Over in this thread, the subject was touched upon.
So, there’s no abortions. How is society affected? Who is raising all the babies? Where are the jobs for these people when they reach adulthood? How does society handle the increase of people?
The book Freakanomics has a section on the rapid crime decrease in the past couple of decades and asserts that much of it can be directly traced back to widespread legally available abortions. The unwanted children that were likely to become criminals were never born in the first place. I don’t know how big that effect really was but some of it has to be to some degree and crime would pick up again 15 years from now if abortions were outlawed.
Another effect Leavitt mentioned was that the legalization of abortions closed most of the orphanges in the United States - women who didn’t want a child and couldn’t get an abortion put their baby up for adoption. There was a surplus of orphans with more children than they were parents looking to adopt so a lot of kids didn’t get adopted and grew up in orphanges. After Roe v Wade this domestic supply of orphans essentially disappeared and that’s when the idea of adopting foreign babies began.
No more outsourcing jobs to India and importing domestic help? Let the orphans do it! Even more women living below the poverty line, and fewer women in jobs above minimum wage. Possibly a backslide in terms of women having consensual sexual relations with men, and possibly higher levels of rape. And more infanticide.
So why is abortion outlawed? That might impact the fallout, quite a bit. I would hope that some of the ramifications of this would be:
- Vastly improved sex education in schools
- Cheap or free condoms available everywhere, as easy to get as tampons/pads are now
- All other contraceptives more widely available, including Plan B
Of course, you’re also going to have more women dying during pregnancy or during childbirth, or becoming ill during pregnancy. You’ll have more children born with severe physical and developmental problems. You’ll have more pregnancies in young teens brought to term. Rape and incest pregancies will be brought to term, and those girls and women should have access to counseling for being forced to bear those children.
Healthcare costs as a whole will rise even more sharply, given the above.
I can’t see how he can support that. Orphanages ended because it was felt foster homes were better – there are issues, but the kids aren’t being warehoused in poorly financed facilities. I can’t imagine social workers would allow orphanages to continue.
Just because abortion is outlawed doesn’t mean women won’t have them.
I think we’re supposed to just believe that this is the case, somehow, for the OP to work. Because of course, in reality, women and men who don’t want children will find a way.
Forgot to add – I imagine murder rates would go up when it comes to pregnant women. Murder is already the leading cause of death for pregnant women in America. Adding unwanted children to the mix (children who may have been the result of cheating, pregnancy that’s evidence of a crime like incest or rape, offspring that can potentially cost thousands in child support) isn’t likely to help.
This was my first thought, along with a rise of domestic abuse in general - walking out of an abusive relationship is even harder when children are involved.
I’d also expect a significant number of older women, particularly from lower income families, would keep working long past retirement age. When the mother is unfit or unready to raise her child and the father isn’t in the picture for whatever reason, more often than not it’s the grandmothers who step up to the plate - which, in turn, means these women have to keep working until the grandkids are old enough to support themselves.
There will be a lot more women dying from trying to give themselves abortions, just like before Roe v. Wade.
But the supply of kids reduced to the point where you COULD have a foster care system. And they still have issues recruiting enough quality foster parents in a lot of places. If you can’t find foster homes, you have no choice but to ‘warehouse’ children - or let them roam feral on the streets (a popular choice in some third world countries where they don’t even have enough orphanages).
Foreign adoption, however, was actually a result of the Korean War and predates Roe v. Wade by fifteen years. Although after Roe v. Wade the difficulty of domestic adoption increased, while at the same time the options in foreign adoption increased.
One fairly significant effect will be the burden on public facilities.
Approximately 1 in 4 pregnancies is currently terminated. That means we need 25% more schools and teachers.
A number of those pregnancies are terminated because screening shows issues with the fetus. Frequently that translates to much higher medical costs over the life of the person. Presumably, those would be passed on.
