A Post-Abortion America

Ross Douthat tries to imagine the possibility... and the necessary trade-offs:

Designing abortion restrictions for contemporary America would require compromises on the part of pro-lifers, obviously – not only on rape and incest but also probably on the availability and distribution of the morning-after pill. But more than that, it would almost certainly require large-scale (and expensive) experimentation with the American welfare state, to address the needs of the hundreds of thousands of pregnant women each year who would suddenly no longer have the option of aborting their unborn - and the hundreds of thousands of children who would come into the world as a result.

What exact form this sort of experimentation would take I'm not sure; it's a thorny enough subject to make a topic for a long essay or even a book. But over the short term, there's no question that it would require conservatives to temporarily table many of their longstanding policy goals - from cutting illegitimacy rates to reducing welfare dependency to limiting the size of government – in the name of the pro-life cause. ...

Over the long run, my assumption is that a ban on abortion, by changing the incentives of sexual behavior and family formation, would actually end up reducing out-of-wedlock births, welfare spending, and all the rest of it, and that a short-term investment in a pro-life welfare state (and an acceptance of the short term spike in illegitimacy, dependency and government spending that would presumably accompany it) would prove a boon to conservatism in the end. But that's a long-term hope, not a short-term plan - and even if that assumption weren’t borne out, I still think that a higher illegitimacy rate and a more expensive and intrusive welfare state would be a small price to pay for a country where every human being enjoyed the protection of the laws.

In 2003, Americans aborted 854,122 potential babies. Pro-lifers quickly contend that this is an astonishingly large number, and they'd be right. But there's another side to that coin: that's 850k more people that we, as a country, would have to support every single year. The old "adoption is always an option" mantra doesn't seem to cover it. Even if we didn't further enrich benefits for poorer Americans, the pressure put on welfare programs, Medicaid, food stamp programs, education budgets, and everything else would be astounding. Plus, if these children are unwanted and there aren't enough folks willing to adopt, then are we going to go back to a massive government-run orphanage system? Are we going to allow gay couples to adopt?

A truly heartless conservative would say "if you get knocked up, it's your problem, and you've gotta deal with it without help from the state." I can hear these arguments coming already, especially if an abortion ban was matched by an increase in taxes to pay for more welfare spending. But in reality, this will never happen in our society, nor should it. The first time some kid gets abandoned, or is found starving in a heatless room, taxes are going right up to pay for programs to make sure that doesn't happen.

I am also unwilling to simply accept on the face Douthat's assertion that "Over the long run, my assumption is that a ban on abortion, by changing the incentives of sexual behavior and family formation, would actually end up reducing out-of-wedlock births, welfare spending, and all the rest of it". This, to me, is not an obviously correct presumption. After all, there are already a lot of disincentives to being sexually active. Nobody wants to have an abortion and go through the emotional and financial trouble involved. Nobody wants to get an STD. We have Sex Ed classes and free condoms. And yet, we're still aborting 850k kids per year. Additionally, if we replace access to abortion with an increased welfare bureaucracy and/or state-run child care and orphanages, then why should people change their behavior? If they get pregnant, the state is just going to pay for much of the cost anyway.

But even if we didn't increase federal outlays, and thereby forced people to bear most of the cost themselves, then we've opened a whole ton of other issues. Will we permit men who knock up their girlfriends out of wedlock to get off scot-free, or will we make them pay child support? Will mothers who can't support their children get them taken away by DCFS, or will we let them rot away? Even if one answers by saying that there should be no government involvement in the matter, will it really lower the rates of pregnancy? I honestly see no convincing reason to think so.