With all due respect, this is poppycock. The “positive outcome”, as you so flippantly put it, of not aborting a pregnancy is the simple fact that the child is not killed! For goodness sake – life and a chance at doing good and participating in humanity is worth the risk of poverty and suffering. Christ Himself became human, lived in poverty, and suffered; can it really be all that bad?
Have we sunk so low that the lives of the most helpless among us are subject to statistical value judgments?
Life. LIFE, my friend.
Peace,
Dante
Well,
Billy Beane did exactly that during his tenure as the general manager of the Oakland Athletics; so do mortgage brokers as I discussed in post 74.
I will take the liberty of parsing my posts in this thread and consolidate them into this post:
I simply do not think that it is a great victory when the pro-life movement saves a few lives from the decision of a pregnant mother to terminate her pregnancy. To me, there is no triumph in that victory because after that, it would mean that the newborn has to face the prospects of life. In many cases, this would mean the newborn would be raised in material deprivation and face further adversity. In some cases, a few of these newborns would overcome that situation through luck, either through a combination of inheriting a socially valuable genotype that endows them with profound intellectual or athletic talent and other coincidences such as wining the lottery. But it is obvious that not all newborns would be that lucky, and the prospects for many is a grim and brutal life with few meliorative factors.
This is not a moral prescription requiring that a fetus should be aborted ; I merely said that saving the life of a fetus should not be considered a triumphant moral victory. Saving the life of a fetus, to me, does not seem to be an indicator of progress, since there would be potential difficulties that the child would encounter as it matures.
Pro-life activists typically emphasize the positive outcomes of the potential of the lives that would be saved as a consequence of their pro-life activism while ignoring the negative outcomes. Besides limited support for mothers after their baby is born, they do not seem to have any concern for mitigating any negative outcomes that would inevitably occur throughout the lives of the infants as they mature. As one could see, the struggle does not end when the fetus is carried to term, resulting in a successful pregnancy, but it is merely the beginning.
The probability distribution of outcomes of an individual life saved through pro-life activism or anti-abortion policies has large variance. For example, on the positive tail end of this distribution, it is possible that an infant saved by pro-life activism today would throw a complete game shutout in the first game of the 2035 World Series and have a multimillion dollar contract. A more probable outcome on the negative side would be that the infant would not have the intellectual capacity to complete secondary education and as a consequence that person would be unable to acquire the human capital that is valued in the job market. That person would need the perpetual assistance of benefactors, such as private charities, the state, or some combination of the two, beyond the services provide by a crisis pregnancy center in order to provide the material and financial resources to make ends meet. He/she would not seem to have any prospects for a decent life since he/she would likely be mired in poverty trapped in a world of despair and despondency while suffering the humiliating indignity of receiving private charity for subsistence.
I most certainly do not recommend using the financial statements of pregnant women or their IQs to render a judgment whether her fetus should be carried to term or aborted. I only mentioned the heritability of intelligence not to recommend eugenic policies, but to point out that the outcomes of the infants saved from abortion are not entirely within the volition of the children themselves or their parents. Those who are the unlucky recipients of a disadvantageous genetic endowment would be unable to surmount adversity simply because they lack the capacity regardless of the opportunities presented to them or the amount of determination they possess.
The first part of a potential remedy is to acknowledge that it is inevitable that some would suffer difficult conditions and adversity that would prevent them from living dignified lives. Once the problem has been acknowledge, measures and policies can be enacted to attenuate and reduce the negative variance of the possible outcomes. The nature of this suggestion is inherently egalitarian because reducing the negative variance of outcomes would mean reducing overall variance,
ceteris paribus, hence a more equal distribution of outcomes. If the means for accomplishing this would including reducing the positive variance through redistribution, then it would further reduce the variance in outcomes. The pro-life movement does not take this into consideration at all.
