Asymmetrical Information

The people in your third category--those who, for a lack of euphemisms, are too dumb to use birth control and yet still screw like coked-up rabbits--are doing us all a social favor by choosing to abort. If one pays even the slightest respect to the notion that environmental factors like rearing, education, and familial background have at least some impact on what kind of persons we turn out to be, then the prevalence of abortion among those who likely have the lowest probability of equipping their offspring with the necessary skills and opportunities for modern living should be celebrated, not bemoaned. To those for whom three generations of imbeciles isn't enough, would another two dozen change your mind? (Props to Oliver Wendell Holmes, natch.)

Let's redraw the argument along these lines. Poorly situated individuals who unthinkingly reproduce in social environments hostile to child rearing--whether in white trash trailer parks, urban slums, or Nuevo Laredo--and are unwilling or unable to muster the consider will required to rise above their unlucky (or deserved, depending on the choices they've made in their lives) circumstances and be attentive parents to their children, are a drain to a society's finite resources. Hence, reproduction among these individuals should be discouraged. The question of how you accomplish this desirdatum can be answered in many different ways. Since we're mostly beyond the days of court-ordered castrations, one might suggest tax credits for individuals of certain demographics and/or tax brackets who elect to undergo voluntary vasectomies or tubal occlusions. We might also consider making abortion as widely available as possible, constructing clinics on a per-county or per-population scale. Ignoramuses in the back hills of South Dakota need abortion just as surely as wealthy Manhattanites.

If it were possible to encourage self-selective eugenics through the operation of the free market--and I am reluctant to say that it is impossible--then there would be no need for government to get involved. As things stand, however, some package of incentives in the way of subsidies or tax credits may be required. But the best route for now is to keep Roe v. Wade intact--regardless of its faulty constitutional basis--and continue disseminating cultural memes that encourage abortion among those women who are unable financially or mentally to handle the enormous stress and demands of child raising. If this gets me labeled as a Margaret Sanger-type eugenicist, then so be it--although there is nothing racial in my suggestions (race, of course, being a factor of absolutely no a priori consequence in the area of genetic intelligence, pace Charles Murray and his loathesome little book).

Finally, a single word for those worry-warts who fret and cavil over the perceived "demographic implosion" in the next 50 years: cloning.

Immoralist - Doesn't the current (and to a larger degree, your proposed) system remove risk-taking from the population, and therefore jeopardize our long-term prosperity?

Immoralist - Doesn't the current (and to a larger degree, your proposed) system remove risk-taking from the population, and therefore jeopardize our long-term prosperity?

Brief Answer: No, I don't think so. I should hope a meaningful distinction can be drawn between entrepreneurial risk-taking and child-bearing. A great deal of thought should be put into both tasks before one undertakes them, obviously. But the consequences of a failed economic venture at the micro level are usually limited by the circumstances of the failure--a person who tries and fails to start their own restaurant business leaves a mostly harmless legacy, unless he was putting cyanide in the salsa. (A case like Enron, however, makes for an interesting criticism of this line of thought.) A child badly raised and reared can do much more damage in the long run.

"If this gets me labeled as a Margaret Sanger-type eugenicist, then so be it"

I don't think I've actually shuddered as violently as I did while reading your dark ruminations on "destroying life unworthy of life" in some time. This is depraved stuff. Instead of Margaret Sanger I detect instead the coldly analytical hyper-intelligence associated with Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer.

It would be wicked cool to have the good people now sitting in Congress vote on who should reproduce, and by how much.

Immoralist is as amusing as he is chilling. The notion that the typical resident of a poor urban neighborhood would willingly submit to castration in exchange for something as utterly ethereal as a TAX CREDIT is so improbable as to be absurd. Or that's my guess, having worked with such folks in the past.

As for Jane, I completely agree with her take on Saletan and everyone else who thinks that more education will stop unwanted pregnancies and abortions. In a former life, I taught sex ed to high school sophomores, and as Jane suggests, they knew all about what gets you pregnant, but were very good at forgetting what they knew about babies and "protection" in the moment of truth.

In fact, I tend to think that promoting contraception tends to have an effect that is precisely opposite to the one intended, because it is not neutral about sex. It rather implies that one can have consequence-free sex, which encourages more sex, which leads to more unwanted pregnancies. Back in the day, everyone knew what got you pregnant, which seems to have made most folks pretty cautious about having sex. (Some, of course, did anyway). Today, everyone still knows what gets you pregnant, but caution went out when the pill came in.

"inadequate sex education is simply not likely to be a major contributor to the number of abortions in this country." How then do you explain the differential in unintended pregnancy rates between the United States and the European countries?

Over 10 million women in the United States use oral contraceptives. The "perfect use" failure rate of most oral contraceptives is 1-2 percent. For the sake of argument, let's call it a conservative 1 percent. That means that there are 100,000 "blameless" accidental pregnancies per year.

I'm just trying to point out that the first category of women that you dismiss out of hand might be larger than you think. If abortion became illegal, it won't just affect the irresponsible people. There would have to be a re-evaluation of the risks of sex across the board - and that would extend to responsible, adult, monogamous, committed or even married couples who simply cannot afford to have children.

