In countries with universal healthcare contraception is supported and the norm, resulting in less abortions and making abortion a non issue. I suspect that in the US contraception is a bit dearer and a bit harder therefore there are enough abortions in the US to make it an issue.
Does that sound like bullshit?
It {US abortion rate} is actually only around half of Europe's abortion rate.
https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/induced-abortion-worldwide
So no, it is not a simple one dimensional supply and demand issue, more contraception=>fewer abortions=>less controversy. I believe if lower US incidence is a fact and not a matter of underreporting, as I suppose it probably must be, then this does not reflect fewer problematic pregnancies, not at all--if anyone has independent statistics on that they would be most welcome of course.
Clearly "problematic" pregnancies is a much more subjective category though it can be correlated with objective facts--families in economic crisis, child abuse and neglect, kids in foster care (dunno how Europeans handle that but the US system is pretty hair-raising, I live with a fellow who was raised in foster care, his stories are pretty horrible), medical issues arising from pregnancies where (given the sociological facts on the ground, of stresses on the mother--certainly Cuomo or RFK welfare reforms for the born would help address this but see below--I'm talking here about crisis pregnancies where the crisis arises from the rotten conditions our society puts so many people in, which definitely can feed back on what a pregnancy does to a woman bearing it).
But I think the bottom line here, stipulating an American woman is half as likely on average to abort a pregnancy as one in Europe, is a lot more gray to flashing red alert crisis pregnancies being carried to term, and that American women are more likely, not less, to become pregnant for a given degree of sexual activity, due to both greater difficulty in obtaining BC (bear in mind people opposing access to abortion also oppose many forms of BC, because it is not a medical issue for them but one of moralism--the goal, whether clearly realized or obscured by subjectively sincere but logically inconsistent convictions, is to renormalize a puritanical standard of sexual behavior as something formal government has an obligation to enforce--which does not automatically translate into that norm being actually normal, just to the law having heavy sticks to beat people, women mainly, with, when actual behavior is often diametrically opposed to the "norm," such perverse outcomes are part of how such ostensibly restrictive societies have actually operated because it relates to power, not to welfare outcomes. The more puritanical restrictions there are, the more social privilege is effective--if we had zero moral concerns about birth control, sex is something poor and rich could do alike, with the restrictions, wealth can always purchase discretion, and discretion is at the option of those with the wealth or other forms of power.
The very topic of this thread underscores how there is a disjunction between the singling out of abortion as a moral issue, and tied to it for many "moralists" the dubious status of all birth control methods, and a general concern for human welfare across the board. A profound and consistent regard for "sanctity of human life" most certainly should have made more consistent and comprehensive social welfare programs across the board a much higher priority than actual US historical outcomes have been.
There are very few restrictions on abortion in the US.
there's a time limit on it, unless the health of the mother is in danger... first trimester?
Not mentioned in the least in this interchange is the
geographic restriction. Legally speaking,
Roe v Wade tied the hands of the states in formal restriction though judges have been chipping away at it at least since the mid-1980s and it was in the 1970s that the Hyde amendment banning Federal Medicaid funds for abortion was passed in Congress. Medicaid is a largely Federally funded program that is under strong state control. States under the control of factions seeking to restrict abortion have some latitude therefore...
But the main thing here is that groups who seek to stop abortions across the board can lobby effectively with basically NIMBY ("not in my back yard!") leverage to shut down actual presence of clinics actually providing abortion in a particular neighborhood. For people who live in diverse, large urban areas, this is an inconvenience--but for others who live many hundreds of miles away from the nearest clinic, it goes from being a minor limit to quite major. The more indulgent of hard line anti-abortion views the courts get, the more this escalates from being a strictly economic burden (a woman must not only pay for the procedure, but pay to travel to and from the place where she can get it, including any recuperation time where driving or riding a bus hundreds of miles would be a medically bad idea, but also take the time required off from work and/or child care for her existing children--part of the mythology of abortion as something only "bad" women do is that in reality many women who abort some pregnancies either have already or intend to have in the future children they do or hope to raise, and a major reason some pregnancies are problematic is the difficulty of taking on yet another child with no adequate supports) to become a legal one--states can seek to criminalize crossing state lines to seek abortion for instance. Whether a state can do that or not is a matter of legal outcomes in court of course, but the way that works is the state can pass any law it pleases, and then someone has to take it to court after application of the law creates a real issue for someone. In an era where the courts take a dim view of abortion restrictions, no sane legislature would pass such a law, but in one where re-criminalization seems to be in the cards, we might well anticipate a state or three trying it. If the state cannot meanwhile actually ban abortion within its own limits but in fact anti-abortion activity has shut down practical access, such laws would have sharp teeth indeed. They can't categorically penalize a woman proven to have crossed out of the state to have an abortion for abortion as such, but they can create Catch-22 hoops for her to jump through and penalize her for evading such hoops.
