Recently, a letter to the editor appeared in the Springfield, Illinois State Journal-Register in which the writer asserted that, had it not been for the 50 million (I always heard the figure was 30 million, but whatever) abortions since Roe v. Wade, the population of the US would now be 350,000,000 instead of a mere 300,000,000.
I find this assertion ridiculous. First of all, many of those aborted fetuses would not have lived to adulthood. Secondly, many of them, if they HAD lived to adulthood, would have reproduced by now.
Is there some scientific model, which accounts for such factors as infant mortality, poverty and similar factors, that theoretically could predict the current population of the US in the absence of Roe v. Wade?
As a somewhat related aside, I remember a Marilyn vos Savant column from many years ago where a writer asked what the population of the US would be had it not been for the Civil War. The writer assumed that the 600,000 or so who died in the conflict would have reproduced, and their children would have reproduced, etc. Marilyn concluded that the current population of the US would still be about the same in the absence of the Civil War deaths. I don’t remember how she arrived at her conclusion, though.
And please, let’s NOT turn this into an abortion debate.
Not trying to debate the ethics and morals, but one factor you WOULD have to consider is that if abortion were illegal, a fair proportion of those abortions would have been performed illegally. I think that’s pretty inarguable. Of course, the amount of enforcement would make this number largely variable.
Also - the proportion of mothers who would die as a result of illegal abortions under unsafe conditions might be big enough to take into account.
Explain this please, you say it’s ridiculous because the number might be lower because of reaswon A but might be higher because of number B, why couldn’t A and B balance out? This would leave the number basically unchanged (or could).
A couple of thoughts about how the 50m would be reduced:
What proportion of those pregnancies would have miscarried?
Woman A has an unintended pregnancy, keeps the baby, later has one more child and then uses birth control. Woman B has an abortion, and later decides to have two planned pregnancies. Both result in a two-child family. In the OP’s example, woman B may make the same decisions as woman A.
Another factor to take into consideration is that a number of abortions aren’t “don’t want a baby, period” but “don’t want a baby now” - and if the mothers had proceeded with the pregnancy they terminated, that would have been a baby instead of the one they had later.
I thought I’d read on the Dope somewhere that the number of those was a lot lower than was being bandied about round about the time Roe and Wade were duking it out.
Again, no cites, but I heard that the number of illegal abortions is now thought to have been higher but they were much safer than what was bandied about during R v W.
The OP assumes that no Roe v. Wade = no abortions, but this is clearly not the case. Several states had already legalized abortion before Roe, including New York and California – the two most populated states at the time. I think it’s also reasonable to assume that in the absence of Roe additional states would have legalized abortion under at least some conditions.
That number would probably be very small. In 1972, the year before Roe v. Wade, the Centers for Disease Control identified 24 maternal deaths in legal abortions, 39 maternal deaths in illegal abortions, and 2 unknown.
The great drop in maternal deaths in abortions in the 1960s (e.g., there were 270 maternal deaths related to abortion in 1957) occurred both in legal and illegal abortions, suggesting improvements in obstetrics was a major factor. The improvement rate continues. In 1999, only four women died as a result of legal induced abortion and none died as a result of illegal induced abortion.
According to Mary Steichen Calderone, M.D., president of Planned Parenthood in 1959, experts in the field estimated that by the mid-1950s, 90 per cent of all illegal abortions were done by licensed physicians.
I forgot to point out the obvious — given that the number of illegal abortions in the U.S. in 1972 greatly exceeded the number of legal abortions, the maternal mortality rate for legal vs. illegal was roughly the same.
There’s no evidence that the legalization of abortion increased the number of abortions; most of the people who got legal abortions would have gotten illegal ones (or gone to places where they are illegal).
Does anyone know where we can find a graph of the US birth rate over time? If we can see what it looked like before and after Roe, that would be a good indication if *Roe *had any affect-- we’d see some sort of abrupt change in the 1970s. What would be even better would to see birth rates in states where abortion was illegal prior to Roe. I did a little hunitng, but my google-fu failed me…
The thread was about the impact of abortion on the population. There have been threads aplenty for you to beat the even-one-death-in-an-illegal-abortion-is-too-many drum.
Plus one could lower the overall population due to murders and mayhem in the 90’s.
Steven Levitt proposed in a paper, and then later in “Freakonomics” that the overall reduction in crime during the 90’s was a direct result of Roe vs. Wade. Less unwanted babies in bad 'hoods = less crime.
None of this takes into account little Johnny Smith, who would have been the original incubator for the lethal virus which wiped out 20% of the Earth’s population in 1988. Had he not been aborted, that is.