", if it weren't obvious that the more ardently pro-choice members of our society need, in a deep down way, to believe that abortion is a necessary response to an unforeseeable misfortune, rather than a form of birth control for the lazy and imprudent."

I am ardently pro-choice but have never felt an impulse to add anything to the words "necessary response" to my definition of a legal procedure to terminate an unwanted pregnancy.

"D" also makes an excellent point about the likely higher number of "blameless" accidents.

For my own part, I've had two "forseeable accidents" (now aged 15 and 18) with the man who became my husband 19 years ago. That is, sex was not as protected as it should have been - obviously - but the intention was not to start children.

We are, of course, extremely fortunate. Others will not have our luck for a million different reasons. For them there must always be a choice.

There's a fourth category of abortion-seekers: women who had wanted to get pregnant, but find themselves forced into getting abortions by their husbands/boyfriends/parents/whatever ("forced" not meaning physical force, at least in most cases, but other forms of pressure).

While I certainly believe Immoralist was playing devil's advocate, there are two assumptions that may be incorrect. The first is that the parents who provide non-stop attention (every new and improved educational toy, non-stop children's tv, etc) will have more successful children. Beyond diminishing marginal returns, you may make children worse by catering to them so much. Also, considering how many brilliant people the world produced before this type of attention was provided, is it that beneficial?

The second assumption is that children from these poor families will be a burden on society. First, how many children are there of well-off parents who are a burden on their parents by not working and mooching off them? While not burdening society directly, they certainly waste resources and give nothing back. Secondly, you forget that poverty/desire can be a driving force. If you see what others have that you lack, you can push yourself to achieve those results (which more or less describes my situation).

babysitting screaming babies can be a very effective form of birth control.

There's a fifth category of women who want abortions--some proportion of those who got pregnant through being raped.

This sounds sensible, but then why are Western European teen pregnancy and abortion rates so much lower then ours? My understanding is that abortion are a bit more restricted there in theory and a bit easier to get in practice, but the main difference is that their sex ed hammers home the importance of consistant, redundant contraception.

Hey guys--let's stop arguing about the death penalty, and make it so no one ever commits heinous murders!

I'm game.

How then do you explain the differential in unintended pregnancy rates between the United States and the European countries?

Fewer and smaller cars.

More seriously, from the numbers I remember those differentials predate and are essentially independent of changes in sex education. Formal sex education has effects in individual instances, but in the aggregate it doesn't seem to do a lot.

Like HeadStart, gun registration, and Motor Voter initiatives, formal sex ed is one of those cases where the government's incentive is to be seen to be Doing Something, even though no one knows of anything which government could feasibly Do that would fix the actual problem. The end result is that you get progams which sound as though they make sense (because hey, it might be worth a shot), and are continued long after they are proven not to do anything (because they are fairly cheap, nothing better has been proposed, and in the end nobody much cares).

"Not that I'm advocating making abortion illegal; I'm not."

then why the title for the post?

"rather than a form of birth control for the lazy and imprudent."

i wonder if we have any figures for the morning after pill and any correlation with abortion. since there is a lot of aggravation in getting an abortion, it would seem to me that the morning after pill would be a great innovation for the "lazy and imprudent." or should that be "lustful and morally bankrupt"?

Immoralist, I like the way you think. Which is not to say that I agree with you. I'm just a big fan of heresy.

"...This sounds sensible, but then why are Western European teen pregnancy and abortion rates so much lower then ours? "

Just curious: Is there any big difference between the teen pregnancy / abortion rates of Western Europeans vs. Americans of West European ancestry?

I want to take (tiny) issue with Jane's assertion that abstinence-based programs are failures. I vividly recall seeing the data, which showed that, yes, overall, girls in abstinence based programs had the same rate of pregnancy as girls who were enrolled in other types of sex-ed programs, but that the age at which these girls became pregnant was significantly later -- late teens to early twenties, as opposed to early teens. I think we can all agree that keeping 13-year-olds from getting pregnant is a good thing.

The Heritage Foundation, naturally, has a lot to say about abstinence education.

I'll take a guess and say that the biggest difference between the Europeans and Americans is the whole attitude towards sex. Sex is much more accepted in Europe, while in America, it is still a hushed topic that has the connotation of being "dirty" in many circles. I fear that it is our puritanical heritage continuing to haunt us. I always assumed that my kids got their basic sex ed in school, and I further assumed that the schools did not talk about the morality or values of sexual relationships. Neither my wife nor I talked to our kids about morality and values, either, but we lived our lives as an example to them, and that approach has happily worked.

My guess is that the Europeans are much more upfront with their children about sex, whether from direct conversations or from the culture itself, so when sex happens, it is more planned and accepted than in this country, and that includes responsible birth control.

Nancy-
The ladies who become pregnant through rape are very, very rare. One of the (estimated, since we aren't allowed to keep actual abortion statistics-- thanks, PP) statistics is less than .1 of one percent of abortions are because of rape or incest. Mostly because rape is violent and that isn't conductive to becoming pregnant.

If you redefine rape to include "Well, I said yes, and never said no after that, but I felt guilty the next morning" (seriously, I've seen this one more than I like to think about.)

If you include an adult having sex with a minor, the statistics would be a lot higher, but if you include that you'll have to be ready to charge PP with covering up rapes.