We can't get too specific about how things have evolved since the POD of this thread OTL, but the general statistics about actual US overall rates actually do, broadly speaking over the whole country and generalized over the whole half century or so, do relate to many layers of effective restriction existing. Even discounting the subjective ones of women who are pregnant being persuaded it is their individual moral duty to take on the burdens of a basically unwanted and problematic pregnancy, this leaves many quite effective barriers posed by people who seek to limit the options of other people who don't agree with their restrictive demands, but have little practical recourse but to be tied by them anyway.
I think the upshot of statistics is that more American women than European are having babies that burden them more, and have fewer supports to help them, and do so because their arms are being twisted in effect. We should bear in mind not all the sexual activity that results in women becoming pregnant is simply pleasure seeking on their parts--to maintain a marriage for instance, a woman might have to have more sex with her husband than she deems wise from a shrewd family planning angle, but if she also believes birth control tech, any approach other than abstinence, is a sin too, or if she is willing to either sin in this respect or doesn't have moral qualms of her own, but her husband refuses to be bothered with a condom or even seeks to forbid her from using other means either, then she is kind of stuck. Especially if American society tends to make her more dependent on her husband than a comprehensive welfare state or compassionate, less "traditional" sectarian-based charity system would leave her in. Such women do in fact comprise a fair share of the women "abusing" abortion as birth control.
Therefore a 12 weeks limit might sound restrictive but in practice would legally allow the immense majority of abortions, especially as it would presumably allow various crisis abortions past that - which again covers a huge majority of 'late' abortions.
This ignores that in actual practice, in the 1990s, restricted from seeking to ban abortions across the board, the Republicans in the post-1994 election surge of power for them did seek to effectively ban what would be considered "crisis" abortions in the strictest medical sense. In the atmosphere of highly charged abusive language castigating late-term abortion providers, without any nuanced discussion of the fact that indeed the vast majority of such abortions actually sought were for severe medical crisis reasons, and showboating legislation against practices that I have yet to see any evidence were normal or common, at least one such provider was assassinated, gunned down on the doorstep of the church he served in many roles. Such providers actually provide grief counseling for the women they serve, because such women overwhelmingly can and do regard their now-doomed pregnancies as carrying a wanted child, whose death they do mourn. (And this seems reasonable and proper to me, if there is any mistake about this--she chose to attempt to bear this child, and that makes it human to me, morally and if I had my way, legally, based on this choice entirely). But this hardly stopped the forces mustered to restrict abortion from demonizing the providers of these medically required services, and the alternative is to doom women entering such medically dangerous pregnancy stages to either major medical trauma, perhaps preventing them from ever being able to bear another child, or actual death. But the effect of the political demonization was to discourage private actors from offering legal abortion services, across the board, and especially such medically challenging late term cases. With some providers being killed outright (attacks on abortion providers are actually a major share of US domestic terrorism) and many more dissuaded from seeking careers in such procedures, access to what is technically legal is again effectively restricted.
The main problem the European Welfare system faces in the following years is: Can it be sustainable?
Again, speaking very very generally about the time period between the decades when the general swing in the USA and other countries was toward legalizing abortion and the turn of the tide to making the controversy between people defending a more permissive status quo and those seeking to re-impose heavy restrictions up to and including outright banning, in this past generation overall gross global and to a lesser percentage but great absolute magnitude, wealth has grown tremendously. But the share of wealth enjoyed by the vast majority of populations, at least in the developed world, has been quite stagnant. So the alleged dilemmas of developed nations fussing over "how ever shall we pay?" ignores the vast elephant in the room of most wealth going to a very small class of people who have been paying, relatively, less and less and less with every passing decade, while gaining a society more and more obsessively governed with their interests made more and more paramount. This is the basic nature of the general "austerity" crisis. Socialism for the rich, free enterprise for the poor!
The money is there, in abundance. It is a question of getting the people who have it, in truckload quantities, to share some of it, on the theory that their great wealth and power stem from the welfare of the society supporting them. Entirely political.
We can only speculate on what might have happened had, around 1980 or so, European and US society alike had gone more social democratic, not less so. Would that in fact have killed the goose laying the golden eggs, or might the overall wealth creation have been pretty much the same? Or if less, might not the per capita shares effectively available for the bottom 95 or 99 percent of the population have been substantially more anyway, or are we doomed to absolute plutocracy as the predictable and inevitable end of history?
