Religious Leaders Call for New Efforts to Lower the City's 'Chilling' Abortion Rate
By PAUL VITELLO
Published: January 6, 2011
Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan of New York joined other local religious leaders on Thursday in calling for a new effort to reduce the number of abortions in the city. The annual figure has averaged 90,000 in recent years, or about 40 percent of all pregnancies, twice the national rate.
John Marshall Mantel for The New York Times
Archbishop Timothy Dolan and Rabbi David Zwiebel at a meeting at the Penn Club in Manhattan.
The archbishop, at a news conference in Manhattan, called the citywide statistics "downright chilling."
But while holding to the conviction that abortion is morally wrong, Archbishop Dolan and the others said they were adopting a more pragmatic goal for New York than abolishing abortion: "Let's see to it that abortion is rare," he said.
In recent years, the Catholic Church has lobbied to end Medicaid financing for abortion. Many bishops, including Archbishop Dolan, have participated in an annual protest outside the United States Supreme Court demanding that the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which made abortion legal, be overturned.
Archbishop Dolan said abortion statistics in New York indicated that it was unlikely that the practice would soon end. But, he added: "We have to tell people what is happening here. I'm frankly embarrassed to be a member of a community where 41 percent of pregnancies are terminated."
Before the news conference, at the Penn Club at 30 West 44th Street, a dozen members of the New York chapter of the National Organization for Women protested outside, distributing literature. As the archbishop arrived, they shouted "Archbishop, we're here to say, family planning is O.K.!"
The gathering of the religious leaders was coordinated by a 2-year-old organization called the Chiaroscuro Foundation, a nonprofit group financed privately by its president, Sean Fieler, an investment banker who supports religious and conservative causes. Mr. Fieler said the event was prompted by the release last month of city health department statistics showing a 41 percent rate of abortion overall in 2009, including a rate close to 60 percent for black women.
The statistics also show the actual number of abortions declining in the last decade. The most recent statistics show that there were 87,273 abortions in 2009, down from 94,466 in 2000.
But Mr. Fieler — who said his foundation would spend about $1 million this year in New York City to open counseling centers and give financial help to pregnant women — said the trend was not downward enough. "These numbers represent a failure," he said.
During the news conference, Archbishop Dolan renewed what he called a standing offer to help pregnant women avoid abortion. "If we can help, let us know," he said. He saidCatholic Charities, a semiautonomous church agency, has helped many women arrange for the adoption of children they could not care for, and would continue to do that.
The gathering was also attended by Nicholas A. DiMarzio, the Roman Catholic bishop of Brooklyn; the Rev. Michel Faulkner, pastor of the New Horizon Church in Harlem; Rabbi David Zwiebel, vice president of Agudath Israel of America, a national Orthodox Jewish community service organization; and Leslie Díaz, a spokeswoman for Democrats for Life of New York, and the wife of State Senator Rubén Díaz of the Bronx.
