In this modern world of progress, education is the key to all things and yet we continue to defund it every chance we get, then wonder why things go wrong.
People don’t have babies willy-nilly because it’s fun to have a kid. People don’t have abortions willy-nilly because it’s fun to have an abortion. They do it because they don’t know better, or don’t have access to contraception, or because of accidental pregnancy/pregnancy through malicious intent. Why we feel the need to punish people for the above and then propagate the problem by continuing to cut funding is not logical or intelligent.
You wanna see fewer people on welfare funded by your tax dollar having a million kids? Prevent it by education (and not abstinence-only because that’s a farce and will never work), providing contraception, and allowing abortion. Funny thing is that when you do the first two (educate and provide contraceptives), I guarantee that the third option (abortion) will fall rapidly. You wanna solve abortion with me? Then lean on the first two. Don’t just defund the whole thing and shove it under the rug and pretend it doesn’t exist for inane puritanical ideological reasons. I don’t like the idea of abortion as much as anybody, but you damn well better believe that I want them available and happening in a well-funded controlled and clinical environment, and not some back alley with a rusty coathanger.
I dunno about anyone else here, but I’d rather my tax dollars go to paying for a box of condoms and an IUD for a teenage couple than go to paying them and their five kids to stay on welfare for the next fifty years. And then pay for those five kids’ twenty-five kids to stay on welfare for another fifty years. And so on. You wanna treat the disease? Treat the cause, not the symptoms. It’s the same thing in “underdeveloped” countries, too, you wanna stop spending billions in aid on these countries? Teach them to fish, so to speak. Don’t cut the “learn fishing” programs and then complain about refugees. Christ almighty the disconnect in that “logic,” and yet it prevails nation- and world-wide.
But it’s not about actually saving lives or preventing abortions, it’s about punishing people for being people.