Re: Majority Favors Limiting Abortion to first 20 Weeks - Women more in favor than Me
If no abortions had occurred since 1973 -
The population of the US would include a much higher proportion of seriously disabled people, including seriously mentally disabled people. There would have been a need for much greater public welfare, both for all the children born with serious birth defects and all the women permanently disabled in late pregnancy and childbirth. Hence, we would probably have a social democracy now, with nationalized health care, so you can forget conservative economic values.
There would be a lower proportion of women, because more women would have died in late pregnancy or childbirth. The number that would have died would not just be equal to those who had abortions in late pregnancy to save their lives, because some of the women who have had abortions in early pregnancy for other reasons would have had dangerous late pregnancies had they continued them. And of course, others would have been permanently disabled by late pregnancy/childbirth.
The crime rate would probably have vastly increased because US culture has no long history of adapting to domestic overpopulation and poverty without the capacity to migrate to less populated places.
Our government would surely have pursued a policy of continuous war with a revival of the draft to kill off young men, as that has been a standard human means of reducing the population of a society to reduce poverty throughout history.
Winter is Coming is a perfect motto for you.
Literally everything you said here except for that last sentence is baseless.
A) The vast majority of abortions were not of those with genetic "defects". In fact with no abortion we would be more likely to have far more producers than we would have net recipients, meaning that as a proportion those who are condemned by the nature of their birth to depend on others would be less of a net drain on the system. Furthermore, your conclusion does not follow your presupposition - in a system such as the one you describe our overburdened and straining social welfare system would have already collapsed, and the ability of the government to provide a huge new entitlement such as single payer would be roughly nil.
B) Women are born more than men; nature's way of allowing for death in childbirth. Except, thanks to modern medicine, women don't die in childbirth a anything resembling the 'natural' rate - far, far, from it, in fact. This means that as the number of births would be significantly higher (carrying with it a higher number of female infants) even as the number of birth-deaths plummeted, that our ratio of women to men would, in fact,
climb slightly. It is
abortion which produces fewer women to men, as so many engage in sex-selective abortion, especially in cultures that more heavily value sons over daughters. Feel free to do a search for "China's Bare Branches", and you'll see the same effects in an extreme case, but only an exaggeration of our disparity, not a difference in type.
C) The "Abortion reduces crime" shibboleth became popular after the Freakonomics guys came up with it, and was then utterly destroyed by someone who
actually studies the history of violence,
Steve Pinker. It's Pop-Social-Science.
D) Again, see (B), we would not be facing a surplus of young men - that is the issue that is faced by countries who perform
lots of abortions (such as China), not countries that do
not perform abortions. That being said, killing off surpluses of young men through warfare is a tactic used by states who feature no significant political feedback mechanism with punitive power (autocracies), not representative governments.