". At least not until we get that perfect birth control that doesn't have to be remembered, doesn't have to be prescribed, doesn't have to be applied, and never lets its user down."

We're not as far away as you think. Plan B is not that perfect, but it's works pretty well. At least, it would if the Bush Administration would accept the conlclusion of its own scientist and approve it.

And Joan, those girls in Abstinence programs do not appear to be delaying sex. The data is murky, but it looks like they're substituting anal for vaginal sex, aka being "technical virgins." Wouldn't condoms be a better idea in our post-HIV world?

' "safe, legal and rare" is like "good, fast, and cheap" -- you have to pick two, because it's not possible to have all three at one time.'

I can think of heaps of things that are safe, legal and rare. Sexual abstinence for one, apparently.

Sailerette while rape victims are a minority of people getting abortions, you are MORE likely to become pregnant as victim of rape. I believe the study was done in Europe - Effectively it found that you are twice as likely to become pregnant as a result of rape.

Found the study sailorette -
Rape-related pregnancy: estimates and descriptive characteristics from a national sample of women.

Holmes MM, Resnick HS, Kilpatrick DG, Best CL.

Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston 29425-2233, USA.

OBJECTIVE: We attempted to determine the national rape-related pregnancy rate and provide descriptive characteristics of pregnancies that result from rape. STUDY DESIGN: A national probability sample of 4008 adult American women took part in a 3-year longitudinal survey that assessed the prevalence and incidence of rape and related physical and mental health outcomes. RESULTS: The national rape-related pregnancy rate is 5.0% per rape among victims of reproductive age (aged 12 to 45); among adult women an estimated 32,101 pregnancies result from rape each year. Among 34 cases of rape-related pregnancy, the majority occurred among adolescents and resulted from assault by a known, often related perpetrator. Only 11.7% of these victims received immediate medical attention after the assault, and 47.1% received no medical attention related to the rape. A total 32.4% of these victims did not discover they were pregnant until they had already entered the second trimester; 32.2% opted to keep the infant whereas 50% underwent abortion and 5.9% placed the infant for adoption; an additional 11.8% had spontaneous abortion. CONCLUSIONS: Rape-related pregnancy occurs with significant frequency. It is a cause of many unwanted pregnancies and is closely linked with family and domestic violence. As we address the epidemic of unintended pregnancies in the United States, greater attention and effort should be aimed at preventing and identifying unwanted pregnancies that result from sexual victimization.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=8765248&dopt=Abstract

Joe Magarac:
As someone once said, "There is no such thing as a contradiction". Are you sure the consequences are unintended? Yes, the pregnancies are unintended, but one could argue that other consequences -- pursuit of immediate gratification, encouraging of dependency, undermining of "traditional morality", instillation of a transactional view of human relationships, etc. -- are not unintended. Just a thought.

I'm sorry, but I've got to disagree with the idea that we don't need more for sex ed. Do you have statistics to back up the idea that it won't help with the number of unintended pregnancies? My sex education in school consisted of the mechanics (penis, vagina, spem, egg) in 7th grade and "Health" in 10th grade. My teacher only talked about how to have a healthy marriages (public school, mind you). Luckily, we had a book that discussed contraception, but I may have been the only one who read it. My parents never said a word, which I am pissed at them about. My mom even had a golden opprotunity in middle school when I asked her what a condom was, but no. We may never overcome the eternal truth that People are Stupid, but education doesn't hurt, and in my case it helped alot. I do agree that parental involvement is the key -- if my parents had discussed sex with me I might have waited longer. Nothing bad happened, but having sex at 16, even with condoms and the pill, probably wasn't a good idea. It was fun though.:)

When are we all going to realise that abortion is just an elective medical procedure. A woman who chooses to go through this procedure will control the course of her life. Hey, th world is a bad enough place as it is without bringing to term a child who will in the coming years, thanks to Bush, will lean, mean and caste oriented. A world of prejudice and privilege. A world of uncompassionate, selfish folks who only will care about themselves. The other alternative would be adoption but how many white patrons will take on a child of color? The right wingers need to www.zipit.com because of the hypocracy of religious doctrine written by men to control women, children and heathens with silly fairytale myths. If rightwingers value life whyso then do they back a president who espouses he reads the bible but ignores thou shalt not kill for the very citizens he claims he cares about. To be fair why doesn't he send his twins to Iraq? Why doesn't he urge folks to adopt blacks and other minorities?

amy, you are a talking contradiction...on one hand, you say we need more sex education, and you wish your parents would have talked with you about it more, but somehow, you were still able to figure out using the pill and condoms at 16?

Our society is inundated with safe sex messages. Who really believes that with the advent of the Internet, it has ever been easier to get information on safe sex? If you know what sex is, you probably know what "safe" sex is. Our schools do a bad enough job teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic, maybe they should worry about fixing their problems there before screwing up sex ed.

Forget the underclass, Immoralist: How can we get people like ruffyy to increase the intelligence level of the gene pool by not breeding?

