The Rawls Report
Abortion 101: True pro-choice
Alec Rawls examines the lack of choice in "pro-choice" rhetoric
by Alec Rawls
Contributing Editor

Dozens of Stanford coeds will get pregnant this year. Most or all of them will have abortions. Why? In an age of supposed "choice" for women, why are almost all of the most educated young women choosing what most of them will regret for the rest of their lives?

Walk through it. There are many thousands of couples ready to raise a family, but who find themselves unable to make their own babies. They would gladly take the baby of a Stanford girl and raise it with all the love and care that the Stanford girl's own parents lavished on her. Now, look at your classmates. Your baby (whether you would be the mother or the father) could be him, or him, or her. As a gift to others, what could match this gift of life?

Then there are the benefits to self. Unless demographic trends suddenly alter drastically, a very substantial proportion of the women who have abortions in college will devote themselves to careers and not find themselves in a position to raise a family until they are into their thirties. Many of them, by this time, will have fertility problems. The previous generation is crammed full of women who had abortions, then never succeeded in having the families they hoped for.

Part of this is direct causality. The most important thing for reproductive health is to have a baby. For instance, about ten percent of American women will eventually develop the infertility causing condition called endometriosis, with most of these being women who delay childbearing, making the conditional probability for women who have abortions maybe one in five.

Endometriosis occurs when cells from inside the womb somehow migrate out. They continue to act as if they are in the womb, growing and shedding each month in accordance with a woman's hormonal cycle. Pregnancy transforms these cells to a benign condition and usually cures that episode of the disease. In effect, pregnancy resets the system with a clean bill of health.

Most important is moral and psychological wellbeing. Compare the following alternative stories. One woman advances in her career, wondering whether she will be able to have the family she wants, knowing that the child she gave up for adoption is five, ten, fifteen years old, loved, miserable, prospering. Another woman follows the same path, wondering if she'll succeed in creating a family, knowing some couple once wanted to raise her child but she chose to abort it instead. Which is the happier condition?

Look at you Stanford girls. You can take fifteen class units while doing research at the medical center, or playing a sport and doing volunteer work. You don't think you can have a baby? My sister had a baby at your age and never slowed down until she walked into the delivery room.

Ten years or fifteen years from now it will be hard to have a baby, especially a healthy baby, particularly if you haven't had one before. There will never be an easier or more convenient time in your life for you to have a baby than now. So why are almost no students carrying their pregnancies to term?

An obvious reason is the terrible influence of the anti-choice "pro-choice" movement. Take a close look at Planned Parenthood. It began as a population control group, with the explicit goal of lowering birth rates. Their slogan, "every child a wanted child," is a call for abortion whenever the birth mother is not able to raise the child. They refuse to acknowledge that an adopted child is a wanted child because that would go against their antipopulation ideology.

The cult of antipopulation was greatly inflated by Stanford's own Doctor Death, the Biology Department's insect professor Paul Ehrlich, a wildly successful quack who managed to convince three decades of America's and Europe's educated elite that reproduction is bad and they should have at most two children. His pitch is that people are destroying the Earth, with prosperous people being the worst, since they consume more than others. No one has ever been more fabulously or more tragically wrong.

For a given level of technology, yes, an increase in population would move us out along society's production function, causing diminishing returns to labor input. We would all get poorer, including in terms of the health of the environment. But technology is not constant. In particular, well raised children of intelligent parents are creating advances in science and technology that are raising society's production function at a terrific rate. (So, on average, are the worst raised children of the most ordinary parents.)

It is simply a fact that the marginal impact of childbearing, especially amongst the most educated, is to make us rapidly wealthier, including in terms of the health of the environment. Concern for the environment is a luxury good. The richer we get, the more priority we are able to give it. Wealth comes from innovation, and innovation comes from people. The best thing that most Stanford girls will ever have a chance to do for the environment is have a baby.

Since the economic and environmental underpinnings of our anti-choice "pro-choice" movement are utterly bogus, that just leaves the feminist ideology that childbearing is the great enemy of women. Wrong again. It is excellent for physical health. (Just eat right, or the baby will cannibalize your body.) And because it is good for the world it is good for a woman's mental health. It is a positive thing, which should free women to embrace their biological urge to reproduce.

There is nothing necessary or permanent about these calculations. If somehow people stopped wanting to adopt then having a baby you couldn't raise would become a much more ambiguous proposition. But in current circumstances, with a great many lovingly prepared empty nests, it is horribly perverse that almost all the pregnant Stanford girls are having abortions.

"Where did I come from mommy?" "A stork delivered you." No one wants to be a stork? Embrace your freedom of choice girls. Be the first in your class to walk around campus with a big belly. No need to worry about P. C. anti-choice peer pressure either. You'll be carrying the reason with you 24/7.

Page last modified on Thursday, 02-Mar-2006 00:25:13 MST.