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I did a research paper a few years ago for my final English Comp class about child-care and raising children while being below the poverty threshold. I wrote an entire section regarding abortion and got some good sources that I'm not going to try and look up again so you'll just take my word for it:Originally Posted by Diff-chan
The legality status of abortion in the US and other countries doesn't actually effect the number of abortions that are performed. The numbers stay pretty consistent whether it is legal or not. Of course in countries where abortion is illegal, the procedures are often performed in secret, outside of a reasonable medical facility and have far more health risks involved for the woman getting the abortion. The whole Gosnell thing I guess is what you could suspect from illegal back-alley abortions. Gosnell goes a little beyond that though. The man not only took advantage of poor people, he pretty much showed a complete lack of respect for human dignity and life in general.
Another interesting abortion fact: Since abortion was legalized, the generations effected by it (as in the kids who were born or aborted) paved the way for a pretty dramatic drop in national crime rates around the time when all of the original aborted babies would've been teenagers/young adults. There's a lot of factors that go into the decrease in crime rates around the country during this time but you'd have a pretty hard time trying to prove that the legalization of abortion in the 1970's has nothing to do with the change in trends. In an indirect way, it goes to show that many of the babies that were aborted were destined to grow up as criminals and problems to society.
Yoshi does have some valid points about taking responsibility when it comes to sexual habits but you could easily argue that getting an abortion is part of the valid "responsible" actions. As I said in my original post, I do believe that abortions should only be performed during the very early stages of pregnancy outside of special cases (serious birth defects discovered during pregnancy, potential danger to the mother, etc.). I don't see why abortions need to be performed later in pregnancy (I'm not actually sure what the cut-off is for the legal status in the US) when the fetus is viable or close to it at that point. It's probably the social stigma over abortions that causes people to wait for so long before going through with it. Even though I think early term abortions are completely acceptable and a responsible action for a person that isn't ready to raise a child; I don't think that abortions should be counted on as a regular method of birth control.
There really does need to be better sexual education in the public school system (when I was in school, they basically just taught us not to have sex at all as a way to practice safe sex) and easy access to condoms/contraceptives for younger people because they are the ones that're probably most at risk for unwanted pregnancies. The closest I've ever come to having a significant other get an abortion is when my girlfriend (and now wife) used the morning after pill one time after a condom broke. Other than that, we had just about 6 years of regular sexual activity using condoms for a short time right when we first started dating (my least preferred), oral contraceptives on and off, and no protection at all (the pull-out method is my personal favorite and has worked pretty well for me) with no pregnancies and only a couple of scares. Once we decided we wanted to have a baby, we did the thing and she got pregnant. How can someone possibly make an argument for depriving the younger generations of the tools and/or education that my wife and I used to avoid pregnancy? It's political bullshit that only makes our society a weaker one. Unwanted pregnancies are just one consequence of poor sex education; a lot of politicians seem to be forgetting about things like oh...HIV and the fact that people contracting STD's is bad for society as a whole and not just the individuals who get them?
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