PBP230H: Objections to Anti-Abortion Legislation

“If abortion is illegalized, then…” The objections: alleged bad social effects of legally restricting abortion.

The answer: 1) In conversation, give a proactive response using common ground, analogies, and questions; 2) If necessary, give more information and/or request a citation.

Objection: If abortion is illegalized, then desperate women will resort to unsafe back-alley abortions.¹⁾

https://www.endthekilling.ca/classroom/legal/

• We don't legalize violence to make violence “safer” e.g. we don't give boxing gloves to abusive husbands
• Equal Rights Institute:
• Alissa Golob's interesting response, something like this: “When pro-choice people say that back-alley abortions will happen, let's think about that. Who would be performing the back-alley abortions? Certainly not pro-life people. It would be pro-choicers, abortion supporters, performing back-alley abortions. So when pro-choicers say 'Keep abortion legal or women will die in back-alleys,' what they're really saying is 'Let us kill babies or we're going to start also killing women.'”

• Historical view:

Dr. Bernard Nathanson, a former abortionist and co-founder of the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL), confessed that he lied about the number of women he said were dying from illegal abortions. He wrote,

“How many deaths were we talking about when abortion was illegal? In N.A.R.A.L. we generally emphasized the drama of the individual case, not the mass statistics, but when we spoke of the latter it was always ‘5,000 to 10,000 deaths a year.’ I confess that I knew the figures were totally false, and I suppose the others did too if they stopped to think of it. But in the ‘morality’ of our revolution, it was a useful figure, widely accepted, so why go out of our way to correct it with honest statistics?”²⁾

• many illegal abortionists then became legal abortionists…e.g. Morgentaler
• Empirical analysis: https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.2013.301378?fbclid=IwAR0ccGHfzR6wLd-_sfquRoYvAb6mJ4nlUCCvQrJo9Qngzzit3A-4PjNbk-8

1. Proactive response: even if anti-abortion laws resulted in an increased amount of children going into the foster care system, this would not invalidate the laws. If legalized abortion helps keep the foster care system numbers low, then why not legalize infanticide to help keep the numbers even lower? Or if a city has a very high rate of homelessness, should we legalize killing homeless people in order to reduce the homelessness rate? If we wouldn't kill born human beings in order to minimize the numbers in the foster care system, then why would it be okay to kill preborn human beings for the same reason? We should be killing problems, not killing people.
2. Give more information: Explain difference between foster care and newborn adoption: https://blog.equalrightsinstitute.com/foster-care-fallacy/

“Perhaps the main difference between adoption and foster care is that foster care is temporary. Your agency or social worker has the goal of repairing the problems in your child’s home that led to their removal. When biological parents are able to prove that they can support their children financially, emotionally, and socially, then the child will be able to return to them.” https://adoption.com/foster-vs-adopt

• example from This Is Us: newborn adoption of Randall was simple because his parents relinquished parental rights, versus difficulty in adopting Deja because she was in the foster care system and her mom's parental rights had not yet been relinquished
• 2a. Percentage of women who actually place children for adoption = very low (citation?)
  • e.g. Laura Klassen from Choice42 said that she's had maybe 1 woman want to place her child for adoption

See Legalized_abortion_and_crime_effects.

OITNB S03E01 conversation between Big Boo and Pensatucky to highlight how the argument is made, how it's taken as scripture in popular culture.³⁾

(lots of cursing)

See also Freakonomics.

1. Proactive response: even assuming the Freakonomics thesis is 100% true, does reducing future crime justify killing babies who might be criminals in the future? Wouldn't it follow that crime could be reduced even more if we killed newborns who weren't aborted but were still in prime crime-producing scenarios? Shouldn't we kill newborns or toddlers in that same scenario then if it will reduce crime further? This is a classic trot out the toddler case – even if legalized abortion reduces crime, that isn't a justification for killing if pre-born children are human beings, otherwise it would also be a justification for killing toddlers.
2. Citation? It might not even be true. Donohue/Levitt have been fending off substantively academic criticisms of their findings since 2001.⁴⁾ The data is messy and incomplete. There might be a correlation between legalized abortion and reductions in violent crime, but when controlling for other crime-associated factors, that effect seems lessened, or some argues even disappears entirely. Point is: it's not entirely clear to what extent, if any, legalized abortion actually reduces crime. It might. It might not. There is open debate happening on the question.

does this belong here? Objection (separate but related to #1): Do [legal] abortion rates remain constant, or even increase, under anti-abortion legislation?

Effects of anti-abortion legislation on lowering abortion rates – need to review these:

• https://lozierinstitute.org/how-the-legal-status-of-abortion-impacts-abortion-rates/
• “P. Levine’s 2004 paper in the Journal of Law and Economics: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/380475
• his 2003 paper in the Journal of Health Economics: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0167629603000638
• New’s 2011 study in State Politics & Policy Quarterly: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1532440010387397
• …all of which show that restrictions on abortion lower abortion rates”
• This article, #8: http://blog.secularprolife.org/2019/02/responding-to-8-common-pro-choice.html?fbclid=IwAR3SKUnuL3eRy1AvsfRZ6F09U-6B50mU5CM6ImhI-Jp4-cDaXlKXbTrrrqk
  • https://www.bustle.com/p/i-got-abortion-in-one-of-the-most-restrictive-states-this-is-what-i-went-through-15870247?fbclid=IwAR18hajyH3QVVf1MX-066LlYrGerrcpbofu8pvm-dSfxG1g3IJjkp5kWm9M
    • Secular Pro-Life comments: “Again, abortion restrictions decrease abortion. This woman isn't saying “if a heartbeat bill was in effect, I would have had to get an illegal abortion.” She's saying “if a heartbeat bill was in effect, I wouldn't have gotten an abortion.” Because when you make an action more difficult to take, fewer people take it.”
• http://blog.secularprolife.org/2018/07/link-collection-evidence-that-pro-life.html?fbclid=IwAR3-nky5IPt8SUbjhWSGDv2dWcUIiOpUxPCvLZj9TWdrAjHkjdtFqYAxKcA&m=1
• http://blog.secularprolife.org/2018/07/more-evidence-that-abortion.html?m=1 and http://blog.secularprolife.org/2018/07/more-evidence-that-abortion.html?m=1
• acknowledging that we also need the educational and pastoral arms in order to drive down the abortion rates – each arm is necessary but not sufficient, because politics is downstream from culture. BUT the law is also a teacher itself