Here’s an interesting example of those realities: The Netherlands has one of the the most liberal abortion laws in the world. Yet for a long time, the Netherlands also reported one of the world’s lowest abortion rates. That low incidence abruptly began to rise in the mid-1990s. Between 1996 and 2003, the abortion rate in the Netherlands jumped by 31% over seven years.

What changed? The Guttmacher Institute, the leading source of data on reproductive health worldwide, cites “a growing demand for terminations from women in ethnic minority groups residing in the country.” Well over half of all abortions performed on teenagers in the Netherlands are performed on girls of non-Dutch origins.

These girls and women weren’t being raped. They weren’t selecting for the sex of their child. They chose abortion because they had become sexually active within male-dominated immigrant subcultures in which access to birth control was restricted, in which female sexuality was tightly policed, in which girls who become pregnant outside marriage are disgraced and in which the costs and obligations of childbearing loaded almost entirely on women alone.

Abortion is a product of poverty and maternal distress.