Asymmetrical Information

As social policy, the most interesting dilemma is that the male is necessary to create the child, and can be compelled to pay for its upbringing, but has no say in whether the child/fetus/whatever is born. And we consider it wrong for the male to convince the female whether to have the child or to not have the child. Why is this?

Your question seems to be premised on the assumption that this 30-60% figure represents people who would not have been pressured to get an abortion in the days before Roe.

First of all, my understanding is that over time the rate at which women have sought and obtained abortions, legal or illegal, has remained relatively constant. Laws against abortion were traditionally underenforced until the period leading up to Roe, when the authorities began shutting down fairly extensive and sophisticated underground operations that had been operating with tacit approval for years. What enforcement did was increase the proportion of "providers" using unsafe, quick methods that basically amounted to just dilating the woman's cervix one way or another and sending her straight to the emergency room in a cab.

But the actual rate at which abortion happened apparently did not change much over the course of the 20th century.

Still, let's assume instead that it has increased at least somewhat. Is it likely that the proportion of women seeking abortion for reasons that have more to do with the opinions and needs of the men in their life than with their own desires vis-a-vis child-rearing has changed dramatically, just because nowadays men can drive women to the clinic and sit around in the waiting room instead of having to just drop them off in the parking lot behind a certain drugstore in a scary part of town?

Fixed? Fixed?

Not yet...

This seems pretty obvious, doesn't it? I mean, of course if something is legal it will be easier to talk someone into doing it.

I can't imagine anyone really arguing with this. Whether this should make any difference is a different question, of course, and that boils down to whether you think abortion is OK or not. Right back where we started.

Interesting post and an angle I had not considered. One aside: if the benefits really accrued more to men, why are men not (generally) the bulk of the pro-choice advocacy crowd? Is this simply that men do not feel that it is their place? I suppose a peek at polling data (if there is any that breaks it into the sexes) would settle it. Should it show that more women are more decidedly pro-choice than men are (or the mirror of this)then one could infer that the benefit is more the women's. ?

In contrast, there have been no scientific studies measuring any significant benefits abortion has produced in women's lives.

So we don't know much. Nor does 30%-60% really mean anything without contrasting it to a figure in a different setting.

How can we weigh the benefit or harm to society against the freedom of the individual without having any facts to work with?

Does the legality of abortion significantly increase the ability of men to pressure women into having abortions that they do not, themselves, desire?

Jane- Ain't that self evident?

One of the sillier argumetns against makeing abortion illegal is that they will still occur. DUH! We made murders illegal and they still occur. But do you doubt for a second that if there was no law against it we would not have more of them???

I can think of a few people who... ah nevermind, we won't go there. ;-)

Paul

It has no effect on the legal and financial responsibilites of the father at all, does it?

Jane,

Why would you even bother posting this? After the several posts you've made about how statistical data is inherently unreliable without specific information about how the polling data was recieved.

Besides, I don't think a father should have no right to make a comment about the decision of whether a woman obtains an abortion or not. If I were knocked-up and my boyfriend, whom I loved, said, "Hey baby, I was planning on marrying you anyway...let's just have us a family." It might change my decision on whether I had an abortion or not. Similarly, if I had been against abortion and my boyfriend told me he would dump me if I had the baby, I doubt I would change my mind or moral values.

But to claim that society has to protect you from being pushed around, that's just insulting. And I can't believe you would even think that Roe had an interesting argument. I would hope that women would consult their partners and value their opinions before making a decision that would effect all their lives.

The statistical part of Parker's presentation sounds a little sketchy to me. To take issue with the 30-60% number, for example: could there be an element of reporting bias? Would a woman ashamed or confused over having an abortion be more likely to shift guilt by reporting that she was "pressured" by someone else into having it? And what would "pressure" mean in this case, anyway?

To consider the larger question: the professional (or, to make a better comparison, wealthier) woman with "expanded freedom", prior to Roe, probably had better access to information about abortions, and better facilities when she had the illegal abortion, than did her working-class counterpart. I don't think you can really talk about whether Roe was to the benefit or detriment of women without bringing in the questions of medicine and sanitation. Certainly a woman who needed or wanted an abortion would rather be post-Roe than pre-Roe.

We could extend the question as to whether Griswold v. Connecticut was ultimately to the benefit of women. I'd answer that one with an unequivocal yes, but you could argue that by making information about birth control more widely known, Griswold, too, decreased "support" for women who got pregnant without intention, since they "chose" not to use birth control or to use it improperly.

