Many people can reason well from A to B, but may not be able to get from B to C. Those who want to ban abortions seem to stop thinking about the results of that ban.
We are already seeing instances where a woman is carrying a fetus that has died, or the fetus has such serious deformities that, even if it was born alive, it would live a short and painful life. If a severely damaged fetus is endangering the mother’s life but still has a heartbeat, the woman could die because the heartbeat hasn’t stopped. Must her doctor wait until she is gravely ill? Or does the state mandate that must she die? Whose life matters more– the living mother’s, or the fetus that will not survive if it is born?
Banning legal abortions will not stop abortions from occurring. Women who are desperate to have abortions will take risks to get one, as they did prior to Roe, going to unqualified people who work in unhygienic conditions. When some of those women wind up not being able to have more children due to botched abortions, who pays for their medical care? What concern is there for the future children that these women will not be able to have?
What happens to the babies born as a result of government-mandated pregnancies? While the government may be able to force women to give birth to babies, it can’t force women to raise them. When the women give their babies up because they decide not to raise them, what does the government do with them? There aren’t sufficient resources now for foster care, nor adoptive families. Social service programs are woefully underfunded. There aren’t enough children’s homes to serve these children. How many of those who banned abortion will open their homes to these children?
Who pays for these children? The state could require all men to be DNA tested so that they would have to pay for the care of the children they had fathered, but it is doubtful that men will want to do this, because they would rightly see it as an invasion of their privacy. It seems that many who take a “pro-life” stance are merely “pro-fetus”. They appear to have no commitment to the lives of women or of babies after they are born.
The reality is that banning abortion is not only an infringement on women’s rights to make decisions about their bodies, just as men expect to do with theirs, it has serious consequences that have not been addressed. Let’s keep abortion legal, allow women the right to make their own private medical decisions, and make every child a wanted child.
