Yes, I remember that. “Every child a wanted child.” I just wondered how do you determine “wanted?” The next logical step is, do you just kill any innocent human you don’t want around in your life?
This has such powerful ramifications. We’re at opposite poles from the abortion enablers - “love every child first, and let them be born” versus “birth the child if it is wanted”. We speak to parents, they speak to people who aren’t sure if they want to be parents. As has been mentioned before, we cannot hope to resolve this without a cultural shift. Consider that, by some estimates at least, 90% of babies with Down’s Syndrome are aborted. That’s an astonishing number, and heartless. Yes, it is difficult to raise any child, much less a child with lifelong disabilities, but the loving choice is to care for the weak and the disabled, not kill them. We’re in Huxley’s territory here, a eugenically-preferred “Brave New World”.
You’d think, with the ready availability of contraception - and at no charge now - abortion would plummet into statistically trivial rates. While abortion rates (variously defined) have decreased some in recent years, and substantially since the mid-1970s (when the abortion industry had time to respond to
Roe by increasing capacity), they have by no means diminished into an insignificant volume.
I suspect that contraception and abortion are trade-offs but only to a point, ie contraception helps prevent unwanted pregnancies, but it also means that there are longer periods during which a woman is fertile and, given sufficient time, likely to conceive unintentionally. This is why abortion rates have only declined so far, perhaps they will level out and we will continually have this group that, despite education, free contraception, etc, will still want to have abortions.
Will we see abortion rates decline if more women opt for sterilization after they’ve hit their desired family size? Sterilization is now covered under the decreasingly-accurately-named Affordable Care Act. Or will Planned Parenthood control the message - “Keep your options open” rather than “Done having a family? We’ll make sure you never have to worry about birth control again.” I think they may be reluctant to push the latter, even among older women, since it means PP loses customers.
The sum-total of this is a country less open to children, with women rendering themselves infertile - either chemically or sugically - and abortion not seen as a problem but a right to be proud of. How can we call ourselves a good society that takes care of the weak and sick when we don’t allow the weak and the sick to be born?