Kevin is right. Of course it is easier to talk someone into something that is legal than something that is illegal.

Still, that doesn't answer Jane's question. Which is: "the empirical question of whether women are better or worse off with abortion legal". And that question can, in theory, be answered without reference to one's beliefs as to whether or not abortion is OK or not.

I'd think that women on the whole benefit from legal abortion. That's why, as PaulD suggests, women are more supportive of legal abortion than men are. However, I would guess that women benefit more the higher their status is, and the more able they are to run their own lives. There is two clear sets of losers among women: women who want to entrap a man into a relationship via a child, and women who are psychologically damaged by aborting, but who are too weak to stand up to a man who demands it.

Freedom is not free. It takes a certain amount of effort to run your own life. It is demanding to make decisions for yourself. But it is also rewarding in a way that having your life run for you isn't.

Leonard and PaulD have a false hypothesis. It is not true that women are more supportive of legal abortion. There have been quite a lot of polls on it-- some showing more men as pro-choice, some showing more women, and some with ties. The margins are very close. (It's easy to search the Internet and find such polling results.)

The real difference is between young and old, or especially between unmarried and married. Young, unmarried men are as likely to be in favor of legal abortion as young, unmarried women. Married people of either sex, especially those who have had children, are much more likely to be pro-life. Very unsurprising, really.

Speaking of pressure, and the unwillingness to make it illegal, we are brought back to the age-old question-- why is blackmail illegal? It's illegal even when the threat is to do something perfectly legal. (E.g., making public information that the one being blackmailed would rather be kept quiet.) How can publishing the information be legal, but telling someone that you will unless they do something else (perfectly legal, like giving you money) is illegal?

Can anyone explain exactly why? Or are they willing to legalize blackmail?

John: Blackmail is completely lawful and widely practiced; public prosecutors wallow in it.

It's extortion that's a crime.

Extortion as a crime includes blackmail in most states whereas in others it is separate. Certainly you're right that prosecutors and other instruments of the state are able to engage in legalized blackmail. That doesn't answer the original question, however.

Blackmail is prosecuted-- for example the case of Ms. Autumn Jackson attempting to blackmail Mr. Bill Cosby.

...my understanding is that over time the rate at which women have sought and obtained abortions, legal or illegal, has remained relatively constant.

That is arrant nonsense. Whomever led you to believe that was a consumate liar.

How many of you here have sought an abortion before legalization? How would you like to be 16 years old and pregnant in 1962?

A medically safe abortion from a real doctor was simply not available outside major metropolitan areas, and even there, you had to question how good (and sometimes how legitimate) the doctor really was.

For the urban poor, a medical abortion was unobtainable, it was "back alley" or nothing. As for rural women, to get a medical abortion you had to have enough money, and freedom, to go to the big city and FIND an abortionist.

Excuse my French, but "relatively constant" my ASS!

"Extortion as a crime includes blackmail in most states whereas in others it is separate. Certainly you're right that prosecutors and other instruments of the state are able to engage in legalized blackmail. That doesn't answer the original question, however."

I can think of a policy reason--the traditional recourse for individuals being subjected to blackmail (whether or not it would meet the legal standards of extortion) is to kill the blackmailer, and a jury that knew that the murderer literally had *no* legal recourse for the blackmailer's actions might well be inclined to think that the blackmailer needed killing, whereas if the blackmailer faced a long prison sentence if the victim went to the authorities they would probably be less inclined to support the victim taking justice into his or her own hands.

You all know this was tossed, right? I think it was actually on June 18, but can't find a story.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20030620/ap_on_go_su_co/roe_v__wade_5

Jane was out of the country, so that's her excuse.

Gary, the idea that the rate of abortion is "relatively consistent" usually comes from work looking at the rate of known pregnancies for an age group (married or otherwise) and the rate of known efforts to carry the pregnancy to term. Not entirely solid numbers, but not bad. Say you survey Desperate Gulch County. If in period A with abortion illegal, there were 456 rabbits dead and 230 women attempting delivery, and then in period B with legal abortion, there were 150 women pregnant and 75 attempting delivery, it's not difficult to say that the rate of abortion seems consistent. Obviously, you might be missing women who went to the big-city doctor in the next county to have their baby, and you might be missing women who never saw a doctor at all, but you've still got some reasonable numbers to work with.

