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The content on this blog is my personal opinion and does not reflect the views of the Department of Defense or the US Navy in any way.


Thursday, January 31, 2019

The Future of Abortion

Because I got in an abortion debate recently, I've been thinking a bit more than usual about where this particular social problem is going to go from here.

Here's the thing: I actually can see a world in the future in which abortion is less common than it is now. Perhaps even extremely rare - and I wouldn't mind that one bit.

But that's a world in which abortion has become much less necessary, not necessarily one in which we've convinced people not to choose it. It's a world in which people have easy access to all the tools they need to control when they reproduce, easy access to medical care to reduce the risks associated with pregnancy, and easy access to social support to ensure their children won't be born into grinding poverty.

Perhaps, if I want to look even farther in the future, it's a world in which medical technology has advanced to the point where we can easily transfer a fetus between people or to an artificial incubator - but we're nowhere near that point, unfortunately.

We're not going to get to that world by trying to shame people into not having abortions. Frankly, I don't think that could work without policing women's miscarriages to a ridiculous degree; between that and the women that will start dying trying to induce them on their own, I think restrictions painful enough to work are basically guaranteed to trigger a backlash eventually. Also, we know from a fair bit of research that bans are much less effective than better sex education and increased access to contraceptives at reducing the number of abortions. Even if we ignore that and try to make some combination of bans and social pressure work, though, it would get us no closer to a world in which we actually care enough about women to address the problems that cause them to get abortions.

Addressing those problems will have to be done separately; whether or not we have restrictions on abortion will only affect how people react to those problems without changing their severity. This is something that the pro-choice side tends to be much better at than the pro-life side, frankly. While there are some pro-life organizations that tell themselves they care about addressing those problems, there's always the unspoken detail that the primary goal is reducing abortion. And if that's the primary goal, actually helping to reduce the problem becomes a whole lot less important once the fetus is close enough to term or once the baby is born. Unfortunately, that's exactly what we see out of all too many people - just enough help to stop the abortion and not enough to actually fix the problems. I can understand why someone with limited resources would want to focus their efforts on stopping as many abortions as possible... but if that causes them to spread their resources out enough that they can't actually provide a useful amount of assistance in the longer term, then they're just making things worse in the end.

The worst part, of course, is that many of those problems may not be completely solvable in the long term, and certainly won't be corrected quickly in any event. It's nice to imagine that we can solve poverty, and certainly it's something we should work towards, but in the short term we're still going to have to decide how to deal with its effects on things like abortion, and we should be prepared for whatever we choose to be the status quo for quite some time. 

I'm quite certain that it's not nearly so clear-cut as saying that a woman always has to sacrifice her autonomy, in some cases her health, and in rare cases her life for a fetus.

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