LogFAQs > #973006773

GGuirao13 posted...

I actually support restricting abortion to extreme cases, like rape, incest, or endangerment of the mother's life.

The maternal mortality rate in the US is almost triple the national murder rate (~17 per 100k vs ~6.5 per 100k). It's up to three times higher than that if the mother isn't white. With the US health care system as it stands, being pregnant at all is endangerment of the mother's life, let alone the question of serious injury.

On top of that, any time you try to restrict abortion by placing criteria on it like that, no matter how good your intentions are, those restrictions will be abused by more gung-ho pro-lifers to deny abortions whenever they can. Ban it after a certain gestational age? You get a bunch of red tape women have to wade through that often takes so long that they end up passing that deadline unless they started the day they got pregnant. Only allow it for rape? If you require an actual rape conviction to qualify, then there's a good chance the baby will be born before the court case is done. Incest? Whoops, that paternity test took too long and now you're past the age limit. Endangerment? We'll just set the threshold of life-threatening risk really high and require doctors to demonstrate that they did everything we believe is possible (which often doesn't reflect what's actually possible, such as that one politician that suggested aborting an ectopic pregnancy should only be legal if doctors tried to transfer it to the uterus first) before allowing it.

I agree with the basic principle of trying to cut down on the number of abortions (virtually everyone does, as much as many pro-lifers would try to paint women as deliberately getting pregnant every week so they can get another drive-through abortion), but restricting access to abortion isn't the way to do that. There's just too much potential for abuse, with disastrous consequences for the mothers. Instead, the focus needs to be on reducing the number of abortions by reducing the amount of unwanted pregnancies that happen in the first place. Comprehensive sex ed curricula and birth control subsidies have both been proven to dramatically cut down on the number of accidental pregnancies (one pilot in Colorado for subsidizing IUDs reduced the rate by 40%, which is massive), and improving prenatal care and other supports for new mothers make pregnancy and parenthood safer and less daunting such that fewer women who do accidentally get pregnant end up wanting or needing an abortion. That approach not only does a better job of respecting women's bodily autonomy (the core moral principle of the pro-choice position), it also tends to yield better results in terms of reducing overall abortion rates, cuts down on dangerous DIY approaches, and means you don't have to waste everyone's time, money, and emotional well-being conducting a criminal investigation of every miscarriage, all of which are objective benefits that everyone should be able to agree upon.