Since it surprisingly hasn't been brought up yet, McCorvey's Motion to Set Aside was overruled.

From a purely anecdotal point of view I know that there certainly are a significant number of women (though I wouldn't put it as high as 10%) who begin their conversation with prolife hotline workers with "My boyfriend/husband wants me to get an abortion." I heard it all the time over the five (5) years that I worked a hotline.

I am certainly convinced that legalization made that easier -- not that there weren't men forcing/coercing/convincing women to get abortions before legalization, but (as someone said earlier) legalization made it easier to talk about.

I don't think this question resolves purely to "is abortion bad or good."

The organization that I worked for was NOT engaged in lobbying against legal abortion -- it had existed before Roe v. Wade and the leaders always said that even if abortion became less legally available or illegal there would still be need for our services to women and their children.

As the statement about "pressure to have sex" puts it, it is sexist to pressume women can't make their own minds up.

Of course we already have heaps of legal and philosophical arguements that such pressure is applied, and that women can't be held fully responsible for givin in, if the woman is:
a)Underage
b)An employee of the male
c)A client of the male if the male is a doctor, analyst, priest etc.

So there is a real legal argument that in such a situation the woman CAN be pressured into an abortion she doesn't want. Right?

This is bizarre. I thought the moral case against abortion rested on the harm done to the fetus, not on the need to protect women from making choices that may not be in their own self-interest.

In any other context such an argument would be laughed out of these comments.

It should be noted:

If you look at almost any survey of attitudes about abortion, women split almost 50/50 on the pro-life/pro-choice question, and men, particularly young men aged 18-35, are by far the most pro-choice group in America.

One of the great slanders in the abortion debate is that "men want to control women's reproductive freedoms/I don't want a bunch of men in Washington telling me what to do with my body." It's sexist claptrap. Women, as a rule, are more pro-life than men are, and this is a contentious social debate that both sexes have a valuable perspective on.

In short, I hate, hate, hate is when feminists try to make this a men vs. women issue. That's just wrong.

As I discuss on my site, the Center for the Advancement of Women has a new survey -- about which they themselves are quite upset -- showing that 51% of American women would ban all abortions except for rape/incest/life of the mother. 51% are solidly pro-life, in other words. Here's the survey.

Isn't "between 30 and 60 percent" the same as "I don't have the faintest idea"?

It seems to me that if women are allowed to have abortions without permission of the father, then men should be allowed to have a "paper" abortion where they declare that they would abort the fetus and will take no responsibility for it if it is born. They would also give up all parental rights (access, guardianship, etc...) as well.

I also think it's interesting that a lot of discussion assumes that men and women will be pro-choice/pro-life based only on their self-interest when I know a lot of people who consider it a moral issue and make their decision based more on that. I don't think a "welfare of the mother" argument would capture the main point of contention between pro-death/anti-choice...

Bolie IV

jc,

That works in theory, but ignores the fact that, prior to legal abortion, unmarried women didn't GET pregnancy tests (and married women didn't get abortions).

Of course, it was a different culture then, unmarried mothers were shunned, and generally had a very hard time. But that isn't relevant to the question of relative abortion rates except to explain why pregnancy/abortion statistics prior to legalization are pretty much impossible to determine with enough accuracy to be relevant.

Some things to consider....

1. While pre-marital or extra-marital sex went on, it was socially disapproved of to a high degree.

2. Unmarried mothers were treated badly, and viewed as stupid sluts.

3. A woman who was known to be pregnant, and then did not have a baby was not only a stupid slut, but suspected of a pretty serious crime.

Women, therefore, had some pretty serious reasons not to let it be known that they were pregnant. This saved the lives of a lot of rabbits.

(For our younger readers, in those days, the only reliable test for pregnancy involved treating a rabbit with a sample from the woman in a manner that, if the woman was pregnant, would kill the rabbit.)

Regardless of the coercion factor, for those of you who don't remember the world before Roe v. Wade, the vast majority of women then had no choice if they or their male partners wanted them to have an abortion: it had to be a criminal act with potentially serious health and future reproductive consequences for the woman because of the clandestine nature of the abortion trade and its attendent unsanitary, unskilled, and sometimes impaired practitioners.
During the '60s I saw two of my own classmates killed through illegal abortionists and several others inadvertently sterilized. In human terms striking down Roe v. Wade means killing and maiming adult women. There is no free lunch on this issue. As social policy, the decision is between killing the unborn and killing teenage and adult women.