But given the vast magnitude of the wealth actually created, versus the tremendous degree of its concentration IMHO we have lots of margin for far better human welfare outcomes for common people, without unduly strangling the worthwhile incentives of more or less honest capitalism. It is not a question in my view of capitalists being unable to pay a larger burden, it is one of their not wanting to and, given the power our systems give them, in every sphere, not having to. And apparently not feeling much of either a moral or politically shrewd obligation to pay for what they don't strictly have to.
Some businesses do benefit from a higher birthrate but the ideal outcome for them is if someone else's employees are the ones having children.
Case in point! It's NIMBYism for the powerful all the way down. "
Somebody has to bear this burden, but why the heck should it be
me when I can shift it to some other Charlie?" This, I perhaps naively think, is why any sensible model of society with any claims to moral legitimacy that also bases itself on private property in the means of production bloody well has to be governed as a
democratic republic, and the rich collectively should accept majority rule
in the interest of welfare of the majority as their moral obligation. The democratic elements, in the context of rule of law by due process with courts charged to seek justice, shall hash out the question of fair burden sharing. Markets do not in fact automatically shift burdens either fairly or sustainably, and require some form of regulation to make the system even sustainable, never mind fair. It is a question of who governs. Who shall watch the watchers? Only the people
as a whole can do so.
Best POD would be something to prevent the 1970s malaise.
In other words, abolish capitalism?
Check it out; economic cycles are a fundamental, inherent part of how private property centered market economies work.
Any degree of technocratic fiddling around with variables that does not become tantamount to some kind of democratically governed socialism will remain subject to major crashes and stagnations. Any approach governed by focusing on the general welfare outcomes, rather than regarding property rights as sacrosanct, will intervene with corrective rerouting of wealth flows to such a degree it is tantamount in practice to democratic socialism, and thus at some point raise the ideological question of "shall we not simply abolish private property in the means of production and be done with it?" as purely rhetorical, with an obvious answer of "of course!"
Falling between the stools was exactly the Great Compromise of the period between the end of the Second World War and the onset of the great global Stagflation Crisis of the 1970s. "Let's have a system based on robust capitalism but regulate it with acceptably general and twiddling marginal means that the system runs smoothly, creating opportunity for all on a fair competitive basis, leaving private actors free to innovate and earn their profits that way, sensibly regulating externalities to smooth the way and for fairness!" And broadly speaking it seemed to deliver, massively, giving really good general welfare outcomes for most and real hope of eventual incremental addressing all remaining rough spots. This was the future people writing in the 1960s expected, gradual increases in general welfare but not to a degree "overburdening" the heroes of capital.
In retrospect, it seemed to work well because part of the cyclic nature of capitalism involves long periods of general boom as well as other long periods of general stagnation, with the basic decade-period business cycle modulated by these. For deep, systemic global reasons there was great growth potential between 1945 and 1970, and the liberal consensus (modulated politically by the Anti-Communist Crusade, this was probably quite important to it being politically possible) held as an apparent success story.
All the technocratic tools of the peripheral manipulations that appeared to work fine in that period broke down in face of stagflation, however, which I think was clearly due to the expansive potentials being exhausted. To go forward from there, one needed to dig deeper into the nature of the crisis, and face much starker political and even moral questions, as to "for whom shall the global economy be optimized, and how?"
The pragmatic answer to the '70s crisis arrived at in the late '70s and early '80s was in fact Thatcher-Reaganite neoliberalism, and turning precisely against various epicyclic interventions in the basic capitalist structure as strong labor unions and high wages generally and welfare "safety nets" as the alleged cause of the crisis and thus dysfunctional. The Reagan Revolution was an all out attack on welfarism as such, and a sermon in favor of reliance on the "magic of the marketplace," whatever that sorcery might bring being deemed the best and rightest outcome possible. It took time to unravel the social consensus in favor of peripheral welfarism of course, and indeed the process is still ongoing today, with many people still holding back from the obvious pit of the plainly visible consequences of going all in on radical propertarianism--therefore propertarians in contrast can insist our current ills are because we have yet to take all our medicine and truly straighten up and fly right.
