Plausible, but I can't put a lot of emphasis on it as it is, once again, self selecting. Educating them on the possible fallout from the procedure is probably a good thing, but that's not what this is doing. Once again, you can't use the ends to justify the means. (Plus I'd argue that having an unwanted child can produce far more trauma to a mother and their family, in the long run) Seems like a moot point, as pregnancy and childbirth are much more dangerous for a woman. You mean... unwanted ones? Sounds very MadMaxian of you. It's nice to think of every life as wonderful and imagine that everybody contributes to the overall wellbeing of the world, but sadly, it's not reality. Especially not when it comes to unwanted children. Excellent. But it's just an anecdote. The other side of this kind of story is almost never told, mostly because it can't be, in addition to no one wanting to believe it/hear it. The positive side, to me, is reproducing responsibly and having happy, maintainable families. Whether a mother decides to keep or abort her baby, I support her either way, but it shouldn't be based on the influence or pressure of the state. Abortion is not an intrinsically bad thing, it's much more complicated than that kind of black and white thinking, and that is something I think we can both agree on.
I used the American diet as an example of the power of incentives. I wholeheartedly do not support it, but damn it works. Yes, I believe providing a disincentive to abortion is for the "greater good". I've plainly said it a few times now, made it clear as day, yet I've been accused of being intellectually dishonest for some reason I can't quite puzzle out. That said, I am aware many of these items carry their own agendas, and being somewhat aware of the governor's incompetence (slightly tinged by this forum's ideological bent, but ehhhh), I hesitate to wholeheartedly support this. However, if done right, and if no effort were made to overturn the fundamental legality of abortion, then I maintain it can be a positive thing.
I agree we simply don't know and the study you bring does little to add to the argument since it is voluntary versus forced sonograms. That said though we know for a fact that abortions are considered to be generally traumatic, or at least very unpleasant experiences, so it anything that prolongs that experience is likely going to be also be considered to be traumatizing or at the very minimum unpleasant so I think it is a pretty safe assumption that this would be an incursion of privacy. Just the same as if you were forced to have a colonoscopy. I think many of us can agree that we should reduce abortions but why the focus on shame instead of looking for ways to reduce unplanned pregnancies and to help raise children? Not saying that you yourself don't feel that way also but it seems like so much of the anti-abortion effort is aimed at bans and shame.
I pointed this out earlier in the thread but anytime you mention these "what if" arguments to be logically consistent you have to consider all possibilities. I mean what if Jared Loughner's mother had aborted him? If great that things worked out for your friend but I don't think the "what if" argument is a way to make social policy in this matter.
Would you then support a law that mandates that anyone having a cheeseburger has to get a cholesterol test?
No, I mean whatever society delineates as a "normal child". That stat about Down's Syndrome children has to haunt someone. Do we really want to be a society that starts selecting our children based on whatever the fashion of the day is? Don't tell me you haven't thought of the possibility. If we could screen whether or not babies were hetero or homosexual for example, I shiver at the possibilities. Yes, I do not think abortion is intrinsically a bad thing. However, uneducated, and irrational abortions would tend to be, in my books, a bad thing. Really though, I can respect your position of individual liberty, since I am by and large a social libertarian. However to me...this is gonna sound all dramatic and overwritten, but here goes anyways---as an atheist, I cannot determine what will happen to me outside this life. Perhaps the religious are a bit more sure, but no one is certain. For me, to deny people the opportunity to experience the vicissitudes of the only life we know, and to determine whether or not the peaks of love and happiness are worth the valleys of sadness and despair, is a cruel denial of the the fundamental principle of liberty---that what your idea of hell is might be heaven for others, and that a life judged wasted by society is not if we are free and happy.
Both possible if one chooses to have the baby. You could argue that carrying to term and then not being able to care for the kid would be much MORE traumatic. I was born to a single mother, my biological father wanted nothing to do with me. Am I happy I'm alive? Sure. But I could understand if the pregnancy would've been too tough on my mother to carry to term (I'd be none the wiser anyways). After all, she was promised the world and then left high and dry with a kid inside of her (seems to happen quite often). Luckily, she had immense support, financial and otherwise, from her family and friends. Not all women have those luxuries.
^A lot of people who support abortion (and some in this thread) have mentioned the "what if the unwanted child does this or that, and messes up our neighborhood" kind of argument. It's assumed that children who were aborted would have probably been net negative impact on society anyways. What I did was to do exactly what you described I should do---balance out the "what if" with all of the possibilities. What if that unwanted, neglected child does not become a criminal that leeches society's resources, but a Rhodes scholar? In application of this policy, both sides must be considered.
