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At 10:00 a.m. on January 22,1973, the United States Supreme Court announced that the Texas abortion law was unconstitutional. The Court also declared the Georgia abortion law unacceptable. The vote was seven to two, with Burger, Blackmun, Powell, Stewart, Brennan, Douglas, and Marshall in the majority. Rehnquist and White opposed the decision. Abortion throughout the nation had been declared legal. Abortion laws in thirty-one states, including Texas, were overturned. Fifteen states, including Georgia, would have to rewrite their more liberal laws. Three other states, Hawaii, Washington, and Alaska-where rigid abortion laws had been repealed-had residency requirements or other limits that would have to be eliminated. Only the New York law, which allowed abortion without restrictions, was unaffected by the decision (Gold69). At first thought, abortion may not appear to have any involvement in economics. But, economics and abortion are, in fact, deeply intertwined. Studies of abortion show that financial hardship is the reason most often cited by women seeking abortions. Lack of money is rarely the only reason a woman seeks an abortion. Most women do so for a complex set of reasons, but money is frequently the paramount factor, the one that tips the scales in favor of abortion. This is especially true for low-income families and single women. The abortion rights movement has since its earliest days argued that poverty is one of the most compelling reasons why women must have access to safe, legal abortion, so that women who cannot afford a child will not be forced to have one (McDonnell 71). The only possible problem with this argument is if a woman seeks to end a pregnancy for reasons other than financial ones. If poverty is the reason a woman is terminating a pregnancy, if in fact wants the child but cannot afford to have it, she is actually being coerced into an abortion. She does not, in fact, have a choice at all. For many women, this is precisely their perception of the situation: they go to abortion counselors saying that they "have no choice," they "have to" have an abortion. In some hard pressed communities in Canada the economic ups and downs are clearly reflected in the volume of abortion referrals: counselors in Sudbury, Ontario, for example, reported a sharp rise in the number of women seeking abortions immediately after the massive layoffs in the nickel industry in 1978. Without legalized abortion, the economy itself would suffer. The constraints on choice are not a matter of economics alone, but reflect a far deeper bias against parenting. Modern industrial society has isolated the childbearing role within the nuclear family. When people become parents in our society, they are expected to take on enormous financial, emotional, and physical burden, and to do so essentially alone. They are essentially given the message that they are on their own, that they must not expect to take care of them (McDonnell 72). This causes new parents to drop everything currently being done in their lives, including their jobs. This causes a decline in the work force, which leads to a decline in the economic prosperity of a country (McDonnell 73). Another economic tie with abortion is population control. Statistics can be quoted to show that the population is increasing in various parts of the world, but the controversial issue is whether the available resources can sustain the increase (Kenyon211). Governmentally, restrictions on abortion necessarily violate fundamental human and constitutional liberties. This was the basic idea behind the Roe V Wade decision: “The right of privacy…encompasses a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.” Also, there is no way to determine whether or not the fetus is a “person.” Reading the Constitution would lead one to believe that the fetus is never a person. Legalized abortion should be upheld economically because overall it helps maintain the economy of the country and its population, and governmentally based on the main ideas behind the decision in the Supreme Court Case Roe Versus Wade. Legalized abortion, in many ways, helps to lift the financial burden off of low-income families and single women. First of all, forcing a woman to have an unwanted pregnancy causes a heavy burden on the mother and all of her family. Raising a child requires countless hours of the mother's undivided attention. This makes it almost impossible for a single mother to retain any job she may have. The mother's resources for income immediately become limited and the expenses of the child become too much too handle. If the mother had a chance to abort her pregnancy, she could have avoided all of the stress of raising the child. The lack of income would probably lead to the mother going on welfare. The cost of welfare is not worth keeping abortion illegal. Another situation that can be avoided by legalized abortion is unwanted pregnancies in families that already have enough children. In many cases, low-income families that already have two or three children simply cannot afford to have any more children. Legalized abortion helps these struggling families to avoid being financially wiped out. It should be a family’s private decision whether or not they abort a pregnancy (McKeegan114). One of the most notable economical issues involving abortion is the Hyde amendment. Most centrally, this amendment cut off Medicaid funding for abortions, but not for childbirth. This amendment caused many arguments from pro-choice backers. First, the bills' opponents insisted that the measure would force poor women into illegal abortions, which would result in carnage. Second, they protested that the measure was discriminatory and violated the equal protection clause, because it prevented poor women from enjoying a constitutional right to abortion while allowing affluent women to do so. Third, they stressed that various social costs of the limitation, including the economics of supporting welfare instead of abortion, and the costs in human suffering of unwanted children and unwanting teenage mothers. Finally, they addressed the procedural impropriety of using a funding rider in this manner and, early on, of flaunting the courts. The third point gives the best view of the economic advantages of legalized abortion. It is better to federally