UPDATE: I added a coda onto the end of this diary.
In the course of my diary entry yesterday, which was devoted to a broader argument, I implied a few subsidiary arguments about other things that I didn't flesh out much in the body, unfortunately.
In comments, I ended up defending one of these points, and later updated the diary with the defense as a coda.
Since few probably got to read the coda, since it is certainly independently interseting indpendent of that post's main topic, and since there is enough of it to stand alone as it's own diary, I am editing and re-posting that small argument here.
I may update this post a little later with a coda containing more of the detail of the argument.
The US, of course, is the richest country in the world, and I am not claiming that there can be no economy at all or something like that without abortion.
But let's look at what the US would be like without abortion. There is a great demand for abortion. So probably there would be a thriving underground abortion industry. By its clandestine nature, this industry would probably be a very unsafe place for women. It would probably be serviced often by doctors who couldn't get jobs elsewhere, for example by people who lost their licenses due to recklessly not following standards. Women who patronized the underground system would run the risk of accidental injury or criminal extortion at the hands of the worst of these doctors, with much less recourse than if they dealt with doctors who are on the up-and-up.
A complete ban on abortion might not change the society in Ireland much. But if there was a complete ban on abortion in America, it might be different. A lot of women who could contribute a lot to science, to intellectual thought, to political leadership, in short to all sorts of professions would not be able to if they got caught in an unwanted pregnancy, and had to take several years off to raise their children. This could cause technology, foreign policy thought, political philosophy, and any number of sciences or sectors of the economy to stagnate. Any of those fields or parts of the economy would have effects on other parts of the economy.
Forcing women into pregnancies makes women more beholden to men and more at risk when they consider getting into a sexual relationship with a man. It makes there be too many new things a man can do to hurt a woman. Since it is not really that is to tell who is a good man and who is not, it is not fair to force a woman to be subject to that kind of extra leverage a man can put against her. Threatening to rape a woman and get her pregnant simply opens up a whole new field of extortion for the date-rapist, extortionist, etc.
Also abortion probably plays a part in population control.
Completely prohibiting abortion is just stupidly playing with fire. Based on all I've written above, it obviously makes it possible for us to have a much better, more powerful, more even and fair and dynamic society if women are able to "bail out" of a pregnancy every once in a while, and only carry to term the pregnancies they actually want.
Some may say that some of these arguments may apply with equal vigor to countries like Ireland an Germany, where abortions have been made completely illegal. But for a long time in the past when abortions weren't available in the U.S. or elsewhere, they were part and parcel of a big regime of patriarchy that kept women powerless and made their lives hell.
Bringing abortion-prohibitions back now, without the rest of the regime, certainly isn't the same exact thing as the old days.
But the point disappears because you can't prove a negative. You can't prove to me that Ireland, Germany, etc., aren't really stunting their potential, and that things wouldn't be a lot better for them if they did have legal abortion.
The argument ignores, too, the fact that America isn't one of those countries, and prohibiting abortion would probably work out a lot differently here.
For one thing, America is the world's leader in a lot of things, a lot of industries and endeavors. Simply as the largest 1st World country, in terms of population, our "economy of scale" with respect to our labor force makes us much stronger and influential than Germany or Ireland. Just to make a hypothetical number, let's say 1/10 people are really smart. So that means in the US, we have a lot more total smart people (than Ger., Ire., etc.) even though they may be the same proportion in the population. If that were 100,000 smart kids in America in each generation, more or less, that would be a lot more chances that there would be some nerd in each generation in our country who would think up some great invention. There aren't just nerds in science. There are great minds in all disciplines. So for this reason America is a vigorous leader.
So when you do something that takes great contributions out of America's workforces, it effects the rest of the world in a big way, because we are the leader in all of these industries because of how much brain-power we have. By putting all these women in a nursery, by stunting their careers, we are accepting making less of a contribution to the world, less technology other nations can improve on (and give the improvements back to us) once we've produce the invention, or less improvements we can make on their inventions, and so on.
Plus, Germany and Ireland don't have the crazy religious blocs we do in this country- not nearly to the same extent. Those people will probably try to take advantage of a ban on abortion to push people around. We don't want those people to have more control than they already to.
