I recently attended the Association of Maternal and Child Health Programs (AMCHP) annual conference in Washington, D.C. While I learned a lot about what is happening at the state and local level to improve maternal and child health outcomes, I was surprised that abortion was not included in any of the breakout session titles or as a focus in any of the plenaries I attended. As the Guttmacher Institute notes, “Nearly half of pregnancies among American women are unintended, and about four in 10 of these are terminated by abortion.” A total of 3.95 million births took place in the U.S. during 2011, compared with just over 1 million abortions that same year. Why wouldn’t a conference about maternal and child health include a session on abortion?
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