Hammer, sorry I wasn't clear in my post. I learned about the pill and condoms from my sex ed BOOK; my sex ed teacher did not mention them. Luckily I was curious enough to read the other informative parts of the book, not only the assigned chapter about marriage. That is a good point about the Internet -- if people are curious about safe sex, they can certainly find a plethora of info online. However, I see the benefits outweighing the minuses of giving good info in schools. Also, I wouldn't say people who know what sex is automatically know what safe sex it --- teens can be incredibly ignorant, but they somehow still satisfy those raging hormones. And planned parenthood helped me out when I could not have talked to my parents. I'm grateful to the female ob/gyn who worked there and helped me get on the pill when I was 16, and I dearly hope places like that will be there help other teens in the future. We don't live in a perfect world where parents talk to their kids and kids obey their parents. Punishing those who don't follow that paradigm is very foolish -- teens are acting out biological imperatives when they have teenage sex. After all, ages 16-25 were my prime childbearing years -- hopefully I'll still be ok planning my pregnancies at age 30 and 32, but who knows? I'm glad I had the opprotunity to learn about and use reliable contraception.

I'm just trying to point out that the first category of women that you dismiss out of hand might be larger than you think.

Assuming for the sake of argument that relying on a single form of birth control with a 1-2% failure rate counts as "responsible" -- 1-2% failure for 10,000,000 users means 100,000-200,000 unintended pregnancies, which is only four to eight percent of unintended pregnancies in the United States.

And Jane didn't "dismiss" those women, she just pointed out that sex education wasn't going to help them at all -- since, by definition, they already knew what to do and were doing it.

This is certainly an interesting discussion but I would just beg everybody to note that Saletan's article was not advocating criminalizing abortion. He was discussing P.R. strategy for pro-choice advocates to regain the upper hand in the debate, and, at the same time, trying to remind pro-choice people of moral complexities that they seem eager to overlook--to the detriment of their own cause.

And as for girls who may not be "delaying sex" but instead "substituting anal for vaginal sex, aka being 'technical virgins'" that certainly IS cause for concern with regard to HIV ... but no question that it is unlikely to lead to pregnancy, and therefore to abortion.

I'm really rather flummoxed here. Is Jane Galt seriously claiming that the only way to deter risky sex is by criminalizing abortions, and if we're unwilling to make that tradeoff, as she is, we should at least be honest enough to admit it? Surely this is a joke.

Elaboration:

http://www.crescatsententia.org/archives/2006_01_24.html#006312

Gretchen, good point.

Any consequences of non-vaginal sex are borne by the actor. The consequences (good or bad) of a pregnancy are borne by the actor and an innocent.

Immoralist, great discussion starter.

Since ruffy brought politics into the mix, does it mean anything that the 12 counties with the lowest birthrates voted for Kerry and the 17 counties with the highest birthrates voted for Bush?

These socio-statistical arguments are creepy.

I'm 'pro-choice' for the simple reason that in a free society, individuals get to make the decisions about their bodies.

Anything else is a form of totalitarianism.

Dan -

To start with, we're talking about two different ideas raised in Jane's post. 1) Criminalizing abortions will result in fewer abortions. 2) Sex ed is unhelpful.

I don't have anything to say about the sex ed portion of her post. My comment was directed at the idea that criminalizing abortion would prevent "irresponsible" (Jane's definition) unwanted pregnancies and also abortions.

If abortions become criminalized, then people who are using contraception and using it correctly, the "responsible people" (by Jane's definition) are going to be affected. That means the circumstances under which they make the decision to have sex will change. I see no reason why this means they will continue to make exactly the same decisions.

One might fairly say that the odds of current methods of contraception are not good enough to be considered "responsible". However, Jane's argument appeared to include that group in the "responsible" category. (It also begs the question of what kind of odds might be good enough that we can call a person "responsible" for accepting the risk.)

My point is that once you decide that abortion is illegal, people are going to have start making different decisions. In some ways this will be good - such as the irresponsible teenagers and other people that get the kinds of abortions that upset Jane. But they won't be the only ones affected, by a long shot.

How do we really feel about going back to a society where ANY sexual intercourse can lead to a baby? How many married couples will have to give up having sex with each other? Criminalizing abortion wouldn't just affect horny teenagers. It would affect everyone.

Some of you folks really should read your posts aloud before pressing that button.

I'm 'pro-choice' for the simple reason that in a free society, individuals get to make the decisions about their bodies.

Anything else is a form of totalitarianism.

Wow, you must need unadulterated Orwellian doublethink to say something that so clearly begs the big question with a straight face.

How do we really feel about going back to a society where ANY sexual intercourse can lead to a baby?

You mean they don't come from storks? What's next, a society where any car ride can result in severe bodily injury or death, where any investment can result in a loss of principal, and where any prescription drug can cause abnormal side effects?

At least you're honest about the pro-Roe agenda. It's not about "control over my body" and it's definitely not about "privacy." It's about the right to have sex any time, any way, without having to deal with the consequences. Sorry. Sex is designed to make babies. All activities in life are risky to varying degrees. Grow up.

Come now, AT.
Abortion IS dealing with the unintended consequences.

You are shouting into the wind insisting "sex is designed to make babies".

Honestly, THAT sounds like a slogan obediently lisped in first grade! Grow up indeed.

Criminalizing abortions will result in fewer abortions.