No easy, incremental, consensus answer to stagflation existed in the late 1970s. Only some sort of ATL radical divergence could account for a soft landing and recovery on any other basis but the Reagan Revolution. I'm all for that, and suspect it might have been in the cards, with say George McGovern being elected in '72 perhaps--if and only if a McGovern Presidency, or any other POD you like (Humphrey winning in '68, which came quite close to happening) or Vietnam being contained (very hard to do, given the anti-Communist crusade, and the independence of Vietnamese Minhists doing as they pleased as tails wagging the Moscow-Beijing dogs--nobody had the power to pull the plug on the crisis without compromising their political legitimacy)--had been able to then follow through with the logic of governing in the general interest of grassroots welfare rather than the interest of the holders of the vast (already, before the spiraling further consolidation of the past generations) concentration of wealth sustaining step by step this, that and the other specific reform and adjustment which I believe would, if politically sustainable against the displeasure of the most powerful on the boiling frog principle, have resulted sooner or later into more coherently socialist institutions of some kind.
Then of course the extended welfare is not some option that might seem more affordable, but the core of the whole ATL system.
I think I see what you’re saying. Most elective abortions happen under 13 weeks anyway. And for after this period, there are health exceptions. So, more ‘restrictions’ in name only.
What laws would you like to see?
And until such laws are achieved, which realistically could be quite a while, what type of policies would you want to see to reduce the incidence of abortion?
And for our purposes here at AH, which national Democrats and/or traditional Democratic voters, obviously northeast and Midwest Catholic voters from the mid-1970s forward being a big one, might effectively push for such changes. I mean, when Catholic voters have a block of even 30% of all Democratic votes in an area, that is a force to be reckoned with. And that’s probably not going to be the case in many areas of the south and west. So, who else within the Democratic coalition might push for different policy? Okay, evangelical votes, even though they were a little late to the issue, at least as compared to Catholics. But who else?
As observed up thread, a majority of Roman Catholic voters themselves acknowledge a need for restricted but legal abortion. As someone raised in a household among the minority of Catholics who took a very hard, sweeping comprehensive line against this, with my grammar and middle school years and most high school all spang in the 1970s, receiving first Communion the very same year
Roe v Wade was ruled on, I know somewhat of what I speak of when I say that the controversy about abortion does not fundamentally stem in the least from its magnitude, but rather from it being deemed something a woman can elect or not on her own personal say-so
to any degree whatsoever. It is framed as an absolute moral evil, unless specially justified by specific circumstances, and the principles at stake among opponents to elective abortion demand as well that any judgement on special circumstances must be in the hands of allegedly neutral third parties, definitely not the woman in question.
Prior to Roe, very very few people except hard line Catholics like my parents were deeply concerned about abortion as the kind of moral issue Catholic doctrine frames it as--murder of a child. They often might have, especially prior to the general crisis for women seeking practical abortions that settled on them in the later '40s and 1950s when medical practice tended to centralize in hospitals whose governance anti-abortion activists could get control of to comprehensively shut down de facto abortion on demand, previously available via peripheral clinics that were being systematically shut down as alternatives to the hospitals, have on the whole been opposed, but on grounds of sexual morality, not as a matter of homicide. Framing it as homicide, and having that evaluation accepted as "self-evident" by lots of people who were not Catholic, was a very political transformation undertaken as part of the general reaction against the failing liberal consensus of the postwar period across the board.
Once framed that way, the level of controversy is clearly a matter of moral absolutes, with magnitude just a footnote. It certainly is a salient footnote! Some fairly "liberal" as we Americans say guys I lived with in a House at Caltech, the hippy house as it happened, on this pretty conservative (not generally fundamentalist, but more corporatist, among undergrads) campus in the mid'80s, were discussing this sometimes, and they were quite appalled at the sheer number of
legal abortions reported. To discuss how I resolved this moral issue myself would take us astray from topic, I have alluded to the core of it (respect a woman's choice either way, so that a
wanted pregnancy should be regarded as her carrying a new human life uncompromisingly) but it took me further years and takes us farther from the POD period.
At that time, I myself was in fact in a dilemma. I had already acquired weighty grounds, as I judged it, to believe my upbringing affirming every developing fetus was in fact morally fully human, and therefore abortion could only possibly be judged permissible for the sake of saving the mother from a severe, grave medical crisis only (indeed it was to Catholic, clerical in fact, ethicist writers of papers on the subject I had read back in the 1970s that I was indebted for even thinking of the possibility medical necessity for abortion might ever be necessary in the first place)--no rape or incest exceptions had any moral logic to them, unless one could spin those as "medical" somehow--were flawed and fishy, but putting my feet on a more sensible place to stand was still in the future for me. So, while I no longer really considered myself a believing Catholic at all by that point, I certainly was in the same general place as millions, the majority in fact, of American Roman Catholics, who broadly more or less accepted pregnancies should not be terminated lightly, and probably there is a new human immortal soul at stake, but for reasons they had trouble articulating for fear being accused of being moral monsters, judged that nevertheless, if this in fact be sin, it should still not be the business of the Federal and state US governments to stand in the way of a woman who chose to take this action in practice. Life experience I believe underlay and today underlies Catholic and other believers' dissents from the magisterial rulings of their supposed moral guides.