Honestly, all the talk about it being a "woman's right to choose" just gives guys carte blanche to be irresponsible. When Feminists made this into, supposedly, a privacy issue, instead of an issue of whether or not a fetus is legally a human being, all they did was split the moral responsibilities of women and curry favor with men who just want to sleep around. Which is to say, I know few guys who discourage abortion, but a number of women who are deeply troubled by it.

Long story short, I think it legalizing abortion empowers men more than women, overall. But hey, this shouldn't be an issue about who feels or is more empowered in the first place.

"As social policy, the decision is between killing the unborn and killing teenage and adult women."

Not really, since any associated dangers of abortion are always voluntary. For example, millions of americans suffer from illnesses and addictions from using illicit drugs. That doesn't mean the responsibility for these negative effects rests anywhere but upon the shoulders of people who engage in the entirely-voluntary illegal activity.

While you can argue that legalization produces increases in standards and safety that have a net effect of saving the lives of people who choose to engage in these acts, that point is not relevant to the central debate surrounding abortion.

1) Since the morality of abortion itself isn’t at issue here, the effect of the legalization of infanticide up to one year (and beyond) should also be considered insofar as it raises identical questions regarding whether the women are better of or not.

2) Is the happiness of the children who ARE born due to the criminalization of abortion included in this utilitarian equation, or just the happiness of their unwilling mothers?

3) Regarding the “benefit to the women who don't want to bear children”: does this account for 1) the percentage of women who have abortions but would have ultimately been happier WITH children had they been denied their "choice” 2) the percentage of women who have children only due to the criminalization of abortion and are happy with their children even though they didn’t originally want to bear children, and 3) the women who abort but later become miserable about the decision?

Why, yes, Bernard, the argument against abortion is that it damages the fetus. But the argument for abortion is that it helps the woman. The question here is whether that is, in fact true. I know that the statistic is suspect; I wasn't trying to pass it off as fact, but rather to use it as a jumping off point for considering the idea that Roe may not, on net have done so. This does not seem as if it was an idea that people who started off pro-choice were willing to consider, which makes the discussion considerably less interesting.

It violates every rule of economics to say that there has been no change in the number of people seeking abortions; it also has absolutely no statistical basis that I've seen. All the studies I've seen have shown between a fourfold and a twentyfold increase in the number of abortions, although of course I haven't made any rigorous study of the field, and it's so politically loaded that pretty much neither has anyone else. The results are complicated by things like improvements in medical technology so that fewer women now miscarry; the availability of home pregnancy tests; and the fact that the availability of abortion is not an endogenous variable, but appears to have had a significant effect on premarital sexual activity. But "there's been no change in the number of people getting abortions" is a canard that I've heard repeated hundreds of times by women's groups, and people who heard it from some women's group; like "1 in 4 women has been raped", "1 in 10 people is gay", "domestic violence accounts for more emergency room visits by women than any other cause", "women make 73 cents for every dollar made by a man", and a host of other favorite feminist statistics, it turns out to have no basis in any sort of serious research. In fact, as far as I can tell, it seems to have been made up out of whole cloth; I couldn't find any study that said that, even an ideologically driven stupid one. But I didn't try very hard and could easily have missed it.

Obviously, Kevin et. al., the ability to get a legal abortion increases the number of men who pressure girlfriends to get abortions. That is indeed trivial. The question that is non-trivial is the proportion by which power has been increased.

I realize that to an educated professional, those lameass women with crummy jobs who want to get married instead of cutting the baby out of them may seem like undeserving jerks who merit little consideration from the law. Nonetheless, it behooves those who are arguing for equality before the law to consider whether it is more important to enable a small number of professional women to pursue time-sensitive careers, or a larger number of non-professional women to force support. Which gets back to what I was saying: giving women the legal right to choose not to bear children gave men the social right to choose to abandon those children -- a right which, I might add, is strenuously opposed by the same women's groups that advocate the right of women to do so. I think it's a legitimate area of inquiry as to whether enabling men to opt out of fatherhood has furthered either desireable sociolegal goals, or women's well-being, on net. Focusing on answering trivial side questions seems to me to be a way of avoiding addressing the larger, more interesting questions.

As a matter of legal fairness, I think that if we allow women to have abortions, we ought to give men the same right to terminate their paternal obligations during the pregnancy. And that if we are going to oblige them to support it for eighteen years, then clearly the well-being of the child is a sufficiently compelling state interest to force the mother to donate nine months out of her life. But that is neither here nor there; the question is still who benefits most from abortion.

