Like almost everyone, I would prefer that there were far fewer abortions. While this might seem like a problematic claim, it is obviously true. People who oppose abortion obviously want there to be fewer abortions. However, those who are pro-choice are not pro-abortion. That is, they do not want abortions to occur as they would prefer that women did not end up in situations where they see abortion as the best or only option.
While I do not fall into the pro-life camp in terms of political labelling, I do take a position in favor of life. To be specific, I prefer to avoid killing whenever possible and I accept that killing anything is an act of some moral significance. In some case, the ethics of killing are easy: I have no issue with killing bacteria if they are working hard to kill me and I accept the need to kill other living things to use them as food. Meat and salad are both murder.
In other cases, like abortion, the ethics are more complicated. After all, abortion involves killing a potential human being and this is clearly an act with great moral significance. Because I have a general opposition to killing, I have the obvious general opposition to abortion. However, I do accept that killing can be morally justified and believe this does apply to certain cases of abortion. As such, I favor reducing the number of abortions and support certain means of doing so. I do not, however, favor it being banned.
For those who follow abortion in American politics, the usual means of reducing abortions are aimed at making it harder for women to get abortions. Numerous states have passed laws requiring waiting periods and have imposed medically unwarranted restrictions on abortion clinics aimed at closing them. I am completely opposed to these means of reducing the number of abortions. While I have various reasons supporting my view, my main reason is that these approaches put the burden almost entirely on the woman. Roughly put, it is the woman who bears most of the cost of the moral and religious views of those who impose such restrictions. These costs can be extremely high and not only in terms of financial cost.
The moral foundation for my opposition to this method of reducing abortions is based on the fact that such imposition is unfair and the fact that this method imposes an extremely high cost on women and society. It is the wrong way to reduce the number of abortions. As such, I favor approaches that would reduce the number of abortions while distributing the cost more fairly and reducing the cost to women and society as a whole. To this end, I offer the following general proposals.
The first is doing what is required to reduce sexual violence against women as this would reduce the number of abortions and, rather importantly, make the world safer for women.
The second is to mandate effective and realistic sex education for the youth and make effective contraception readily accessible. If people have a better understanding of sex and have access to the means to prevent pregnancy, there will be fewer unwanted pregnancies and hence fewer abortions. This has other obvious benefits, although some people do oppose birth control for usually unexplained “religious” reasons.
The third is to provide greater social support for mothers and children. This would include such things as affordable day car for all working mothers, financial support for lower income mothers, and other support that would make raising a child less of a financial burden. This would reduce the number of abortions by making the choice to have the child more viable.
The third is to address the gender inequalities that burden women. These include wage inequality, the glass ceiling, and other such things that contribute to making it difficult for women to have a family and a career. This would lower the number of abortions by making being a woman and a mother less of a career handicap, thus giving women a greater opportunity to choose to continue an unplanned pregnancy.
There are, of course, some obvious objections against these proposals. The first is that doing so would require the use of public money. The “advantage” of the usual approaches is that they are initially free for the state and the cost is imposed upon the women. Such cost shifting is beloved by the morally shifty. As such, it comes down to the ethics of deciding who should bear the burden and cost. Being pro-life rather than anti-abortion, I hold that the cost should be shared and I am willing to pay a price for my principles rather than expecting others to bear that cost.
The second objection is that these approaches require some radical changes to society. Those who oppose fairness and prefer the “traditional” approach of oppressing and burdening women will find this problematic. However, they would be wrong about this and morally defending unfairness is rather challenging.
The third objection is that this approach will still allow abortions to occur as there is no proposal to impose new restrictions or ban abortion. My reply is that I do acknowledge that it would be preferable to have no abortions, just as it would be preferable to never have to harm anyone or anything ever. However, if it is accepted that a person’s interests can warrant harming another living being, then there are clear grounds for warranting abortion in many cases. As such, while I favor reducing the need for abortion, I cannot favor eliminating it, any more than I can support a total rejection of ever doing harm. I do, of course, recognize that such complete pacifism could be morally commendable and someone could consistently oppose all abortion if they embraced it.