Quite clearly, for a Catholic seeking moral clarity, especially one thinking mainly in terms of the general example of the Gospels as the general thrust of what our elaborated institutions should be facilitating in the world ("the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath," says Jesus after all--even my very conservative father, preparing as a Lector for a Mass and for a discussion after Mass, jotted a note on the story of Jesus confronting the men about to stone a woman "taken in adultery" per the Law, "let he among you who is without sin cast the first stone"--my father wrote "what about the man taken in the same adultery?") would have to accept that if we seek to deny abortion to every woman who is not in dire and objective medical crisis due to a pregnancy gone medically wrong, we absolutely must do a lot better in terms of general welfare. That was open and shut. And Catholic ethics most certainly do, while acknowledging the world is a fallen Vale of Tears where many moral evils exist, and our ultimate salvation is only possibly the work of God's mercy and grace, the clear moral duty of all mortals is to do as much good as they can, so if institutional means can remedy material evils, such institutions should exist and be supported, and griping about the cost is a matter of at best technically fussing with optimizing them, and fundamentally shirking a fair share of this burden is itself sinful. Humans owe each other corporal works of mercy.
So the question of "why then did so many Catholics swing to Reaganism" comes down to at least in part, ideological judgements about how best to achieve suitable material welfare in practice. Catholic teachings also take a restricted but firm line on the legitimacy and even necessity of private property, of the fundamental right of people to retain what legitimately belongs to them, and on the private family as the foundation of all society.
The fight then is fundamentally not just about abortion, but the fundamental questions of what is the proper legitimate basis of society across the board. A sweeping prohibition of all elective abortion, permitting it only for medical necessity in the judgement of experts, is inherently enforcing differential roles for men and women in human society as fundamental--and in the context of Christians or other theists, as this being instituted by God. I would go a lot further and have elsewhere in appropriate fora, and argue there is a fundamental clash between the values of democratic, egalitarian society and a basically authoritarian world view going on here, and that many people (of many denominations, and also atheists on both sides of this question, I just happen to come from the Catholic form of it) resolve it in an equivocal pragmatic manner and give themselves room to lean either way depending on circumstances.
Mario Cuomo then, would in his speech, and would if successful in forming a Catholic-general non Catholic moderate moralist alliance, where as some Catholic social justice advocates have put it "the other shoe drops" and it is a balance between demanding some social restoration of "traditional morality" but with a generous quid pro quo of massive and much needed public welfare across the board, would in fact be advocating a "radical middle" position that I fear wouls lack a deep bedrock coherence.
Indeed one could base a Christian Social Democracy on the Catholic Catechism and while it forbid certain Marxist approaches, would also be a strong rebuke of Thatcher-Reaganite neoliberalism which I think, from such a bedrock and forthrightly theocratic position, would properly be condemned as essentially institutionalizing the pagan worship of Mammon. Just about literally!
I absolutely disbelieve such a movement, deeply forthright in its adherence to the Catechism, would have long political legs in the USA, or in Europe. I know European Christian Democratic parties purport to be precisely about this, but in practice they come down on different positions. Anyway in the context of US secularism, while persons are free to vote for parties organized on any principles whatsoever, any legislation emerging with a such a party in a major role in the authoring and ratifying coalition would be under very very strict and suspicious scrutiny indeed. Whereas the plausible deniability of ostensibly secular parties give people wiggle room to contradict the Catechism wherever they judge it necessary--as with those 56 more or less percent Catholic voters from that day to this supporting politicians who do
not seek to criminalize and restrict abortion. Just as much, when they vote for parties seeking to slash the welfare state back, they are also turning against their canon.
And in the real world, the opposite of the implicit full agenda of the ATL response to Cuomo calling for moral voters to proceed on both feet--to reject both the slaughter of the innocents he believed as a Catholic was happening with legal abortion on the scale actually practiced, and the sacrifice of born and unborn alike in the furnaces of Mammon as misery for many followed the profits of a few--is what people actually wound up voting for. Preserving at least technically legal if not practically available for millions access to legal abortion, few questions asked, while also letting the neoliberal market philosophy have essentially free rein.
People were perfectly capable of listening to Cuomo, and Pope John Paul II, and Dennis Kucinich, and the Kennedys, and a long list of other prominent US Catholic politicians and other Catholic moral leaders. To get them to actually line up with the Catechism better--we need one heck of a robust POD indeed.
