2012/02/08

Why It is Reasonable to Vote Single-Issue With Regards to Abortion

This started as a reply to a discussion on facebook - the blog post may not get much wider attention, but the numbers I looked up to make my point shocked me.  An amalgamation of the best sources I can find suggest that, as a minimum estimate, there are 600,000 abortions in the US each year.  These "best sources" are, in the interest of full disclosure, mostly pro-life organizations, verified by Wikipedia.  Oddly (or not), pro-abortion lobbies seem extremely reluctant to talk about the actual numbers, occasionally mentioning "abortions per 1000 pregnancies" or similar statistics, but almost never admitting the sheer enormity of that six-digit number.  And in fact, the data that is presented suggests the number is closer to 800,000 - but I'm willing to guess low to make a point.

That point is this: If abortion were outlawed tomorrow, I think we can assume that no more than half that number of abortions would continue.  I suspect it would be even fewer than half, but I'm willing to say, for the sake of argument, that half of the women getting abortions want it enough to go through an illegal procedure.  That means we instantly save hundreds of thousands of lives: even if we assume that of the 300,000 babies no longer aborted, another half of them die due to natural causes  - miscarriages, still births, etc. - we're still looking at 150,000 lives saved per year.

If you could suggest any other policy change that would even begin to approach the positive effect of outlawing abortion, maybe I - and the thousands of other voters and citizens for whom abortion is the most important issue facing us - would think about changing our priorities.

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