November 11, 2009

• What if we were *serious* about ending abortion?

  Let’s do a sort of intellectual puzzle. It’s a puzzle for people who are pro-choice and people who are pro-life but who believe that abortions can be allowed in some sort of special cases such as the oft-cited “rape, incest, and to protect the life of the mother and/or child”.  This is NOT a puzzle for people who are pro-life and believe that no abortion under any circumstances should abortion ever be countenanced. I have absolutely nothing to say to  people with such a rigid ideology.

  But for the rest of us, the vast majority of the population that believes in both choice and life and don’t believe that you have to choose one or the other, there is much to discuss. Most of us believe in abortions under certain circumstances and don’t believe in them under other circumstances and those circumstances we might disagree on. But by and large we all want less abortions to occur.

  Put another way, it’s a discussion for people who want a society that is neither like China where abortions are rampant nor a society like the Philippines where laws against abortion drive women to regularly put their own lives at risk to abort unwanted children. We want a society where abortions don’t happen often. And a society where worse abortions happen less frequently than not as bad abortions. Not one where abortions are pushed under the table into backrooms and not ones where abortions happen so frequently that people have stopped altogether valuing entities before they are born and simply use abortion as a convenient substitute for contraception.  Even if you consider abortion to not in any way be causing a death under any circumstance, surely you can agree that abortion is a medical procedure that we’d like to do less of anyway, if only because it’s a lot more expensive than preventing a pregnancy in the first place.

  So the question is, how do we get there? What would we do if we were really serious about eliminating abortions except in the most extreme necessary cases? What would we as a society do?

  Well there are certain pretty obvious things we can do right now. They aren’t difficult nor are they particularly expensive. Here’s a quick list off the top of my head.

  1. DON’T outlaw abortion -
  Or put any unnecessary restrictions on it. The reason for this is about the same as the reason why it’d probably be a great idea to have all congressmen have the words “prohibition doesn’t work” tattooed on their foreheads. If you want to stop a thing from happening that is prevalent you have to know when it is happening. You can’t control things happening in backroom deals hidden from the public view. Nor can you ensure the safety of the people when you prohibit their behavior with proclamations instead of teaching them what they need to know in order to become better citizens. All you can do is lock them all up and America already leads the world in prison populations at our great expense.

  2. FUND sex education -
  I’m talking about a massive influx of money into ensuring that children are given comprehensive sex education and health education from a very early age. Believe it or not most people don’t want to get pregnant and have children before they are ready. So if you want to create a world where people have children and not abort them it obviously makes sense to give them as much knowledge as possible so that they know what they can do to avoid getting pregnant.

  3. FUND easy access to contraception -
  This is perhaps the easiest to understand. The more people who can easily get contraception the less often they will be get pregnant when they don’t want to. That’s less cases where someone would even need to worry about whether or not they have to get an abortion.

  4. FUND research into better forms of contraception -
  This is important. All commonly used forms of contraception are not full proof. If we want to minimize abortions we have to minimize cases where contraception fails. The more reliable contraception is the more people will use it.  Likewise research into other things that make people more likely to use it such as convenience, ease of use, comfort is important. And research into rapid manufacturing mechanisms that drive down costs are equally important.

  5. CREATE support networks for people who are pregnant and people who have children –
  These networks don’t exist to convince people to or not to abort. Such things are cruel mockeries of compassion. No. What we need are groups of women who share experiences and talk to one another and help each other through difficult times. Not judging one another. The less alone you feel when dealing with hard decisions the more likely you are to feel confident in your ability to make those decisions and deal with the consequences, even if those consequences are the need to raise a child. It’s reasonable to assume that women in supportive households with supporting family are more likely to choose to have a child than women in abusive households or who have very little in the way of family to turn to for help. Support networks would substitute for those who lack a supportive home life.

  6. FUND early childhood education/universal education, preschool programs, and safe daycare services -
  Basically we know raising a kid is hard. Many people have an abortion because they don’t feel as if they can do it.  They don’t feel they have support. They don’t know that there’s help out there for them. The more you can reduce that uncertainty the more likely a woman is to feel it’s ok to take a risk and have a child. One of the biggest uncertainties is how you can have a child and maintain a work life. Knowing that there will be someone safe and reliable to look out for your child when you cannot makes it much easier to choose not to abort.

  7. REGULATE maternal leave -
  Lots of women will choose to have an abortion rather than risk their career. It has to be very clear then that women are not allowed to be fired because they are pregnant. Further more, women need time off when they are pregnant and during the early months after the child is born so that they can take care of their health and that of their children. The government can and probably should help businesses pay for that should it result in a loss, but businesses have to be required to stick to it. In the end they’ll find it is more productive for them to do so, since happier workers generally are more productive workers.

  8. FUND adoptive services -
  Many women will refuse to bring a child into this world if they feel that putting that child up for adoption is a terrible and cruel fate. People need to believe that giving up a child for adoption will still result in that child living a full and happy productive life even if no one ever adopts them. If they instead fear the children will fall through the cracks, feel alone and forgotten many will do what they can to avoid having that on their conscience.

  There. Eight simple easy steps society could do right now if they wanted to seriously curtail the number of times people choose to have an abortion, without stepping on anyone’s rights, without shaming anyone, without jailing or arresting anybody. You don’t have to deny anyone health care to do these things and doing all these things would make lots of people’s lives better in real measurable ways. If you believe that a fetus at any stage in a pregnancy is alive, then doing these things will clearly save many lives and at very little cost.

  Some will object that these things are “too much government interference”.  But on the contrary, prohibiting the right to abort a fetus is the government interfering in the way people live. Further if you don’t want the government to do these things they can all be funded through private entities, non-profit organizations, and charities.  The important thing is that they get done, not who does them. Saving lives and lowering costs is not a job for just the State or just private industry or just the individual. It’s the job of everyone.

  I’m sure there’s many other easy things we can do that will reduce abortion rates while at the same time not limiting anyone’s rights and indeed providing people more choice and freedom. Feel free to suggest them. Regardless this is the debate we should be talking about. Not what laws we should be creating to make it illegal or too costly to afford an abortion but what incentives we can create to make people less likely to want or need an abortion.

  There’s no reason why we can’t as a society if we choose care about both women AND the unborn. This idea that proponents on both sides often advocate that we have to choose one or the other is unnecessary divisive and dangerous.

  Those are just the easy simple ideas for things we can do. Stay tuned for part 2 where I suggest the more crazy off the wall kinds of ideas to achieve even greater reductions in abortions while preserving freedom.

  • 8:38 am
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