There's nothing wrong with this thought. Summary execution for speeding will also result in people being a lot more careful about speeding.

However, it certainly doesn't imply that Jane means that the result would be worth the cost.

AT I think you need to realize that I don't believe the government should have ANY SAY in whether a grown woman wishes to have child or not. It is none of "their" f-----g business to legislate how it's citizens make a personal decision whether or not to becoming a parent.

Hehehe, AT, I agree with you that it's pretty obvious that sex is designed to make babies. There's no reason to be nasty.

It's an obvious point, but I think a lot of people are missing the ramifications. This isn't about sex on demand, in as many crazy combinations as possible. My point is that this is also about sex in what a vast majority of people consider to be its proper place. I might be going out on a limb, but I think most Americans don't really think that procreation is the sole purpose of sex. You can look at simple statistics on the massive use of contraception in this country to see that.

However, there is a point of view that abortions don't kill babies - they kill clumps of cells that are about as advanced as a parasitic frog. Those cells only become babies when they don't get aborted in time.

So don't lecture me about risks, consequences and responsibilites - this conversation, like most on the topic of abortion, comes down to each individual's evaluation of when true human life begins.

Some people see dealing with the consequences to be as simple as killing a frog or something like it. Some others think a cute widdle baby is murdered every time. Ultimately this isn't about those immature selfish liberals or whatever enemy you've imagined - it's about a dispute of the fundamental facts of what a fetus is at what point during gestation.

Instead of expecting everyone in our society to get through their first 8-10 prime childbearing years without having any children, I think a better solution would be to eliminate summer breaks, speed up the curriculum, and shorten childhood.

A shorter childhood means a smaller window of opportunity to derail it by getting knocked up.

All other solutions that depend on delaying or preventing childbirth will, over the course of a few generations, be selected against by the evolutionary process, at least in an environment like ours where children almost never die.

Do we really want to select against the ability to follow the fairly simple instructions on the box and the foresight to stop and pick up the box and use the contraceptive therein?

D says "I'm just trying to point out that the first category of women that you dismiss out of hand might be larger than you think."

You're forgetting that not all women who take the pill are trying to prevent pregnancy. It's also prescribed to treat acne, hirsutism, painful or heavy periods, PMS, endometriosis and for women with high risk of ovarian and uterine cancer and ovarian cysts.

Also, around 10% of all women are infertile (or their husbands are) and won't know it until they go off of the pill. And some pill users are using other forms of birth control as well.

For these reasons, the number of consistent pill users who will get accidentally pregnant this year should be much less than 100,000.

All activities in life are risky to varying degrees. Grow up.

And who are you to decide the penalties for those risks ?

Dear AT, what do you call turning grown women into government-regulated incubators ?

Oh wait, Jesus told you it's alright.

I find it hilarious the number of people who believe that expecting women (and men) to accept the natural consequences of their actions, by having the child they knew was a possible result of their sex act, is some kind of tyrannical control over their body.

For pity's sake people, if you can't do the time, don't do the crime. When we were kids, and we got a result we didn't like, we would insist on the opportunity to try again. Grown-ups should know better.

Perhaps they should change the name of abortions...it would be more honest to call them "do-overs".

If abortions become criminalized, then people who are using contraception and using it correctly, the "responsible people" (by Jane's definition) are going to be affected. That means the circumstances under which they make the decision to have sex will change.

I don't see what this has to do with either of Jane's points. The fact that criminalizing abortion would be unfortunate for the small percentage of people who become pregnant through no fault of their own doesn't have any bearing on the question of whether or not criminalizing abortion would reduce the overall number of abortions.

How do we really feel about going back to a society where ANY sexual intercourse can lead to a baby?

Jane wasn't advocating criminalizing abortion. She was advocating that we stop pretending that abortion can be "safe, legal, and rare".

Dear AT, what do you call turning grown women into government-regulated incubators ?

Well, David, what do you call someone who, when she finds the existence of another person inconvenient or annoying, simply kills that person? Or someone who demands both the freedom to act and the freedom from the consequences of their actions?

I'm mildly pro-choice myself, but comments like David's (and many other things which Jane mentions) have been pushing me to the pro-life side for years as I try to find an argument that actually makes sense.

Dan - you're right. She's clear that she wants it to be legal. She also wants us to "stop pretending" that any strategy other than ban would be the best way to make abortions rare.

She also focuses on irresponsible behavior as being the greatest source of abortions. The _only_ thing I was trying to point out is that even if you count only the people using contraceptives correctly, abortions wouldn't be all that rare. Therefore a ban would affect "responsible" people more than Jane's post implies it would. She describes them as "that tiny minority so beloved of Hollywood scriptwriters" - I'm just saying maybe that minority isn't so tiny. It's a relatively minor point - I'm not sure why it's caught so much attention.

I'm also pointing out that all this rhetoric about selfishness and personal responsibility (and yes, personal insults in the place of sound argument) only makes sense when you see a fetus as a true human being as opposed to a less-than-human clump of cells with only the potential to become a human being. If you view it as the later, the whole "do the crime, do the time" approach seems absurd.

If you view it as the later, the whole "do the crime, do the time" approach seems absurd.

And if you view it as the former, the whole "right to bodily integrity" argument seems absurd, it being difficult to have any bodily integrity to protect from the government when you're killed by dismemberment at the behest of your mother.

