The Grand Illusion
There have been more than a few articles about how rigid anti-abortion laws have increased the medical and health problems or pregnant women. For instance, the maternal death rate in Texas surged 60% as a result of the Texas anti-abortion legislation. And we’re seeing horror story after horror story about women dying or losing the ability to have children when a normal pregnancy goes wrong, and doctors won’t give them treatment because they fear losing their licenses and/or going to jail.
Bad as that is, there’s another negative aspect of those laws that’s only mentioned occasionally in national media, and that’s the adverse economic impact on women and their families. Denying access to abortion and reproductive health care places the greatest economic burden and significant health risks on low-income, often minority women, increasing both poverty and inequality. Interesting enough, allowing freedom of reproductive care decreases poverty… and also lowers the tax burden on both states and the federal government.
But the economic impact goes beyond poor women. It affects all women and their spouses and children, in ways that often aren’t recognized. If a working woman wants to live and work in a state where she has control of her own body, that can limit her economic opportunities, because there are at least eight states where she cannot work without putting her own health at risk. Men don’t have to choose between giving up bodily autonomy and economic opportunity; why should women?
This also has a familial impact, because two thirds of all children live in households where all available parents work.
In states like Idaho, obstetricians are leaving the state because they fear that giving necessary care to pregnant woman could land them in jail. Those leaving Idaho, Texas, or elsewhere aren’t being replaced. In addition, fewer medical school students are choosing the obstetrics field. This not only has a negative impact on individual doctors, but on communities and states as a whole, particularly in economically depressed areas, at a time when we already have a national shortage of physicians.
Yet all the downsides of thoughtless anti-abortion legislation, including the negative economics, are ignored or brushed aside by banner-waving pro-lifers who only consider the “unborn,” who, for them, are sacred and inviolate, while ignoring women who will die without proper medical care, girls raped incestuously, and women forced to bear children, often as a result of spousal abuse, children they do not want and cannot properly care for (and whom the right-to-lifers won’t care for, either).
Regarding your extra paragraph at the end; I’ve read about rapists claiming parental rights over the baby born from the rape, so the woman who was raped is not only forced to carry the baby to term, she’s also forced to keep n interacting eith the rapist for the next 18 years, supposedly for the good of the child and the man’s right to a family life with his forcibly created offspring. The cases I read about were from before the ending of Roe v. Wade, and involved rapists who were known to their victims, people like dates, ex-boyfriends or separated (ex)husbands.
The rapists often want to demonstrate their power over their victims. Now with abortion outlawed in many states, that power could be much more likely to be extended for many years, if she gets pregnant. I wonder if that won’t make rape that much more attractive to the assailants, especially those in a deteriorating relationship who want to block the woman from getting away?
The increased maternal mortality as well as greatly increased infant mortality in Texas is already visible in the statistics. I wonder if we’ll see an increase in rapes and femicides of women forced to remain in bad relationships in the next few years as well.
Were you trying to edit the previous blog post but instead added a new post with one new chapter?
No. What I meant (and clarified slightly after your comment) is that too many of violent anti-abortion types ignore not only countervailing moral arguments, but also the rather significant economic costs of stringent anti-abortion legislation.
On the new paragraph, I recall Max Weber’s ‘Politics as a vocation’ (1919) (apologies for the wall of text):
We must be clear about the fact that all ethically oriented conduct may be guided by one of two fundamentally differing and irreconcilably opposed maxims: conduct can be oriented to an ‘ethic of ultimate ends’ or to an ‘ethic of responsibility.’ This is not to say that an ethic of ultimate ends is identical with irresponsibility, or that an ethic of responsibility is identical with unprincipled opportunism. Naturally nobody says that. However, there is an abysmal contrast between conduct that follows the maxim of an ethic of ultimate ends–that is, in religious terms, ‘The Christian does rightly and leaves the results with the Lord’–and conduct that follows the maxim of an ethic of responsibility, in which case one has to give an account of the foreseeable results of one’s action.
You may demonstrate to a convinced syndicalist, believing in an ethic of ultimate ends, that his action will result in increasing the opportunities of reaction, in increasing the oppression of his class, and obstructing its ascent–and you will not make the slightest impression upon him. If an action of good intent leads to bad results, then, in the actor’s eyes, not he but the world, or the stupidity of other men, or God’s will who made them thus, is responsible for the evil. However a man who believes in an ethic of responsibility takes account of precisely the average deficiencies of people; as Fichte has correctly said, he does not even have the right to presuppose their goodness and perfection.
He does not feel in a position to burden others with the results of his own actions so far as he was able to foresee them; he will say: these results are ascribed to my action. The believer in an ethic of ultimate ends feels ‘responsible’ only for seeing to it that the flame of pure intentions is not quelched: for example, the flame of protesting against the injustice of the social order. To rekindle the flame ever anew is the purpose of his quite irrational deeds, judged in view of their possible success. They are acts that can and shall have only exemplary value.