For purposes of prevention. Although surgical abortion is a very minor procedure compared to, say, kidney removal, every pregnancy and every abortion carries some nonzero risk. It’s a valid public-health policy to encourage women who don’t want to bear a child to avoid getting pregnant in the first place. The safest abortion is the one you don’t need because you successfully prevented conception.
That said, of course it’s ultimately up to an individual woman to choose whether she wants to get pregnant and whether she wants to terminate a pregnancy, for whatever reason. But I don’t think society should be introducing market forces into those individual choices by monetizing abortions for pregnant women.
[QUOTE=John Mace]
And how would you make it illegal? Who would you punish and how?
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AFAICT, it might be already illegal, perhaps under the laws against the sale of human body parts that have been so prominent in the news lately due to the artificially manufactured kerfuffle about Planned Parenthood’s fetal tissue donations. If we can say it’s illegal to pay someone for the discarded tissue from their abortion, ISTM we can surely say it’s illegal to hire them to have the abortion in the first place.
Leave the individual choices about pregnancy termination up to individual women, and don’t try to exploit their economic vulnerability to influence their reproductive choices.