On the question of "any sex act leading to a baby," well, that is the world that ALL men live in. A man whose semen is obtained by deciet or fraud, even recovered from his partner's mouth or a used condom, has no right to refuse child support.

D, your numbers are incorrect. The failure rate of birth control pills with "perfect use" is less than .5% a year. The failure rate of the patch appears to be almost nonexistant, suggesting that that "perfect" use isn't. So you're overstating the number of people who will get pregnant on the pill by a factor of 4-6. Moreover, as other commenters point out, those failure rates are only for couples regularly having sex for a year; a substantial portion of women who are on the pill are not regularly having sex. The number of people who are perfectly using the pill, but get pregnant anyway, is probably decidedly trivial.

The "regular use" category--the "oh, I forgot to take it this morning" crowd.

The number of rape pregnancies is likewise trivial in relation to the overall number of unwanted pregnancies/abortions in this country. It should be pointed out that in recent years, the morning after pill has become widely available, and is part of the standard treatment for rape.

The number of "oops, I forgot to take it this morning!" pregnancies is no doubt much larger. But that blurs the line of "accident". And there are lots of treatments available, such as the patch, IUDs, oestrogen rings, and depo-provera shots, for women who are not confident of their ability to take their pills every day, at the same time every day.

All of which is neither here nor there. My point was not that abortion should be illegal; it was that sex education is unlikely to meaningfully reduce the rate of unintended pregnancies. Your argument, if it were true, would tend to bolster my case, rather than refute it, but your figures are wrong.

I was perhaps not very charitable in my response to your post, Jane, but I'd really like to hear why you think, exactly, 'safe, legal and rare' is an inconsistent set. I mean, it obviously depends on what your definition of 'rare' is, but the implicit claim in your post that legal sanctions are the only way to affect safe sex and thus abortion rates is simply absurd. Why on *earth* would your first instinct be to target the relative 'prices' of safe v. risky sex through the *indirect and delayed* instrument of punishing pregnancy, rather than the *direct and instant* instrument of making safe sex cheaper? Claiming that it already is 'free' is naive economism at its worst--while it might be possible for some people in some places to get free prescriptions from planned parenthood, that's monetary cost only, not opportunity cost. And if you even think about social norms and stigma for one minute, you'll realize you're only getting at the tip of the iceberg as far as true 'costs' go. So before looking to coercive sanctions, perhaps you should give these factors a look.

I understand you were just reacting to the Saletan article, but that's hardly a defense--after all, Saletan's real point is just that greater use of contraception is quite possible; his specific policy prescriptions were just casual throw-aways.

(http://www.crescatsententia.org/archives/2006_01_24.html#006312)

Well, David, what do you call someone who, when she finds the existence of another person inconvenient or annoying, simply kills that person?

Sorry, my Theist-English dictionary isn't near me.

How come no anti-choicer ever says they want to kill Roe, so that they will charge these women with murder ?

I'm mildly pro-choice myself, but comments like David's (and many other things which Jane mentions) have been pushing me to the pro-life side for years as I try to find an argument that actually makes sense.

I'm never shocked when people are willing to give up other people's rights, or objectify them to such a degree.

When are we all going to realise that abortion is just an elective medical procedure.

About the same time we all realize that a liver transplant is just an elective medical procedure -- meaning, it isn't, and this should be apparent to even a layman with basic medical knowledge. One who argues otherwise is flatly ignorant.

Abortion is an invasive prodedure, involves an area of the body that is heavily infused with blood and soft tissues at the time (and therefore highly susceptible to septicemia if any mistakes are made), and violently interrupts a unique hormone cycle -- which, in turn, can inflict significant psychological trauma in some cases.

Can an abortion be performed with relative medical safety to the woman? Yes, but that does not mean it is "just" an elective surgery. Nor is that an argument for an inherent and unconditional right to obtain such procedure. Congratulations on disqualifying yourself from further talking privileges; mind letting the adults handle this one from here on out?

Hey guys--let's stop arguing about the death penalty, and make it so no one ever commits heinous murders!

I'm game.

Where's the Department of Pre-Crime when you need them?

The _only_ thing I was trying to point out is that even if you count only the people using contraceptives correctly, abortions wouldn't be all that rare.

I guess that depends on what you call "rare". The example you used -- contraceptive pill failure -- accounts for only 4-8% of abortions.

She describes them as "that tiny minority so beloved of Hollywood scriptwriters" - I'm just saying maybe that minority isn't so tiny.

Well, based on the data you provided, it would appear that it IS tiny.

I'm also pointing out that all this rhetoric about selfishness and personal responsibility (and yes, personal insults in the place of sound argument) only makes sense when you see a fetus as a true human being as opposed to a less-than-human clump of cells with only the potential to become a human being.

If you see a fetus as nothing more than a clump of cells, why worry about making abortions rare? If abortion is safe and legal and involves nothing more than snipping out some undesirable cells, why should I be any more concerned about its prevalence than I am about the prevalance of plastic surgery? If people said "so long as it is safe and legal I don't care if it is rare" then there'd be nothing to worry about here. It makes no sense to argue that something is perfectly fine but should be kept as rare as possible.