There are countries where abortion is illegal. What tends to happen is that if abortion is available in a nearby country and there is no restriction on you travelling there, that’s where you go. I doubt that you’d tell the airline ticket booker the purpose of your visit, if your own country had outlawed abortion, of course. Because you’d probably be denied travel in a case like that. And reported to the police.
So one new effect would be an increase in the revenue for the airlines, on account of a whole new line of business - abortion tourism, for want of a better expression.
In a vast country like America, only the wealthy would be able to do that, I suppose. And for the very wealthy, it wouldn’t really be an issue. Very wealthy people can always find the type of doctor who is willing to be paid enough to overlook certain things. Like the law.
The less financially well off and more desperate would revert to the old ways of backstreet abortions, as well as cruder and more violent physical methods of separating the mother from the foetus - beating or kicking the baby out, for instance.
Yep. Abortions, especially early abortions, are actually pretty easy for even non-medical people to perform. Of course, if you want safe abortions, with sterile technique and painkillers, that’s gonna cost extra. Some doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel will quietly terminate pregnancies, some will do it out of compassion, and some will do it for the money. Wealthy women, or the women who can get some cash from someone, will go to another country to have the procedure done legally, just as they did when abortion was illegal before.
I also have to wonder about ectopic pregnancies, and other pregnancies that will either endanger a woman’s health, or pretty much guarantee a dead mother as the outcome.
The consequences? I think that some women will give up straight sex altogether, and some will become far pickier about when and with whom they have sex. There will be a lot more unwanted kids around, and I think that we will, indeed, have a lot more crime in about a little over a dozen years.
Suicide rates, especially among teenagers, would rise.
I know you said this is what you hope would happen, but it’s doubtful.
Outlawing abortions would be the first step to outlawing the pill, then condoms, then sex ed. Premarital sex would be re-criminalized. Eventually any prenatal care would be outlawed, just in case the lady had a “miscarriage” shortly there after, or was coached on how to induce one.
There would be a sharp rise in infanticide and abandoned babies, as well as child abuse and death. More women would die in childbirth and because of complications of pregnancy.
Any woman with any sense, intellect, or self-respect would leave. Hopefully similar men would too. All that would be left are the pro-birther, educating their children at home using the Bible and the staff. Any higher education would be left to those few who can afford it, people who were able to control their fertility somehow.
Eventually the US would become a backwater, women barefoot and pregnant in the home, industry and business would stagnate and the economy would collapse. At that point, society would revert to some sort of feudal system, wherein the massive class of the unwanted would become slaves to the upper class. The only methods of population control would be starvation, disease, and overwork.
At that point another country would probably try to take the USA over, inserting their own people as feudal lords as a new colonization. The USA would be no more, having crumbled in all but name years before.
Just my humble predictions.
I hope you mean that if you wanted to outlaw all contraception, the first step would be to outlaw abortion, not that outlawing abortion is necessarily and always the first step to outlawing all contraception.
For anyone interested: the example cited in *Freakonomics *was Romania under Nicolae Ceauşescu. (Wikipedia)(Google Books)
A number of pregnancies wouldn’t happen because folks would be more that much more careful about using contraception, without the backup plan of abortion.
Pretty much automatically, yes. And curtailing women’s rights in general. The anti-abortion movement is fundamentally a crusade against women, and the rights of women.
I’d expect an increase in child abuse due to there being so many unwanted children. I’d expect laws against abusing both women and children to be curtailed or eliminated as well; contempt ( or worse ) for both is part and parcel of anti-abortionism. There’d be quite a few women dying due to hospitals being afraid to treat pregnant women for fear of being accused of abortion if she miscarries.
A nation that actually succeeds in stopping all abortions is going to be nearly totalitarian towards women. It’ll need to test women on a regular basis, and any woman who tests positive for pregnancy would have to be sent to what amounts to “maternity prison” and kept under constant surveillance. Because otherwise she might find a way to get an abortion out of the country or underground; possibly with the connivance of her husband so you can’t trust him either.
I’d expect contraception to be outlawed as well, and women’s protection against rape curtailed or gone. Because that’s the kind of society that would do such a thing.