Babies are just too damn hard. Have an abortion.

Does that sound cold? Offensive?

That is the message carried throughout the March 8 editorial statement. Too poor? Irresponsible? Well, if you can come up with $1,000 or more, depending on how far along your pregnancy is, one of Wisconsin’s abortion facilities will be happy to take your problem off your hands.

Advocating for the aborting of babies conceived by poor or teenage parents is callous and elitist. This is akin to Rep. Gwen Moore’s argument that abortion is better for unplanned babies than a life “eating Ramen noodles.”

The Guttmacher Institute, formerly the research arm of Planned Parenthood, states that one in three women will have an abortion by the time she is 45. More than 53 million abortions have occurred since abortion was legalized in 1973.

Birth control was available long before 1973 and has been widely used ever since. Yet one in three women still has an abortion. So the solution is to provide more birth control? Birth control is not on the same economic scale of necessity as other services necessary to keeping the state running.

Low-income women can already obtain STD screenings, breast cancer screenings or pap smears from federally qualified health centers all over the state. Birth control is not health care, and all taxpayers should not be mandated to fund something that many of them oppose.

The pill has a failure rate of 1 percent when it is taken at the same time every single day. With typical use, the average failure rate is between 3 and 13 percent per year, depending on the type of pill you are taking. This means that at best, one in 100 women will still become pregnant while using the pill; at worst, up to 13 women out of 100 will still become pregnant. Looking at the abortion statistics, we can see that abortion is used as back-up birth control. Putting aside the staggering statistics of aborted babies, why should taxpayers continue to pay for a system that has a failure rate of 1 in 100?

While a University of Wisconsin student, some of my friends did end up pregnant. Almost all of those pregnancies ended in abortion. To this day, those friends still have emotional scars and remember very clearly the circumstances. Yet the one friend who did not abort her child has no regrets and no emotional scars. Why is this? Abortion hurts women, and it is time we recognize that, rather than prescribing abortion in some condescending, blas? manner.

Virginia Zignego ([email protected]) is the communications director of Pro-Life Wisconsin and a 2005 graduate of UW-Madison.