Jane - You're right. I went back and checked the figures. Absolutely perfect use is indeed less than one percent. My confusion came from the fact that "perfect use" is rarely quoted as the failure rate when the medical community explains it to patients. My apologies. Had I been paying closer attention to the conversation, I would have caught that you and I are talking about two different things. (Even worse is that I keep arguing that it all depends on the definition, while not paying enough attention to your definition.)

Still, 4-8 percent of a big number is still pretty big. (Is "rare" the same thing as "drastically reduced"?) But then we again devolve into different definitions. I am indeed aware of the injectables and other methods, as I used Depo Provera through college because I knew that taking pills correctly on a topsy-turvy student schedule would be very difficult.

Dan - I haven't been arguing that abortion should be kept as rare as possible. I've said that if rarity is your objective, then yes, a ban is most effective. A ban is also going to affect responsible people's decisions about sex the most, since they have a lower tolerance for the risk of pregnancy. I've also said that if you don't consider a fetus (and here I'm particularly thinking about the first trimester) to be the same thing as a true human being, then abortion is no longer murder, and the morality of the situation changes. This is why the two sides of the debate keep talking right past each other. It all depends on the fundamental disagreements over the facts. (I also suspect that Jane and I would disagree about what makes something "rare" but anyway...)

Again, apologies for not reading more closely and basing it on incorrect figures.

I'm fairly comfortable with the idea that paying for a persistent birth control implant for any woman (or man, once the technology is perfected) who wants one would be a good investment for the government in the long run, and I'm not inclined to be terribly sympathetic to objections which are bound to be raised to it from the religious right (I'm more inclined to be sympathetic to libertarian objections to government involvement in this sort of thing, but given that the welfare state is here to stay IMO, might as well use the money devoted to it more efficiently). Furthermore, anyone living off of the public dole should be--as a condition of aid--be using the most efficient and reliable method of birth control consistent with their medical condition. Between those two changes, I'd bet that a lot of abortions would be eliminated relatively painlessly.

Jane --- I wanted to say that emergency contraception is not widely available and is not part of the "standard" treatment after rape. The life begins at conception crowd has done a good job on this issue. The Justice Department won't even include info about pregnancy prevention to its national protocol for treating rape survivors.
http://www.aclu.org/reproductiverights/gen/12742prs20050106.html
Many hospitals do not provice EC, http://www.kaisernetwork.org/daily_reports/rep_index.cfm?DR_ID=29839; Walmart does not provide EC; and many local pharmacies do not provide EC. In KY, where I live, 87% of the counties do not have a pharmacy that provides EC. If you don't live near a big town, and Wal-Mart doesn't provide EC, and your local pharmacist doesn't provice EC, and you have to drive 2 hours (taking a day of work), and talk to a doctor, if you can find one, its pretty darn tough to get it.

"If rightwingers value life whyso then do they back a president who espouses he reads the bible but ignores thou shalt not kill for the very citizens he claims he cares about. To be fair why doesn't he send his twins to Iraq?"

I've never understood the "Why doesn't Bush send his daughters to war?" argument. The obvious answer is that we have a volunteer military. And they haven't volunteered.

If you believe a woman has the right to control her own body, why do you think her father has the right, indeed the obligation, to enlist her in the military against her will and send her to war?

I've enjoyed reading the posts and musing over the big, insoluble issue of woman's rights vs. rights of the unborn. I have always been on the fence about Roe v. Wade; is it the most brilliant feat of intellectual deconstruction of a statutory scheme ever written, or a massive pile of amphigory, "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing?" But I think the result in Roe gets us to where we need to be as a country.

As a former prosecuting attorney, I see a problem that most of the posts have not considered at all: the effects on the citizens of enacting unjust and unenforceable laws. Assuming Roe is overturned and the states are given the right to recriminalize even first-trimester abortions, what next? The red states will rush to impose harsh penalties, up to and including murder charges, for abortionists and the women they treat. They will get convictions, and maybe even death penalties. Will that stop abortions? No, it will make them more expensive, less safe, and harder to get, but it won't stop them from happening.

Most people obey the laws of the land because the vast majority of the laws enacted are perceived by the vast majority of the citizens as just and fair, and the punishments reasonable. Impose an unreasonable law on people, however, and they won't obey it. When the 55 mile per hour speed limit was imposed in the late 70's, at least in the Western states with wide open spaces and 80-mph-engineered Interstates, the number of speeders increased astronomically. The law didn't stop speeding; it only made it more expensive.

Unjust laws (or laws that are perceived by a large portion of society as unjust) have an unintended consequence. A generally law-abiding citizen, perceiving that one law is unjust and choosing to break it, then has no guide other than his own imperfect conscience to tell him which laws to obey, and which ones to break. We saw this during Prohibition; if the law against alcohol consumption is unjust, what is to stop a "businessman" (i.e. bootlegger) from breaking others? He's already a criminal; if he chooses to break or not break another law, he'll still be a criminal. What about the fear of getting caught? If the government locked up everyone during the 20's who ran liquor, and everyone who profited from the booze trade, and everyone who drank, there wouldn't have been jails enough to hold them all, or judges enough to sentence them. Every bootlegger, speakeasy operator, or drinking patron knew that, and more importantly, so did the cops and the prosecutors and the judges. Because they had to selectively prosecute, they chose to prosecute the easy cases, those who either were not protected by vested criminal interests (with bribes and kickbacks for the enforcers thrown in) or the cases that were so egregiously heinous that they couldn't ignore them and keep their jobs.

