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Title: Opinion: The consequences of an abortion ban
Originally reported on www.concordmonitor.com by By MICHAEL FERBER
200000048 – World Newser
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Opinion: The consequences of an abortion ban
Michael Ferber lives in Strafford.
If abortion is made illegal in this state, or all the states, this is what will happen.
It will not stop abortions. Millions of girls and women had abortions before Roe v. Wade made them legal, and millions will have abortions after they are made illegal again. Though proportionally fewer people may want them than in the old days, thanks to improved contraception, when a woman wants an abortion she may move heaven and earth to get one; the demand will be intense.
A large underground network dealt with abortions before 1973, and an underground network is being rebuilt right now. It will be much easier this time, and safer, because medical techniques have improved, more medical people know how to do them, and there is now a medical method with two pills.
Banning those pills will be no more effective than banning alcohol was during Prohibition — even less effective, since alcohol took up space in smugglers’ cars and boats while the pills are tiny. There are websites telling us how to make at least one of the pills at home. And if they have to be smuggled, and the smuggling is profitable, there will be no shortage of drug gangs who know how to get them around, and how to get around the police.
When I was about to go to college in 1962, I was given a phone number and told to pass it on to any girl who was “in trouble.” She would be well taken care of by legitimate doctors and nurses, but she would need $600 in cash (well over $5,000 today). Why so much money? I was told that quite a bit was needed to pay off the police. Now the police will be paid off again, if necessary, though quite a few officers will simply refuse to intervene because they have real crimes to pursue.
It will be much easier this time, too, because for fifty years abortion has been legal and there is strong public support for keeping it that way. There is far less stigma attached to having an abortion than there used to be; I know scores of women who have said they had one. The underground network will have plenty of people to help those who need them and those who can perform them.
Some supporters, in the spirit of the civil rights activists and draft resisters of the sixties, will stand up and announce that they have broken the law and invite prosecution. They will demand jury trials, and many juries will refuse to convict them. Many juries, too, will refuse to convict the distraught girl who made a mistake with her careless boyfriend and was pointed out by a neighborhood snoop. If things go the way the anti-abortionists wish, the courts will be clogged with cases and the prisons will be more crowded than they already are.
As for the snoops, who are now incited by some state laws to report suspected abortions, and get $10,000 for doing so, they will breed outrage in their victims and disdain among their neighbors. The law may grant them anonymity, but counter-snoops will find them out and expose them. Communities that lived peaceably by tolerating each other will turn into little East Germanies, where everyone suspected everyone else. It may get violent.
To the most dogmatic anti-abortionists, all these ugly consequences may be worth it if the law prevents a single abortion, as indeed it might. Let them take comfort in that belief if they will, but they are still responsible for the grave turmoil that will follow a ban. And they reveal themselves as foolish as well as fanatical, for not only will a ban fail in its purpose but there is an obviously better way to prevent abortions: prevent unwanted pregnancies.
That entails accessible birth control and sex education for the young because preaching about abstinence has fallen on deaf ears for thousands of years. But most anti-abortionists are not serious about their cause, or they would join with abortion-rights activists to make abortions unnecessary.
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