fund abortion rather than to fund welfare for the rest of the unwanted child's life (Condit, 189). Despite the efforts of a decade and a half of women's liberation, women are still expected to do the real work of parenting, to sacrifice their own work goals, their own personal needs, when they become mothers. Women are still being forced to choose between mother- hood and person-hood, between having children and being full participants in the larger society. Like poor women pondering abortion they do not have much of a choice. For society today is still pro-natalist, in the sense that it encourages childbearing by women and families as a social norm, it is paradoxically anti-natalist in that it robs both men and women of real dignity, support and joy in the performances of the work of parenting. In this context, many women may well be choosing abortion not because they do not want children, but because their prospects as mothers are so bleak in society. As Vicki Van Wagner, a Toronto midwife and childbirth educator puts it: In unchosen pregnancies, women may deeply regret that they are not in a situation which would allow them to raise a child... for many women it is not clear that they don't want a child, it is clear only that they cannot raise a child in the situation society puts women in. The lack of support for parenting manifests itself in a variety of other ways. Pregnant women are still expected to quit high-visibility jobs such as waitressing as soon as their pregnancy becomes obvious. There is a lack of high quality, affordable childcare in this country. The idea of fathers staying home with children is still considered little more than a joke. Single women are almost assured of living in poverty if they become mothers. With all of this opposition against women working after they become mothers, many women are forced to quit working. With many women leaving the work force, the economy suffers. With legalized abortion many women may not be forced to leave their jobs. The economy will prosper (Chilton 84). One of the most contentious matters in abortion is the definition of over population, which is not as simple as it may appear at first sight. Again, statistics show that the population is steadily increasing in various parts of the world, but the issue is whether or not the available resources can sustain the increase. Some would argue that there is plenty of food in the world and that it could be made available with the aid of modern technology- the fault lies in its utilization. The neo-Malthusian argument has been introduced into the debate. T.R. Malthus (1766-1834) was a British economist who believed that any attempts to raise the living standards of the poorest sections of the community were bound to fail because this would lead to a population increase, which would in turn outrun resources and so set up a viscious circle. His proffered solution was 'moral restraint', like the postponement of marriage, along with premarital chastity, until parents were able to support a family. Later writers have pointed out that the consequences of this theory could be overcome by adopting birth control measures within marriage (Kenyon 210). Improved health care has, paradoxically, brought its own disadvantages. People are living longer (hence an increase in the geriatric population), and more babies are surviving. In the nineteenth century the population grew rapidly in all European countries except France, Spain, and Ireland: all countries with legalized abortion (Kenyon211). There is no doubt that there is an alarming increase in the world's population. Every 10 seconds there are 39 births in the world and only 16 deaths. If this worked out at a two- percent increase per year, then the world population would double in a 40-year period. Put another way, the world population is growing about 75 million per year, with the highest rate of increase in Latin America, Africa, and Asia: places with laws restricting abortion. To place the abortion part of the debate in perspective, the United Nations, through UNICEF, estimated that in 1982 more than 17 million children (one every two seconds) died from disease and starvation. There are many ways of trying to regulate the population, some obvious and others less so. The four basic ways are contraception, sterilization, abortion, and infanticide. Sociocultural factors can be involved- for example, the restriction of marriage, and procreation contingent on caste, tribe, or taboos. Religious sanctions can be used, and laws can be passed to regulate 'promiscuity', prostitution, pornography, the age of 'consent', and marriage. These are just a few of the many ways to prevent population rises. Some of these methods of population control have been enshrined in legislation: but how far should legislation reflect the majority view, or set the trend for future change, or indeed be ahead of its time and 'public opinion'? This is not an easy matter to settle (Kenyon 211-215). So how does population control help the prosperity of the economy? First of all, controlling the population helps limit the poverty rate. The more people there are in the world, the less jobs are available, the more people become poor. This leads many poor families to go onto some sort of welfare program. This sort of trend is detrimental to a country's economy. Governmentally, pro- choice should be upheld based on any person’s right to privacy. In the Roe V. Wade federal court case seven out of nine judges ruled in favor of pro-choice based on the fact that Jane Roe had her right to privacy. Ronald Dworkin, the most influential liberal constitutional thinker of the late twentieth century, maintains that: “All have a general right , based in the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of due process of law, to decide for themselves ethical and personal issues arising from marriage and procreation. Abortion does not violate any fundamental human or constitutional right to life because a fetus does not have any right to be born and because the word ‘person,’ as used in the Fourteenth Amendment, does not include the unborn.” Other liberal proponents of reproductive choice derive abortion rights from the more general right not to have one’s body occupied by an unwanted, albeit innocent , invader. One version of this argument condemns restrictions on abortion for violating