Plus, kids (and people in general) in Europe are often a lot more responsible and realistic about things like sex and alcohol than we are here in America. I don't have the statistic in front of me, but I think we far and away have more teen pregnancies in America than they do in those countries. This isn't because Germany and Ireland don't have abortion, it's because girls their use condoms when they have sex with their boyfriends, and they're not getting pushed into a lot of stupid, condom-less sex by asshole guys in the first place. European women are more feminist and better able to think about these things when planning/thinking about their sex lives, and to stick up for themselves. Europeans men are probably a little more feminist, too. It's feminism that defends women, not abortions.
So, no, all the arguments do not apply with equal vigor to those countries.
***CODA***
When I wrote about this topic yesterday, I got a lot of weak and bizarre objections. Some of them had more to do with my argument, and some of them were just typical foaming-at-the-mouth responses to abortion in generally.
Quickly, I'm going to respond to some of them as I responded to them in comments, just for the benefit of people who may encounter these objections in another discussion.
* Although I didn't call abortion a "necessary evil," a commenter claimed I did. But maybe the questionable "necessary evil" label is a useless appeal to emotion. I would ask such a person if he/she calls war a necessary evil, and if the answer is 'yes,' then ask if they claim we should never fight wars. Or ask about another example. There are any number of things we might describe as a necessary evil, but that we do them anyway, so trying to say that abortion is 'evil' and therefore should not be allowed because one might roughly call it (or make it sound like) a 'necessary evil' does not advance the discussion as to whether we should permit abortions at all.
* A commenter said that there was no evidence that prohibiting abortions stunts economic growth if you look at other countries that prohibit abortion. The commenter didn't show any evidence of how you show this, and frankly, I don't know how one
could show it. You would probably half to show that there are economic
benefits to mothers being forced to stay home and raise kids they didn't want to have, and then show that those benefits outweigh any benefits an economy would get from thousands of mothers not being forced to hold up their careers and their professional development to raise the kids. The benefits on the forced-abortion side seem like they'd be really amorphous, especially compared to the really concrete benefits on the allowing-abortion side. Also, another problem for the prohibiting-abortion side is that the pertient women for determining effects on the economy aren't choosing to have children they want, they're being forced to raise children they didn't want, didn't plan for, and very likely aren't prepared to raise in any number of ways that a willing mother is much more likely to be ready for. Because it's much more obvious how allowing abortions could help an economy (and indeed, our economy has grown by leaps and bounds since
Roe v. Wade,) I think it's incumbent for the pro-lifer to be the one to prove how prohibiting abortions is better-or-as-good for the economy, and it sure seems like getting the data on that is really tough going.
* The commenter pointed to other countries that prohibit abortions (Germany, Ireland) and others that only recently allowed abortions (Spain, Switzerland) to try to refute my point. As any political science student knows, it's tricky looking to other countries as examples to predict how doing similar things might affect a country. Political science has few meaningful laboratories, and in the case of something like the myriad of different ways a great number of women who are more psychologically healthy, who have less burdens at home on their free-time, and who could have up to several additional years added to their professional contribution and development at an early stage of their careers
effect an economy, it's just not going to be that meaningful to look at even other Western industrialized nations who no doubt had different abortion laws circa
Roe, changed their laws at a different time than us, and were different in many, many other ways- legally, cultural, in terms of amount of population and population density, economically, degree of women's integration in the work-force and relation to men and the family, religious intensity and religious taboos, neighboring countries and immigration (specifically, culture of the immigrants), and so on. I think a lot better example is how
America changed post-
Roe, and it's obvious that women here (1) are healthier, happier, and more indepentent today than in the '50s and '60s, (2) kids are healthier, happier, raised better, smarter, do more, and have more (3) men are fine with the whole thing, and in all terms probably do more, have good relations with people, are healthier, and happier, and (4) the economy as a whole has grown enormously, and we have had a lot of great inventions, innovations, and improvement; despite lots of challenges, there have been lots of chances.
* Somebody wrote:
As to your point that no country is comparable to ours, perhaps you will raise it next time that someone advocates abolition of death penalty or single payer health system by appealing to "European experience."
Of course this has nothing to do with my argument, but in case someone uses an objection like this on you, the answer is that those are very different and complicated questions, and those issues affect a country in different ways that prohibition or practice of abortion does, and it's just doesn't work to say that because the example of other countries isn't helpful in the abortion debate it will never shed light in any other, totally different debate, and you can't use it any other debate.