I’m sorry that I can’t respond more fully to your articulate post (I don’t think my boss would appreciate it), but don’t you think that:
* a ban on abortions or certain abortion procedures may change some of the social attitudes towards casual sex and individuals not making sure that there is some form of birth control in place before they engage in the “do it if it feels good” mantra of our country?
* while the short term welfare state may expand, maybe the states can help eleviate some of this issue, maybe by making the adoption process easier and CHEAPER. Here in NY, the adoption process could cost someone close to $20,000. Granted, we would need to find other areas to shrink the welfare state besides just changing adoption laws, but a change in attitude and easier access to adoptions are good starts.
Right now, people are guestimating that over 1 million abortions are being performed a year in this country. And while I have not seen the numbers for abortions per year pre Roe, the welfare state back then was not what it is today. So, there is a solution, but we have to start with the basic premise that children in the womb have a right to LIVE. And we need to proceed from there.
By the way, you idea of ultrasounds is the key to cutting abortions. NARAL and PP have done a great job in misinforming women for decades. We have to get that part of the argument back.
Pre-Roe, families were still largely intact, so going back won’t teach you much. The guesstimates today are 2 million legal abortions in the US every year, of which half are to the underclass. That’s where I got the 1 million more welfare babies per year from. Who knows what the real number is.
As to this: will abolition of abortion change attitudes about sex? No, I don’t think so. The horse is out of the barn. The sexual revolution is not going to be reversed any more than women are going to be put back into the kitchen barefoot and pregnant. People are going to continue to have a lot of sex, and use contraception to try and prevent pregnancy. Contraception fails, or people get drunk and don’t use it, etc., and there will be plenty of unwanted pregnancies, particularly among the underclass, who have less to lose anyway. I do not believe the sexual revolution can be undone, and I don’t think we’re going to save babies by trying. To save babies, we have to appeal to human emotion, to guilt, and to compassion: the very things that move so many liberals about the suffering of animals is what is needed to be harnessed here. Ultrasounds do that. Preaching at people like Cotton Mather about the evils of illicit sex? Most people know it’s evil. Everybody since the dawn of Judeo-Christianity anyway has known that masturbation is a serious sin too, but you’re never going to stop that either. Some vices are too strong. We can appeal to people over the lives and pain of babies. But we’re never going to save any babies trying to wrestle society back to eschewing sex before marriage. To save babies, I think we have to be realistic. Human chastity is something for after the parousia. We’re just not going to get there. I am confident, in fact, that in the context of a national security questioning in which I could put people on lie detector tests and grill them about sex, that a surprising number of the most stalwart Christians have Achilles’ Heels on the subject. We’re weak and we like sex. That doesn’t mean we have to turn into infanticides too. There’s a difference. Sex is good, but used sinfully, and it’s practically irresistible. Abortion is bad. It doesn’t feel good, physically or emotionally. There’s no natural abortion drive the way there IS a natural sex drive. In short, I don’t think it is strategically wise to try and use abortion as the “camel’s nose under the tent” to usher back in a Christian age. I don’t think it’s a good idea because (a) it’s going to be hard enough to give people a twinge of conscience about killing babies using ultrasounds, but the sort of folks who might commit abortions unless dissuaded are just going to laugh at you if you tell them that teenagers should stop having sex; (b) it’s unrealistic: teenagers are not going to stop having sex. It isn’t going to happen. Not now. Not ever. Teenagers in Saudi Arabia are having sex, but it’s boys with boys and girls with girls, thanks to the segregation of the sexes. Is THAT what we want? I am unpersuaded that causing teenagers to indulge in gay sex because heterosexual sex is less available is a good thing at all. And I think that the idea that there ever was a time when teenagers were not having sex with each other is a fairy tale. To quote Shakespeare in Measure for Measure: “Does your Worship mean to geld and splay all the youth of the City?” “No, Pompey.” “Truely Sir, in my poor opinion they will to it then.”
If it sounds like I’m condoning all of this, I am not. I think that millennialism is not going to save babies’ lives. We are not going to reverse the sexual revolution by limiting abortion law. If we try to, we will not limit abortion law.
On the other hand, by appealing to basic human compassion, quite a lot can be done to seriously reduce abortion. Take France, for instance. In France, abortion is legal. This decision was made by the Parliament, after much democratic debate. It is legal, but it is severely restricted: to the first ten weeks, only, with no exceptions other than to save the mother’s life or in the event of terrible defects found in the fetus. There is a one-week waiting period. Counselling about adoption services and social benefits if a woman keeps the baby to term are mandatory. Notification of the father is to be done under ordinary circumstances. Abortion mills are illegal. Abortions must be performed in hospitals, and no hospital which performs them can have more than 25% of its procedures as pregnancy terminations. It is the policy of the French state to allow abortion, but to strongly discourage it, and to encourage adoption instead. There are still abortions in France, of course, but nothing like the rate in the USA. And France has a (deserved) reputation of being considerably more sexually libertine than America. Why, then, the strict laws? Because the French people had a fair and full debate about it. They don’t LIKE abortion. They find it horrible. They allow it, basically as final birth control, but they have a whole network set up to discourage this. And this is the libertine French! My point is that even people who are libertine in their sexual mores can have very different moral impulses when it comes to children. Children are a very different thing, and even people like the French, who aren’t a bit squeamish about having adulterous affairs, are natively squeamish about aborting babies. I do not hold up France a paragon of anything in this regard. I merely note that even a sexually libertine society, if allowed to follow its own moral compass and debate abortion, comes to a far more restrictive consensus on abortion than the American court-imposed abortion right leaves the USA> I think THAT is possible: to cause people to come to dislike abortion, and be willing, democratically, to restrict it to the first trimester.
The key there will not be the restriction, it will be the debates that are had as the restriction is sought for. Lots of people will have that soft-spot for babies, and if the debate is had, although they will come down on the side of maintaining abortion rights, it will be an uncomfortable condition. And the country, having had the debate, will be conditioned by the arguments. If at that point a pro-life Supreme Court swoops in and finds the unborn fetus a “person”, the decision won’t provoke a revolt.
So, in a nutshell, I think that to restrict abortion we need to press on the emotional side, showing the ultrasounds, etc. And we need to get pro-life judges up there who will find inherent personhood in a fetus, and strike down abortion. To get the judges, we need to advance on the emotional front.
And when someone faces us with the social welfare costs, which will be high, we have to be able to unflinchingly look them in the face and say “Yes, welfare WILL expand. And we will pay for it.”