I know two well educated women who are haunted/unhinged by the decision to have an abortion. With one, the boyfriend had no intention of marrying her. With the other, the boyfriend promised marriage if she would abort. Neither woman has gone on to marry or have children. To find themselves without a husband or children in their late 30s to mid 40s has compounded their sense of betrayal, guilt, shame and anger at having terminated a pregnancy.

Had the pregnancies occurred prior to 1973, the men’s decisions not to marry may have been the same. If these two women had balked at an illegal abortion, they would have been pressured by their families to slip out of town and place the child up for adoption.

In 1965 Daniel Moynihan’s reported an increase in out-of-wedlock births among nonwhite women, low unemployment among nonwhite males and an increase in new welfare cases. The rate out-of-wedlock births among blacks was 17% in 1950, 26% in 1965 and 39% in 1970. By 1999 the rate among whites equaled 26%.

The rate of increase in out-of-wedlock pregnancies along with an increase in new welfare cases could suggest the inability of black women to count on the support of their boyfriends had been increasing prior to legalized abortion.

I am not willing to accept the conclusion that well educated women have gained a right at the expense of working class women. It could just as easily be argued that the welfare state has eroded the willingness of women to rely on men’s support in the event of an unwanted pregnancy. Working class women may be the ones opting out of marriage and keeping the baby.

One assumption that is being made here is that abortion was illegal before Roe vs. Wade. It wasn't in many (most?) areas of the US. In some areas, IIRC, California, it was relatively easy to get one. In other areas, including much of the Bible Belt, you could get one to preserve the life of the woman. So, the mother just had to say to her OB/Gyn, "I'll kill myself if I have to have this baby". She then would get referred to an OB/Gyn that did abortions. (At least two girls in my high school class (1973) did this. One on a trip to CA, one locally.) In both cases, I'd bet the pressure came from the girl's parents.

Dear Edmund,

It is not an "assumption" that abortion was illegal. It's direct experience. It was "relatively easy", as you say, to get an ILLEGAL abortion in California, but it was certainly not legal.

While there were exceptions for situations such as pregnancy arising from rape, "life of the mother", etc. Abortion on demand was NOT legal ANYWHERE in the US. (Well, as of 1964, a year in which i did a great deal of frenzied research on the matter.)

I'd bet abortions happen when a woman has 'too many children.' It's not something that created more marriages through shotguns; because men still marry to have sex. And a willing partner is still desirable. And, if the woman carries to term there are many men who fall in love with their own kids and marry the mother. (In a day where marriage rates are dropping. Duly noted.)

However, my mom pointed out that illegal abortions used to be done when people couldn't afford the 'next kid.' It was done painfully, and it was destructive to the marriages! PLUS, many a mother died from either the last kid born or the infections post abortion ... didn't matter ... But CINDERELLA the step-child story was COMMON. Because having babies was dangerous.

Young men died on battle fields. And, young women died in childbirth. Many babies died from infections. And, few people grew to old age.

Abortion isn't an argument the government should be in, anyway. Where's the crime? It's in the imaginations of religious zealots. Yet we're promised privacy in our sexual decisions ... And, we're promised a secular government.

Abortions, if they are outlawed again,are just another way to put women down. And, it turns the medical profession on its head, too. Since there's always the destruction of fertility for those who survive back alley abortions ... and the doctors who have to deal with the high calamity rate of medical procedures done without medical training.

AGAIN: Don't think it's the young teenage girl going to the abortionist. It could be the family matriarch. The wage earner. And, without her, then her kids are orphaned. And, life turns into hell. Just read Dickens.

Gary, that's not true. Abortion was legal in many states, including California, prior to Roe. It was also possible in every state to find compliant doctors who would certify that you had health problems. My great aunt had a medical abortion to terminate an unwanted pregnancy in the 1930's in a rural area. While there certainly were back-alley butchers (and the commenters are also right that these remained after Roe; not every clinic was Planned Parenthood), that is not how the majority of abortions were performed. Indeed, if you listen to the tales of "illegal" abortions at rallies, I've never yet come across one of the "I was held down on a dirty table and sterilized" version, nor of the "I did it myself" version, although I don't doubt these happened. But all the stories I've heard are along the lines of "I had a humiliating search for a doctor who would do it, and had to go to the emergency room when I had normal complications"; "I had to go to Mexico/Puerto Rico/Sweden/a state with more accomodating abortion laws", "the state notification law made me tell my parents/spouse/a judge". The really bad things always somehow happened to a friend of a friend.

