At Townhall.com: Abortion’s Impact Is More Than Morality

May 21, 2019 | Featured

Dr. John Lott’s latest op-ed at Townhall is available here.

From Alabama’s new law restricting abortion to Virginia’s governor Ralph Northam (D) comments clearly condoning killing infants after birth, abortion is guaranteed to be a central part of next year’s election. The abortion debate usually centers only on the morality of the act (choice versus life). Morality surely is important, but abortion has the much wider impact.

Liberalizing abortion rules from 1969 to 1973 ignited vast long-term social changes in America. This discussion might finally provide a chance to evaluate how Roe v. Wade has changed the U.S.

One often misunderstood fact: Legal abortions didn’t start with Roe or even with the five states that liberalized abortion laws in 1969 and 1970. Prior to Roe, women could have had abortions when their lives or health were endangered.

Doctors in some surprising states, such as Kansas, had very liberal interpretations of what constituted danger to health; nevertheless, Roe did substantially increase abortions, more than doubling the rate per live birth in the five years from 1972 to 1977.

But many other changes occurred at the same time:

• A sharp increase in pre-marital sex.

• A sharp rise in out-of-wedlock births.

• A drop in the number of children placed for adoption.

• A decline in marriages that occur after the woman is pregnant.

Many of these changes might seem contradictory. Why would both the number of abortions and out-of-wedlock births go up? If there were more illegitimate births, why were fewer children available for adoption?

For the first puzzle, part of the answer lies in attitudes toward premarital sex. With abortion seen as a backup, women as well as men became less careful in using contraceptives as well as more likely to have premarital sex.

There were more unplanned pregnancies. But legal abortion did not mean every unplanned pregnancy led to abortion. After all, just because abortion is legal does not mean that the decision is an easy one.

Academic studies have found that legalized abortion, by encouraging premarital sex, increased the number of unplanned births, even outweighing the reduction in unplanned births due to abortion.

In the United States from the early 1970s, when abortion was liberalized, through the late 1980s, there was a tremendous increase in the rate of out-of-wedlock births, rising from an average of 5 percent of all births from 1965 to 1969 to more than 16 percent two decades later (1985 to 1989).

For blacks, the numbers soared from 35 percent to 62 percent. While not all of this rise can be attributed to liberalized abortion rules, it was a key contributing factor, nevertheless.

With legalization and a woman not forced to go through with an unplanned pregnancy, a man might well expect his partner to have an abortion if a sexual encounter were to result in an unplanned pregnancy.

But what happens if the woman refuses — say, she is morally opposed or, perhaps, she thought she could have an abortion but upon becoming pregnant decides she can’t go through with it?

Many men, feeling tricked into unwanted fatherhood, likely will wash their hands of the affair altogether, thinking, “I never wanted a baby. It’s her choice, so let her raise the baby herself.”

What is expected of men in this position has changed dramatically in the last four decades? Evidence shows that the greater availability of abortion largely ended “shotgun” marriages, where men felt obligated to marrying the women.

What has happened to these babies of reluctant fathers?

The mothers often raise the children on their own. Even as abortion has led to more out-of-wedlock births it has dramatically reduced adoptions of children born in America by two-parent families.

Before Roe, when abortion was much more difficult, women who would have chosen an abortion but were unable to get one turned to adoption as their backup. After Roe, women who turned down an abortion also were the type who wanted to keep the child. . . .

The rest of the piece is available here.

johnrlott

2 Comments

  1. Drake_Burrwood

    While I do not disagree with any thing you say.
    I would introduce the issue of deliberate federal and legislative targeting of “black” cultural vice, with felony conviction.. to “break” black power.
    As an issue with “broken” black families.

    It is easier to remove bellbottoms then skin.

  2. Tom Campbell

    Many of these social changes were underway well before RvW. One should measure the changes from at least the LBJ “Great Society” expansions of the welfare-redistributionist state, if not to post WW2 times.
    We know what life was like before RvW made it tougher for states to ban abortions. What RvW might have done is create an environment where abortions could be performed in more often correct circumstances that preserved the woman’s health and ability to have children in the future.
    It isn’t abortions that incentivized the manless domestic situations: it was welfare. Such allowed women to have children but not have in the home the man/men who donated the respective sperm supplies. Likewise men could knock up a woman and scoot, knowing she’d rely on the taxpayer to make it all work.

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