Mr Puggsly said:
Right, people want babies. But there are tons of children waiting to be adopted. The situation would be even worse without abortions. |
I don't think there is any evidence to demonstrate that, or any reason why that would be true ...
While the general point of what Kasz said is true I believe the age he said that children become "damaged goods" is still very young; from my understanding interest in adopting children starts to decline at about 2 years old, but they do not really hit an age where it difficult/impossible to get adopted until they hit school age. It may not be nice to say but a lot of the fears about adopting older children are not unfounded.
A few years back I read an article discussing a paper from Jonathan Klick (University of Pennsylvania Law School) and Thomas Stratmann (George Mason University) that indicated that toughly laws relating to abortion results in less high-risk sexual behaviour resulting in lower pregnancy rates and lower incidents of STDs. The laws that were the base of the study involved requiring children to get the consent of their parents before having an abortion so it wasn't an outright ban, and yet there were significant changes in people's behaviours.
I could be wrong, but I suspect that if abortions were illegal most girls would be extremely careful about taking their birth-control pills and few men would be having pre-marital sex without a condom; essentially, people would behave as is suggested in many sexual education programs to prevent preganancy and STDs.