I don't doubt that bad things happened. I know women got admitted to the emergency room for botched abortions. But we have 4,000 abortions a day in this country now. If all abortions were unsafe, and being had at the same rate as now, we should have a lot more sterile, dead women in the generation before mine than is in fact the case. The only woman I've ever met who was sterilized by an abortion got something called Partial Ackerman's (sp?) from a nice, safe Planned Parenthood, legal abortion.

You should also remember that abortion was simply less safe in 1973, whether performed in a hospital or a backalley clinic.

I found this paper, written by a right-to-lifer, but with actual cites to data, that says that the number of women who died of abortions in 1966 (California was the first state to make abortion legal in 1967) was 122. The number of abortions performed was in the 40,000 to 200,000 range, giving us a 7-to-30-fold increase in abortions since legality. The "no increase in abortions" and outrageous death figures came from NARAL, which, as I suspected, seem to have made them up. Also, 80-90% of illegal abortions were obtained from physicians. In other words, illegality does indeed seem to have made abortions harder to get, but it did not result in thousands of women dying or becoming sterile from back-alley abortions every year.

But his data seems rather old, and of course, he's got an agenda. I'll keep looking.

According to papers published by the Alan Guttmacher Institute:

Estimates of the number of illegal abortions in the 1950s and 1960s ranged from 200,000 to 1.2 million per year. One analysis, extrapolating from data from North Carolina, concluded that an estimated 829,000 illegal or self-induced abortions occurred in 1967. --Rachel Benson Gold, Lessons from Before Roe: Will Past be Prologue?

In 2000, 1.31 million abortions took place, down from an estimated 1.36 million in 1996. --Facts in Brief: Induced Abortion

"Where's the crime? It's in the imaginations of religious zealots. Yet we're promised privacy in our sexual decisions ... And, we're promised a secular government."
Carol Herman

Promised by who? I don't recall reading either of those promises in the Constitution (and while there are portions that are relevant to those claims, they are things reasonable people can disagree on).

Your attempt to characterize abortion as purely a theological issue is gut-bustingly funny though. Is murder a concern only to "religious zealots"? I'm sorry, but you need to be slapped.

Murder and abortion (if any differentiation can be made) are moral issues, and while religion deals with morality, it's not the sole source of it. If you think 'secular' means amoral, then you probably haven't thought too much about the consequences of trying to purge all morality from law.

Seth -- what I'm trying to do is actually find the studies. I'm not using any data source that doesn't directly cite their sources, as there's simply too high a likelihood that the source is either fudging, or is making reference to the quite imaginary studies, quoted eigth-hand, that tend to make the rounds of advocacy groups. The AGI is an advocacy organization, and it doesn't put up its sources. I'm not looking at articles from pro-life organizations that cite material third hand either; there are just too many factoids in circulation on both sides.

"Where's the crime? It's in the imaginations of religious zealots. "

I'd never thought as a agnostic I'd be so thouroughly disgusted by some freak like carol claiming that killing a child means nothing, and those that don't want to see that happen are "Religious zealots."

Carol, How about I just preform a umpteenth trimester abortion for you mother and kill you. Hey, under your logic where is the crime, right?

"But the argument for abortion is that it helps the woman."

Not quite. The argument is that it gives the woman a choice that keeping abortions illegal denied her. That some people contend that the choice is sometimes unwise, even purely fromthe point of view of the woman's long-term health, does not refute it.

"The question here is whether that is, in fact true."

By your logic we should ban tobacco, since it unarguably is bad for the health of those who choose to use it.

"It violates every rule of economics to say that there has been no change in the number of people seeking abortions.."

Not every rule, but a pretty important one. It also violates some rules of economics to suggest that reducing choices makes people better off.

Gary Utter,

Just to let you know, my Great-Grandmother, while a married woman, had an abortion. So you are wrong on that point. Before abortion was a national issue, it was often a decision between a woman and her doctor, especially if the doctor felt the patient could not carry the child to term anyway (as was the case with my great-grandmother who was 42 at the time).

"Simply the empirical question of whether women are better or worse off with abortion legal"

Wow. What is "empirical" about arguing the impacts of the single most contentious issue in american politics over the last 30 years?