the right to bodily integrity protected by the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Professors Robin West and Deborah Rhode charge that anti-abortion measures permit invasions of “the physical boundaries of the body and the psychic boundaries of a life(Hertz 45). A second version of the argument of bodily autonomy claims that pro-life policies unjustly and unconstitutionally conscript women for the good of others. Professor Cass Sunstein maintains that “the government cannot impose on women alone the obligation to protect fetuses through a legal act of bodily cooptation.” Requiring women to shoulder this responsibility is particularly offensive to the values protected by the Thirteenth Amendment and the equal protection clause because men have no comparable legal obligation to be Good Samaratins. “The law of abortion,” Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law School declares, is the “one place in the law where a really significant and intimate sacrifice has been required of anyone in order to save another(Olasky 112).” Any decent community must recognize that “the right to privacy is inherent in the right to liberty.” “Keeping Reproductive Choice in Private Hands” a bold heading in one law review article proclaims, “is Essential to a Free Society(Olasky 113).” Another question in the politics of abortion is whether or not the fetus is a person. So what has the constitution to say on the subject? Throughout the text the Constitution uses the word ‘person’ in a way that would not really make sense if fetuses were thought to be included. The Fourteenth Amendment, for example, says that “ all persons born or naturalized in the United States...are citizens of the United States and of the states they reside in.” This at least establishes that those who wrote and ratified the Constitution did not have the unborn in mind when they spoke of ‘persons.’ And it establishes that if fetuses are persons, they most definitely are not ‘citizens.’ This inference is also true in the Fifth Amendment which says that no person may “for the same offence...be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb.” This provision applies to persons who are not citizens, such as resident aliens(Tribe 216). Apart from how the Constitution uses the word ‘person,’ there are serious problems in viewing the body of a woman as the locus of two separate persons for purposes of Constitutional interpretation. If we were to treat women, for some significant portion of their lives, as the conjoined locus of two full human beings, extraordinary and perhaps and unthinkable implications would follow. First and foremost, the state would be compelled to treat all abortion as murder. But abortion in the Anglo-American tradition has always been considered, if a crime at all, then a lesser crime than murder. No state has ever treated early abortion as the legal equivalent of the murder of a child. Indeed ,even in Louisiana, the state that had the harshest abortion law prior to Roe, although murder was punishable by death, the punishment for abortion was only ten years. This no doubt reflects a strong, although not “provable,” human intuition. Whatever reaction anyone might have to the pro-life position that a fetus is a human being, nearly everyone is likely to believe, even if they are reluctant to say so openly, that abortion, particularly early in pregnancy, is not the equivalent of killing an already born person and that the woman who chooses such an abortion should not be punished as a murderer. Think next about the principle that a woman must be at least be permitted to abort a life threatening pregnancy, a principle that even Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, one of the original dissenters in Roe V Wade, thought implicit in the “liberty” clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. If an embryo a person, how could this exception be justified? What basis would we have for deliberately sacrificing one person’s life for anothers? Especially if the woman initialy chose to become pregnant, how could we justify securing her survival by destroying her voluntarily conceived child? No claim of self-defense could go this far. We have no established method for balancing the rights of two people in such a situation, no moral or legal calculus for deciding that one person may be killed so that another may live. If the fetus were a person, what would we do in the fairly common situation of a pregnancy that subjects a woman to , say, a 10 percent risk of death if she carries to term, but only a 1 percent risk of death if she aborts within the first month? Perhaps 50 percent of such risky pregnancies would end in miscarriage if no abortion were allowed. If the embryo were a “person,” the state probably could not justify increasing the fetus’ risk of death from this 50 percent to 100 percent by permitting the woman to take an abortion-inducing drug, simply to eliminate her 10 percent risk of death. Nor could a state ever knowingly permit such a woman to travel, in order to obtain an abortion, to another country. For if a fetus were to be seen as a separate “person” in the eyes of the Constitution, letting the mother go elsewhere to abort would deprive the fetus of life In violation of the Fourteenth Amendment(Demarco 143). The implications for women, and for the law, would be staggering. Of course, the traditional immunity of women from prosecution for abortion would be untenable. Any woman who had sought an abortion would at least be liable to criminal to criminal punishment for attempted murder or for aiding and abetting the physician who performed the deed. Legalized abortion should be upheld economically because overall it helps maintain the economy of the country and its population, and governmentally based on the main ideas behind the decision in the Supreme Court Case Roe Versus Wade. Economically legalized abortion can help improve the economy in three ways. First of all, it helps lift the economic burden off of low-income families. Second of all, it helps keep unemployment rates low. Finally, it helps control population. Governmentally, abortion should remain legal because a woman and her family have a right to privacy. Second of all, there is the fetus cannot be considered a person. Bibliography: Word Count: 3172
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