legal 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 federallyMoen 5fund 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...