Bad lawmaking was not limited to the 20's and the 70's. Immigration law is a perfect example of a bad law on the books today. If the government today set out to lock up all the estimated 18 million illegal aliens in our country, who do we send to round them all up? Where would we put them? How do we replace their essential roles in agriculture and construction, among many other industries? How would we keep them from coming back? Can we build a 2,000 mile long wall, going up 40 feet and underground 20 feet, where almost half of it runs through the middle of a river, and man it 24 hours a day? What would that do to our relations with Mexico? Can we cut off free commerce with Mexico and still maintain NAFTA? Do we have to build a similar wall with Canada, or along our entire Atlantic, Pacific, and Arctic coastlines? We can keep illegal aliens out of our country, surely, but at what cost?

The law has a limited amount of power over citizens' behavior. Part of that power comes from the indoctrination that we all receive in school, that the police are our friends, that we should all obey the laws and we will stay out of trouble. Part of it (for most of us) comes from the Judeo-Christian-Islamic moral code. Part of it from respect for the institutions of the nation. Part of it comes from enlightened self-interest. And a very small part of it (despite all the rhetoric) comes from the will of the individuals in power at any one time.

We could stop medical abortions, I suppose, by making all doctors, nurses, and other medical practitioners employees of the government, and by keeping them under surveillance by police officers at all times while they were performing their duties, and by scrupulously accounting for all medical equipment used and all procedures performed, and by locking them up in government dormitories at the end of their work days to make sure they weren't sneaking out to do any work on the side. We could register knitting needles, too, and we could make oral contraceptives (and any other potential abortifacient) a Schedule I illegal drug, and open all mail coming from any country that allowed its citizens access to any such drugs, to make sure no private person set up as an abortionist.

If a Legislature make an act a crime, they by definition create criminals; if they create criminals, they have an obligation to the people they serve to provide some way to prosecute and punish them. If they don't do that, they are betraying the trust of their constituents. And if they do that, they must be prepared to justify the costs they impose on society as a greater good than allowing the "criminal" acts to continue.

Ladies and gentlemen, despite all our laws, human beings will do what they want. And the human mind is ingenious enough to contrive ways of satisfying their needs. We can't even stop prisoners in penitentiaries from getting illegal drugs smuggled in to them. How can we seriously think that we can stop someone who really wants to be rid of an unwanted or inconvenient pregnancy, from (let's not mince words here) killing her unborn child?

So if we can't make a perfect solution, then we must come up with a workable (if unsatisfactory) one. And the workable solution, despite all the rhetoric, must include some measure of dead (babies)(embryos)(viable tissue masses)(you pick the word; they all have an emotional content to one side or another). If you are a pro-choice absolutist, you condemn millions of (potential) babies to oblivion, without recognizing that the next Mozart or Einstein may be among them, in the name of the mother's reproductive freedom. If you are pro-life but willing to make an exception for rape or incest, you are still consigning some quotient of innocent children to death. If you are a pro-life absolutist, you are condemning mothers to raise children that will be a constant reminder of their rapists, with the added and chilling thought that those rapists are entitled to regular visitation (and custodial rights in some situations) with their children. Is there any compromise that would satisfy these positions?(The Aristotelean "golden mean" is nowhere to be found.)

The only one I've seen that comes close is Justice Blackmun's decision in Roe. (If you have not read the actual decision, the exhaustive discussion of prior law and the logic behind the decision is well worth your time.) The artificial creation of "trimesters" is an attempt to satisfy the three positions: the state has no authority over the issue during the first trimester, because the right of the mother to control her own body supersedes any interest the State has in the potential life inside her. During the last trimester, the life in being is viable, that is, could live outside her body, and therefore the state has a well defined interest in that life, and can make laws to protect it to the detriment of the mother's choice. And in between, the life is of greater value and potential than before, but not able to survive without the mother, so the state may make reasonable restrictions on what the mother may do with her body. This decision doesn't satisfy anybody, but that is the very definition of a fair compromise.

Despite the Alitos and Robertses of the world, Roe is not going to be overruled any time soon, so we have to live with it. So, one would hope that the one issue all sides could agree upon would be that anything that would reduce the number of abortions would be a good thing. The Saletan article makes some good suggestions for how we can do that. It would be a wonderful world indeed if there were never any unwanted pregnancies, and if all babies were born healthy and happy into homes where they were wanted and loved and able to be supported, but the only country where that happens is Fantasyland.

Smoking is popular because tobacco is an anti-depressant.

Now pot is an anti-depressant - safer than tobacco. However, our government in its infinite wisdom has decided you can have tobacco - at wildly inflated prices - but you can't have pot.

Do all arguments degenerate into the "legalize marijuana" comments if they go on long enough? It sure seemed that way in college debate, with all those libertarian (read: toker) debaters sitting around during down-time...but perhaps this is always the case. I will have to put together a study!

Comments are Closed.