Well, an individual cheeseburger, just like an individual beer as I posited earlier, is a hell of a lot different than an abortion, no? That said, I'm a proponent of some kind of obesity tax. Or hell, a fitness tax credit, since we seem to hate to punish people these days and we all seem to hate taxes.
I like this part of the article: "That version contained language that allowed a woman to "avert her eyes" if she chose." Reminded me of Clockwork Orange. Seriously though, this seems like a useless idea. Abortions are physically and mentally stressful enough. The sonogram should be between the doctor and the woman. If these were state-funded abortions and the state insisted on enacting this sort of legislation then I suppose they have a right to force the sonogram. How much would these additional sonograms cost? Maybe they can also force the woman to read Biblical passages too.
People who need abortions will still have them. This isn't the huge "deal-breaker" some of you are making it out to be---what's 24 hours and a sonogram for a once in a lifetime kind of thing? I actually hope something like this makes someone like a well-supported, financially endowed female who fears the responsibility, or a pair of parents that fear raising a child with Down Syndrome think twice.
I will now blow the minds of our resident anti-abortion conservatives: The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime John Donohue, Yale University Steven D. Levitt, University of Chicago Abstract We offer evidence that legalized abortion has contributed significantly to recent crime reductions. Crime began to fall roughly eighteen years after abortion legalization. The five states that allowed abortion in 1970 experienced declines earlier than the rest of the nation, which legalized in 1973 with Roe v. Wade. States with high abortion rates in the 1970s and 1980s experienced greater crime reductions in the 1990s. In high abortion states, only arrests of those born after abortion legalization fall relative to low abortion states. Legalized abortion appears to account for as much as 50 percent of the recent drop in crime. Suggested Citation John Donohue and Steven D. Levitt. "The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime" Quarterly Journal of Economics CXVI.2 (2001). Available at: http://works.bepress.com/john_donohue/8
A point to raise here---who are we to judge that an "unwanted" child will not want life just because nobody else at the time wants them to be part of their lives?
Conceivably, everybody would want to live (unless, you know, their life was going to be a 24/7 torture fest or something), but that shouldn't factor into our decision making. If it did, we should all be cranking out babies all the time, because hey, everybody would rather live than not live, right? But, obviously so, in the case of unwanted children, we don't afford them the same rights, or weigh their opinions as much, as as full grown adult (we run this hierarchy throughout the course of our lives)... and rightfully so, I would say.
yes, I referred to the Freakonomics argument above. Once again though, economics offers us insight into value systems. The evidence here was well-researched and the conclusion reasonably established. However, do you really want to live in a society where abortion is considered an anti-crime method? Especially given that if you read the book, a lot of other factors could also explain the drop in crime, and could be used instead (increased jail-time for violent criminals or additional police being shown to have a significant causal effect on dropping crime.)
Why should it not factor in our decision making? We're not talking about making some kind of fertility spree where we try to liberate the souls of wherever the hell our souls come from. We're talking about after the fact a life is possible, we should not work to deny it.
Is the weighting so unbalanced that the fundamental right of all beings---the right to live, once disputed by the adult in any way, yields unanimously to the adult?
Because I don't give more credence to the supposed wishes of a spec of matter containing less cells than the brain of a housefly (for instance) as opposed to a full grown, living, breathing, thinking, adult? Everybody may want to get/be born, doesn't mean I should forgo the use of contraceptives or abortion methods, simply because my impregnating some girl would cause happiness later for my unborn child. This is a personal value judgment, if someone wants to put the wishes of the unborn child ahead of their own, more power to them, but let them make that determination. I think you may have missed something, in that no one here seems to have said that the child itself "doesn't want to be born".
This argument is however very controversial and known because it commonly has been used as a justification. I'm parsing through the book again though, and it occurs to me that this passage has some relevance--- "Let's say that he is forced to affix a relative value and decides that 100 fetuses are worth one newborn. For a person that believes that 1 newborn is worth 100 fetuses, 1.5 million yearly abortions in the United States would translate into a loss of 15000 human lives. That happens to be about the same number of people who die in homicides every year. And it is far more than the number of homicides eliminated each year due to legalized abortion. So even for someone who considers a fetus to be worth one-hundredth of a human being, the trade-off between higher abortion, and lower crime, is by an economist's reckoning, terrible inefficient."
