At the birth of our nation, over 90% of our citizens were farmers, where "many hands made light work." In that context, neither practical nor moral arguments for abortion would find a persuasive moral footing. Large families provided more hands, as well as a social safety net and retirement program for parents.
By 1900, fewer than 40% of Americans were farmers. Today, fewer than 1% of Americans are farmers, and most of those just part-time. Extended families within easy driving distance are nearly extinct. More and more, people must fend for themselves, without a safety net of adequate social, financial and medical services.
The whole social context of family planning, birth control, and abortion has changed in the last 235 years. Today, pregnancy is a request, not a demand. Women have many eggs, and men make sperm by the millions: the fertilization of an egg by a sperm happens many more times than we wish. We can always breed, but should only do it when we are ready, willing and able to care and provide for our children. While a few kids out of a hundred thousand may make it out of the ghetto, those are unfair odds to pile on a parent, child, or society.
There is an image from September 11, 2001 that was burned into the memory of everyone who saw it: people, sometimes holding hands, jumping to their death from the Twin Towers, with no safety nets to catch them. It should be as heart-rending to see millions of children pushed out into a world that has no adequate safety nets for them either. And to enact laws whose intent is to force the most desperate women to bring babies into a home and a world that can't care for them is, if not evil, a brutality against the most vulnerable women and children in our society -- and profoundly immoral.
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