A couple years back there was a great non-fiction book written about how Kansas morphed from an outpost of liberalism into arguably the most conservative state in the country (take out Utah, Arizona, Montana, and Alabama and it isn’t so arguable). It also covered how residents of Kansas routinely vote against their own economic interests in order to advance a socially conservative agenda. The book was appropriately called “What’s the Matter with Kansas?”
Well now we have to ask that question all over again as Kansas is on the threshold of becoming the first state without an abortion clinic. Last week the Kansas legislature–Republican dominated, as if I even needed to say it–passed strict new laws that basically denied two of the three abortion clinics in the Kansas area licenses to remain open. The only one to keep its doors open was a Planned Parenthood center and that’s until they can find new laws to shut it down.
Then we have the case of South Dakota which recently passed a law that says women thinking of having an abortion must first notify the center and then go to a Pregnancy Wellness Center and listen to “alternatives” to abortion (i.e. attempts to talk them out of it). All of this would be mandatory whether the woman wants to attend this or not. The Republican Governor said “It’s a great way to present the alternative options to abortion,” as if any woman who’s already at the door of a place like that hasn’t fully weighed, considered, and reevaluated each option a 1000 times. [The law has been overturned by federal courts but the state is appealing it.]
Then there’s the case of Indiana which…yawn, I’m sorry. I’m just getting kind of bored recapping all the different ways states have found to outdo themselves with crazy new abortion restrictions. Long story short: the GOP is in a contest to see which state can pass the craziest laws that would most effectively make getting an abortion in that state impossible.
The question is: What would that mean if they were successful? In a political sense it might be disastrous for the GOP longterm as–without abortion–they would essentially have no social issues to trick dirt farmers into voting against their own interests. And in a societal sense it could have unintended consequences not just economically (moving yet another industry underground just creates more work for an already overburdened police force and the exhausted government that provides their resources) but also morally.
Anyone who has read the the nonfiction book Freakonomics already knows where I’m going with this. In the book is a chapter devoted to how the legalization of abortion drastically lowered the violent crime rate two decades after it passed. At a time when every person in America was prognosticating an uptick in violent crime…it went down (and same for other countries two decades after they legalized abortion). The generation of kids that wasn’t born to parents that didn’t want them didn’t grow up to become murderers and rapists.
If you force a child to be born into this world that is unwanted and that child grows up to be a killer, are you responsible for the lives that killer takes? That’s a moral quandary rarely talked about in all the overheated “STOP Killing Babies!” lectures.
Another undiscussed moral side effect is the overcrowding of the planet. If we know that overcrowding is killing the planet, why are we trying to force even more people into this world? Instead of talking to people about the dangers of not using birth control, we’re scaring them silly about the dangers of having an abortion. So it basically amounts to a choice between those that could be alive or those that are already alive. The red states need to think long and hard before trying to start a domino effect that make it almost impossible to get an abortion in half the country.