What do you mean by "better", Jane? Women have entered the work force, universities, the military and politics since Roe at levels they had never reached before. Correlation or causation? I dunno.

Sexism is as dead as racism as a legitimate point of view. Women can go anywhere and do anything that men can do, from national security advisor to CEO to combat pilot. Correlation or causation? I dunno.

Men and women both are much freer in their ability to enjoy the most intimate (literally) aspects of their relationships and managing the consequences of those decisions. Is that good or bad? How the hell can you even try to answer that question? But in this country, we generally assume that, absent other considerations, liberty is a good thing.

And whatever else you can say about the abortion debate, everyone must concede that legalized abortion has increased living women's liberty.

p.s.

As to the results of polls, I am stunned that the usually libertarian, small-government conservatives who congregate here would care about the results of polls on reproductive decisions. (And referring to some of Jane's earlier posts, polling on reproductive rights is notoriously inaccurate.) As the Supreme Court just noted this week, there are limits on the scope of state legislative power. If there is any action which should be beyond the scope of state power, it should be the right to terminate a non-viable fetus. There is NO legitimate government purpose to illegalize that act, except to impose a moral view, and that, my fellow readers, is now clearly beyond government power.

in our constitutional democracy, sometimes the minority wins. [yeehaw.]

"There is NO legitimate government purpose to illegalize that act, except to impose a moral view, and that, my fellow readers, is now clearly beyond government power."
FDL

Sorry to break in on the self-masturbatory glee and junkyard political philosophy, but you are wrong. It is neither beyond government power, nor should it, nor could it be.

FYI, even serious libertarian efforts to remove "morality" from laws are themselves furthering a moral agenda: liberty above all. While we can argue about whether formulating ALL of the laws our society on that moral imperative is better or worse, than how it is done currently, it's certainly no different on a qualitative scale.

It may be possible to have "law" without moral principles, but it's not possible to have law worth having.

. . . giving women the legal right to choose not to bear children gave men the social right to choose to abandon those children . . .

That seems to me a different issue than the one you originally raised in your post: there's a difference between the man who shrugs and walks away from a pregnant woman and the man who says, "You absolutely must not have this baby." While the number of the latter almost certainly rose with the more widespread availability of abortion, I'm not sure what effect Roe may have had on the number of the former. One would think that the former number decreases (slightly) as the latter increases, since some men who would originally end up in the shrug-and-walk-away group choose to join the pressure-her-into-termination group, but maybe not.

I guess the underlying question is: does easily accessible abortion trivialize pregnancy? My own personal experience (as one of those heartless professional sluts, I suppose) would be no -- I simply don't know of many people, men or women, who would approach a termination lightly. But I know I'm speaking of a statistically insignificant sample. Is there a way we could measure attitudes towards pregnancy as well as abortion?

"."'s post really calls for a response.

self-masturbatory? isn't that a little redundant?

"nor could it be." sorry, you lose. thanks for playing. Prohibiting the act of sodomy is now, as a matter of law, beyond government power.

i like the fact that six votes from the Supremes equals "junkyard" philosophy. where does that put Bush v. Gore, a gross interference in a state supreme court's review of state issues, and a decision so utterly at odds with traditional federal jurisprudence that the court itself stated that the opinion had no precedential value? sewer philosophy?

once more and with feeling for the morons in the crowd like soulless machine, aka ".". Does the constitution, in your view, impose ANY restriction on state legislative authority? (we hope that you can read the bill of rights and answer that question in the affirmative.)

if you can get that far, what are the guideposts for antimajoritarian rulings? what do the words "liberty" and "due process" mean? what about "equal protection"? and before we ask the framers, or the authors of the 14th amendment, what makes "original intent" the only valid form of constitutional interpretation? after all, its not like the constitution says anywhere HOW it is to be interpreted.

for those who need concrete examples, Justice Thomas, from Virginia, is married to a woman with very little melanin in her skin. For years, they could not have been legally married in that state. Is that law (commonly called anti-miscegenation) constitutional, unconstitutional or silly?

If laws were based more on "promoting the general welfare" and less on a book about a jewish rabbi and 12 fishermen (complied with some really old stories about goat herders), the laws in this country might make a little more sense.

hopefully Lawrence is but the first in a wave of anti-majoritarian cases involving challenges to laws that embody certain "moral principles" without doing anything to promote the general welfare. "." might not want to live in that country, but s/he/it would likely be happier in a quasi-theocracy anyway.

