Just Think

I wish folks would look at this issue pragmatically. Both sides come in full of emotion and with guns blazing and they tend to overlook the completely obvious.

Here is a pragmatists view of this issue:

The argument that it is a human life is valid, as is the argument that a woman has the right to make choices about her own body.

The libertarian party would argue that though the fetus has the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the woman is the owner of her own body and therefore can evict an unwanted tenant... what happens to that tenant afterward is not her problem. I think that's a cop-out, but at least it is an attempt to reconcile the two valid arguments. Myself, I tend to take the approach of "what else weighs on this decision".

I'm sure we all agree that obviously the woman who has an abortion does not want the child at least at the time that she makes that decision. This is pretty obvious, but it is also a good place to start... common ground if you will.

Second, hopefully we can all agree that abortion is more costly than contraception. This is important when looking at this pragmatically because the idea of "abortion as contraception" becomes silly. Obviously an woman who knows that $2 is more than $1 understands that abortion is more costly than contraceptives. Hence we can conclude that it is an extremely rare case that abortion is used this way. It is likely that abortion is used when contraception fails, but obviously not as a contraceptive itself.

So where does this leave us?

Well, given that the children are unwanted and assuming that none of them are aborted at all that leaves us with over 1,000,000 unwanted children each year for which homes must be found (numbers from abortionfacts.com). Let's even assume that 50% (an outrageously generous number) of women who would have had an abortion actually decide after childbirth to keep the child, that's still over 500,000 unwanted children each year. Let's assume, for our purposes, no population growth at all for this number, we'll assume it remains the same.

In the 1990s, there are approximately 120,000 adoptions of children each year. This number has remained fairly constant in the 1990s, and is still relatively proportionate to population size in the U.S. (adoption.com quoting Flango and Flango). So, we must conclude that there are already at least 120,000 children per year available for adoption.

Would the addition of this 500,000 children per year increase adoption rates? That is debatable as we have no specific data to draw from. Let's assume a best case scenario that it increases adoption rates by 10%. This would mean that somewhere in the neighborhood of 132,000 children per year were adopted. Adjusted upward by another 10% (erring on the favorable side for the children here) for population growth that would put us at 145,200 children per year being adopted.

So, assuming a lot of growth in adoptions, no growth in unwanted pregnancies, and nobody circumventing the law and getting illegal abortions we would end up with around 354,000 children per year that we could not find homes for. You can play with that number and your guess on how many women would get abortions illegally if they could not get them legally, but you can already see that we cannot afford this.

Pragmatically, our nation cannot afford to subsidize a population of 354,000 unwanted children per year. Let's assume no change in that number for 18 years (the amount of time we'd have to subsidize each child)... that would be 6,372,000 children in the system in 18 years. Assuming a very modest support cost of only $1000 per month per child that would cost the country 6.3 billion dollars per month, 76 billion dollars per year.

I may believe that abortion is abhorrent, but I also believe that the government cannot make it illegal and then turn its back on the children who are born unwanted. I'm sure that my pragmatism will offend many, they'll say "how can you be so cold?" and "what is a human life worth?", my answer is this... "how much are you willing to pay?".

Are you willing to increase the size of government to create the bureaucracy needed to deal with these children? Are you willing to pay more for medical care due to the emergency room visits of women whose illegal abortions went badly? Are you willing to pay more in taxes to fund the bureaucracy you've created and to subsidize these children's lives? Are you willing to pay more for the policing of that bureaucracy to ensure these children are not abused and that they actually get the benefits the government is supposed to provide them?

Call me a cold bastard if you must, but I am not willing to pay for this and if the GOP truly wants less taxation and smaller government then neither are they.

That brings me to the final point. The GOP is just using the zealots who want abortion made illegal at any cost. They are just using them because the GOP has no plan to make abortion illegal, they just use it to push a hot-button at voting time. If you are making your voting decision on just this one issue then you are being boondoggled by the republican party. They need abortion to be legal so they can keep people like you voting for them. If abortion were outlawed then you may wake up and realize that there are other things going on which affect your life, and they don't want that to happen.

Speaking of affecting your life, and again being pragmatic here, how does the abortion of someone you don't know, have never met, and will never meet affect you? It doesn't, but if you make them have that baby it sure will, and it will affect me and everyone else as well.

Just my take on things.