I am constantly amazed by the contortions that people go through to justify their position on abortion. The pro-lifers usually resort to religion and the question of murder. The pro-choices resort to the rights of women. Both these arguments tend to miss the point (although I certainly sympathise with the women’s rights group).
Of course prevention is better than abortion, but here is the point: with 7 billion people on this earth, many of them living in poverty and squalor do we really need to force people to have unwanted children? I am convinced that anybody who wants a child and can provide a loving home will not resort to having an abortion. The desperate, the poor, the teenage mothers to be, the people who feel that they are unable to cope with a child and to provide a loving home for a child, these are the people who resort to abortions. And this option should always be open to them.
Where is the sense in forcing drug addicted mothers to give birth to children they cannot and will not care for? Why do we want to force teenagers to give birth to unwanted children when every available statistic indicates the huge penalty both the mother and child will face in life? Where is the sense in forcing a mother with 6 children and living in poverty to have another unwanted child?
It always amazes me that the people shouting the loudest against abortion do not seem to have houses full of children. They are not there when women in the depth of despair give birth, to take care of the child. No, the majority of these people are living in good homes with families that they can care for and do care for. Where are the millions of adverts in the papers saying “don’t have an abortion, we will give your unwanted child a loving home, we will cloth and feed the child, we will educate the child and above all we will love the child”.
If half as much effort went into caring for unwanted children as goes into the anti-abortion crusade, there would be no orphans, no abused children, no child headed-households. But no, the only moments that these people care about is the moment of conception and birth. Thereafter, hey buddy it is your problem.
The damage that this does to society and the earth is evident to see. In Freakonomics, Levitt and Dubner have convincingly argued that legalised abortion brought the crime rate down in New York. Statistics show that much of the crime is committed by young males who were brought up in bad circumstances. So it is not only the mother and the unwanted child that suffers, the whole of society suffers for many years through crime waves and the huge burden on the justice and correctional systems (i.e. our taxes).
7 billion people on earth and we are in the midst of the greatest wave of extinction in history with the number of species going extinct accelerating all the time. The oceans, once thought to be an inexhaustible resource, are being fished to exhaustion and filled with pollution. How can forcing millions of unwanted people onto the earth make this situation any better? Do we even need to talk about global warming? What would an extra billion or so people do to global warming?
Don’t even get me started on idiotic religions that forbid the use of contraception. Add these idiots to the anti-abortion crowd and we get a bunch of people who are hell bent on slow suicide by overpopulation. Which, actually, is strange since the very same religions that prohibit contraception and abortion also prohibit suicide?
If you are religious then clearly your god gave you eyes to see and brains to think. Look around; see what having 7 billion people on earth does to the environment. Now use your brains.
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