Reading the comments here and elsewhere on abortion and the Lawrence decision reminds me of an old joke about protestants. "Protestantism is that aching concern that someone, somewhere . . . . is having fun."

[yes, . , i'm playing with myself while writing this. ooooooh]

put it this way. you will never, never, never convince me that the federal government or the state of california has the right to regulate my wife's control of one of her ova, that just happens to be fertilized. (but thanks for your concern. really. so much.)

cheers.

Congratulations on entirely missing my point FDL.

Jane,

Perhaps I was not clear enough. I am talking about 1962. Abortion was not legal anywhere in the US in 1962. Everything I said about the availability of abortion was true IN MY EXPERIENCE. I don't doubt that your aunt had that abortion in 1932, but it certainly was not legal according to the letter of the law. (If it was simply "unwanted".) We are simply trading anecdotes in this regard, not real numbers.

My point was (and remains) that prior to legalization (which I should not conflate with Roe), women did NOT "seek and obtain abortions, legal or illegal," at the same rate that they do now that abortion is legal. The contention was that the rate remained constant. I think that is nonsense.

Also, note that legalization in SOME states pre Roe had some interesting effects on states that did not legalize abortion. Abortions became harder to get where it was illegal.

I can't speak to the numbers of 'back alley" abortions performed, but I suspect that the victims of that sort of thing are not from the social class that you are going to meet at rallys. Most of those women are poor, in thier '50s or older, and still working 8 hours a day or more to pay the rent.

Clarification, looking back at my earlier post, I see I cited 1964 as the time when I had some experience with this, it was actually 1962.

Kate,

>>"Just to let you know, my Great-Grandmother, while a married woman, had an abortion. So you are wrong on that point."

Well, no, I'm not, but I'm apparently not making my point clear enough.

For a teenage girl, unmarried, to obtain an abortion without the cooperation of her parents, was very VERY difficult. It was illegal, everywhere in the US. When I think about abortion, I do not typically consider the 35 year old married mother of three who doesn't want a fourth. (I know she is out there, but it's outside my personal frame of reference, so I tend to overlook her.)

An adult woman, with a husband (presumably) and income and resources, and a confidential relationship with one or more doctors, had many more options than the 16 year old girl. (And it was the teenaged girl, especially in the underclass, that typically was forced to go the "back alley" route.)

>>"Before abortion was a national issue, it was often a decision between a woman and her doctor, especially if the doctor felt the patient could not carry the child to term anyway (as was the case with my great-grandmother who was 42 at the time). "

Abortion was illegal, with some legally prescribed exceptions. Pregnancy was seriously risky for a 42 year old woman in the time, and an abortion was a "life and health of the mother" decision. If your great grandmother had been 22, the doctor would have likely found himself trying to justify that abortion to a medical board, and perhaps a court.

To clarify my position a bit further (so I don't find myself arguing endlessly over things I don't care about), I am neither defending nor attacking legalized abortion. I am essentially neutral on the issue. What I AM attacking is the idea (and statements of that idea) that legalization has not made a significant difference in the abortion rate (disregarding population variance).

Now, after pondering the previous paragraph for a few minutes, I have to change my mind.

Knowing what a horror it is for a 16 year old unmarried girl to find an abortion when it is illegal, I don't want to see teenage girls have to go back to those days.

Granted, unmarried mothers are common and unashamed these days, society is vastly different than it was then, but, still, I would hate to think of anyone suffering through that again.

Well, my great aunt was an unmarried teen and she got one. Even planned parenthood estimated that 90% of abortions, pre-Roe, were done by physicians. The majority of the rest were done by nurses or other trained providers. Again, I've no doubt that the back alley existed, but it doesn't seem to have been anywhere close to the universal phenomenon claimed by advocates.

I know this comments section has been around for a while. I wanted to clarify that regarding my post above, I had no data and was merely postulating. I don't mind being lumped in with Leonard on the issue, but I never said that women support choice more or less than men do.

I wonder though: how many men who say they are pro-choice do so because in the end the choice is not their's and being more or less ambivalent on the subject merely state "sure, yeah, whatever" feeling that it is not their place to oppose per se.... I am anti-abortion but pro-choice. I wish that no abortions ever happen, but I would not allow the state the right to have a say. Depending on how a question were phrased, my response could imply a different opinion on the matter at hand......

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