The Poor Get Children

I am always afraid to insert anything controversial here. It is not my intention of imposing my opinions, outside of music and Science Fiction, on anyone. If you disagree with me, you won't come back and if you agree with me, what I had to say was a wasted entry.

I thought, however, that I would like to make a few points about Alito as a Supreme Court justice and his impact on partisan agendas. I am a firm believer in that government can be viewed as an ecological system. Our society has feedback loops that cause the system to oscillate back and forth trying to find equilibrium, and it will be interesting to see what happens after Alito's approval and Roe v. Wade is overturned. I wonder how the negative feedback loop in politics will change things.

The reason that I am writing this is that it seems apparent that Alito will be voted into the Supreme Court and that the religious right will be successful in banning abortions, at least in some states. How will this affect political systems? What will be the impact on abortion rates, and how will this affect political systems? There seems to be a great many abortions in the United States each year. How will a partial ban on abortions affect our society, institutions, laws and politics?

If Roe v. Wade is overturned, I still don't see that as an indication that there will be a total ban on abortions. In extremely "RED" states, where the religious right has more power, there will be laws passed that prevent abortions, but women will be able, in many cases, to go to a neighboring state and still get an abortion. In many states, laws will appear that interfere with abortion, but do not actually ban it. In most parts of the country, it will be more difficult to get an abortion, but not impossible.

What I believe will happen is that the poor and the un-empowered will find abortions difficult or too expensive. Children, the poor, and the mentally challenged will not be able to get abortions as easily as before, if at all.

There are currently somewhere in the neighborhood of a million abortions per year in the United States. (The exact number of abortions is difficult to find, because of the intense politics that surrounds this subject.) Just how many of these will be prevented by law after Roe v. Wade is reversed is difficult to say. About half of abortions are for adult women over age 25. I can guess that the probability of these women continuing to find a locality where an abortion is legal is better than most other groups. There are, of course sub groups that will not be able to obtain an abortion.

Children under 16 account for as much as 20% of all abortions. This group will find it much more difficult to receive an abortion. Often parents of these children will lead the effort to abort these pregnancies. In fact, I would guess even now that in many, if not most cases, a parent takes charge in order to get a very young daughter out of trouble. Still, a significant percentage of teenage pregnancies will result in births due to a partial ban on abortions, and I see this as the main effect of Alito's confirmation.

I have no way of knowing, but my feelings are that when Roe v. Wade is overturned, the result will be about 100,000 additional births per year in poor states, mostly to young children, but also to other un-empowered groups that have no ability find alternatives. Minorities already have much lower abortion rates and higher birth rates than do the white majority. A ban on abortions will nonetheless increase minority births somewhat.

Increases in unwanted births will be most obvious in poor states where groups are able to exert political pressure and ban abortions. These states will experience, over the next decades, a heavy increase in welfare, education and medical costs from this increase in population of very poor children. As the song says, "The poor get children." This will mean more parishioners for those who supported Alito and pushed through the ant-abortion laws, but it will be a great drain on the economy of the already poor states.

The long term effect then on the social structures of the United States will be to hurt the states that choose to limit abortions. It should have very little effect on liberal states. I do not see a federal law or constitutional amendment getting very far. There may be a ban on late term abortions, but any such law will not be constitutional if it does not have wide medical loopholes, even after Roe v. Wade is overturned.

I think that what will happen in states with severe abortion laws, is that the issue will soften. Once the controversy has settled down, I think that laws will loosen up to permit privileged groups to receive abortions without having to fly to New York. Things like waiting periods and residency requirements will find their way into abortion legalities so that mothers can still get themselves and their wayward daughters out of trouble without spending too much. Abortion rates will creep back up, but without Roe v. Wade as an easy target, anti-abortion groups will not be able to do much about it.

My conclusion is that overturning Roe v. Wade is a done deal. It will happen in the next few years. Its short-term impact will be to make conservatives very happy and Liberals very angry. There will be several hundred thousand unexpected poor children to take care of, but they will be ignored. These unwanted children will contribute the poverty rate and the crime rate, but they will live in places that already have high poverty and crime rates.

An interesting result of overturning Roe v. Wade will be that a strong motivating issue will disappear from the Republican platform. I feel that many votes for the right wing are votes against abortion. There is not so much incentive to vote for an anti-abortion advocate after the ban is in place. Angry feminists may actually remember to vote, and lukewarm liberals might vote their conscious rather than their gonads.

The abortion based negative feedback loop, built on anti-abortion groups and their money, will fade away and a new equilibrium will appear. The political results of Alito's appointment to the Supreme Court will likely be a Democratic Senate and Presidency, as well as a plurality of liberal votes in the House of Representatives.

Without its stand against Roe v. Wade, the Republican Right has nothing left to inflame its supporters. Republicans will once again become the party of voodoo economics and anti-flag burning amendments. I think that most Americans dislike things such as the ban on prayer in schools and evolution, but they also understand at some level that the schools aren't a good place to pray and the creationism is really silly.

By getting what it wants, the extreme right will loose much of what it has.