Yes, but that's in one year- I don't agree that you can discount the cumulative effect. Assume it's half the abortions that would be born below the poverty line, figure a child and teen mortality rate that's actually pretty harsh, and you're still looking at a group of over fifteen percent of all people presently in poverty, being in poverty eighteen years after an abortion ban.Destructionator XIII wrote:Anyway, there's about 900,000 abortions in the US each year according to the CDC. The latest Census numbers put 46 million people below the poverty line, about 17% of the population. The previous year had about 43 million. The economy is in the shitter, so this is probably reflective of that, but that's a growth of three million; about up 7% from the previous year.
Now, if every one of those abortions would have produced a baby in the poverty line - surely a big overestimate - the growth would have been ~ 30% more than it was, or up about 9% from the previous year.
This is where I got the one or two percentage points I think I left in one of these posts.
Moreover, adding extra babies to a family teetering on the edge financially will tend to push people over the poverty line who wouldn't otherwise be there (so one baby may mean three or four more people 'in poverty' by official standards), and makes it harder for the parents to pull their way back out of the hole- especially with a single mother.
So the effect isn't limited to the increase in any one year.
Yes, but we'd like to think that the economy will eventually restart. The increase due to more births in poverty won't go away nearly so fast, if at all.(Note: this is already talking about growth, so I don't think accumulation of births would change the conclusion much. There's about 4 million live births in the county a year, and if about 1/6 of people are below the line, odds are a similar fraction is there for children too; we're doubling the growth rate from births, worst case scenario. The poverty growth from the failing economy - 3 million in one year (2010 I believe) - is far more significant.)
It's not so much "save money- allow abortions!" It's "if you're willing to tell all women that they are required by law to carry pregnancies to term, and put the private burden of raising those children on the mothers, you should be willing to require a modest public burden of care on others."In the big picture, we're definitely talking about <1% of government spending. If you're looking to cut something, this shouldn't be very high on the priority list.
Banning abortion puts a very large burden on a specific class of women- those who don't want children or don't think they can afford to have them, but are now forced to have them anyway no matter the cost. If the result (more children) is worth the cost to that group of people, it should be worth something to the rest of us, too.
No, I mean many of those babies are going to be born into a social environment already full of crime- which could be reduced effectively if we were willing to spend money and pay attention to the issue. But most people who would ban abortion are not willing to do this.You also talked about crime... maybe a small effect there, but it's not like babies are criminals. They might put financial pressure on parents who could turn to crime.. but I don't have numbers, but I'd be really, really surprised if it was > 1%.
Again, it just isn't a significant consequence.
Again, it's not "allow abortions to save public money." It's "if we're going to ban abortions, if we care enough to do this to these women and create a specific law preventing them from doing this, then we should also care enough to do these other things."EDIT: I think I lost the forest for the trees in here. Yeah, maybe the policy makers see a benefit here... but I sure hope not. Pretty minor change, and that's the same kind of stuff used to justify shit like eugenics.
It's like, we agree that if a man fathers a child, he's responsible for that child entering the world, and he should pay a nice big share of the costs of raising that child.
But when all of society says "this child must be carried to term and raised," then isn't all of society at least somewhat responsible for that child entering the world? Shouldn't society be willing to provide the funds to make the difference between misery and poverty for that child, and some reasonable degree of happiness and success?
The birth of children who would have been aborted is a consequence of our decisions as a civilization. Should we not be willing to help pay for the consequences, or does that burden fall entirely on a narrow group of women who knew they didn't want or couldn't afford to carry it?
Which, again, I actually would be- I'd be for society helping to pay with the usual (or more than usual) services in terms of education, crime prevention, antipoverty measures, and so on. Even though I don't want an abortion ban. But so many of the people who want such a ban don't seem to care about it- once the child is born, it becomes Someone Else's Problem and the costs of raising it go directly to the whore-mother who bore it.
Probably not that much- I'm talking centuries ago; the Church's charity was a big deal in medieval times.Aye. BTW, do you know if this used to be much bigger forty years ago?Compare this to, say, the Catholic Church. When they had political power, they ran a lot of orphanages, schools, and charities- a chunk of tithe money went there. They still do some of that, even without political power. So while they were (and are) anti-abortion, they're more consistent about it: they continue to value the baby after it's born, and are willing to sacrifice from a communal pool of resources to make sure the baby has a chance of survival and a future.
Note that if you go back far enough before the sexual revolution, a child born out of wedlock was a name-blackening scandal for the woman- about the only way she could get charity to help raise that child was to more or less abandon the baby on an orphanage doorstep.
But we don't automatically assume that non-person things have some right to achieve potential that trumps the privacy and rights of other people. By turning the fetus's "potential-human" status into a really big deal that is weighed as equal to, say, the chunk of the mother's potential and opportunities she sacrifices by having the baby, you are implicitly accepting enough of the human status that the "dude, you're killing people" argument really should matter.Right, though the human thing doesn't have to apply: opportunity is all about realizing potential, and we can all agree that fetuses are at least potential people. So maybe.Yeah- although really, opportunity isn't something you see much in anti-abortion arguments. For the fetus's opportunity to carry much moral weight you almost have to decide to consider the fetus human or near-human. And then the "dude, you're killing people" argument comes into play.
Well, in theory they do, it's complicated. But the point is, no one can really accuse the Catholic church of having a history of being anti-abortion but indifferent to the plight of children in poverty, they do try to do something for poor children. It may not be exactly what I'd like, I might not approve of every last detail, but they try, so I don't accuse them of being a pack of goddamn hypocritical assholes about it, the way I do Protestant evangelists who are so obviously doing it out of misogyny.What I find interesting about it though is just that I've never seen it before. What you said about the Catholics is the same idea in a way: basically do what they can along the whole process, though for life rather than opportunity. But I just get joy over stuff like this.
