Benefits
Jill Suttie posted an article a few days ago on how access to abortion improves women’s well-being.
Though people may argue over whether this ruling is sound or not, it likely spells disaster for women’s health and well-being. That’s because research suggests women who have the right to choose whether or not to give birth are happier, healthier, and more economically stable than those who don’t. And their children benefit, too, by having a mother who can afford to nurture and provide for them better.
What a surprise, eh, that women who get to have some control over their lives are better off than women who don’t?
Item one is better mental health.
Many women are made to feel guilty about seeking an abortion; at times, the circumstances surrounding their choice can involve stress and negative emotions. Does getting the abortion hurt their mental health? Not in most cases. In general, women who get a desired abortion tend to have better mental health—even in the short term—than their peers who are denied one.
Maybe because if you don’t want to have a baby, at a particular time or at all, then being forced to have one will make you feel bad: thwarted, coerced, pushed around. Just a wild guess.
Item two is better physical health.
While some have argued that abortions have health risks, those pale in comparison to giving birth. Legal, medically supervised abortions are relatively safe for women. If we don’t keep them that way, women may seek to abort unwanted pregnancies on their own, putting themselves at greater risk for health complications.
Meanwhile pregnancy and giving birth are rough on the body, and genuinely risky. Stats have improved enormously since the bad old days but it’s still risky.
And yet the anti-abortion people will continue to scream MUUUUUUURDEEEEEERRRR no matter what the data shows. They cannot ever understand how they are simply exchanging one for the other; they claim that outlawing abortion will “save” the unborn fetus, even though the data demonstrates that it ends up destroying women.
It’s not unlike the IUD-funding program that was carried out in Colorado. Subsidized IUD’s were provided for young women and the result was a drop in teen births and abortions. Despite that clear data which ostensibly one would think that they would applaud, the “pro-life” people continued to protest and fight the program on the grounds that it was “killing children” (there is a distinct sect of the anti-woman movement that thinks that IUD’s are abortifacients, and the others seem to buy into the idea that pregnancy is a woman’s fault and punishment for having sex–a primary biological impulse).
Their goal clearly is not to help the already-born, already-in-need women.
Meanwhile, in northern European countries like Norway (which, as you’ll remember, Trump wanted more immigrants to the USA to be from because they’re not “shithole countries”, as Trump liked to muse), abortion and contraception are readily available and while teens are encouraged to delay engaging in sex until they are adults there is not the same huge stigma about it there as there is here, in my experience. So: an atmosphere of tolerance and acceptance, and easy non-stigmatized alternatives if unwanted pregnancies do occur, and what is the result? Per-capita teen pregnancies in Norway were 11 per 100,000 (in 2011), and abortions 9.2 per 100,000 (in 2020). In the USA, where there is continued stigma for both despite abortion being legal, the rate was 17.4 per 100,000 (in 2018) and 14.4 per 100,000 abortions (in 2020), and those numbers had been going down in recent years.
The forced birth crowd insists that they’re all about saving lives and not about controlling women, but their “revealed preferences” are telling:
Can we have comprehensive sex education and make birth control easy to get and afford, which studies show reduces the number of abortions? Nope, those might encourage women to have sex!
Can we provide better medical care for pregnant women and recent mothers, which we know will make for healthier babies and make the prospect of having a child less daunting? Nope, that would be socialism, and we might have to raise taxes!
It’s interesting how many things are more important to them than preventing what they claim to believe is murder.
You’d think they would have devoted some effort to the science of removing these undeveloped beings, and incubating them until viability, if it really were about the precious baybeez, and not at all about controlling and punishing women. Their real motives lie clear for all to see.