Are we better off today than we were 40 years ago before Roe v Wade?

An estimsted 55 million abortions hsve taken plsce since.

40 years ago today it was passed by the supreme court.

of course we are better off than we were 50 years ago, as we have had 50 years worth of economic expansion (as a trend) technological advancement etc. etc.

All of that would have occured regardless of roe vs. wade.

I think what you really want to ask about is the counter factual: would the US be better off today had the Roe vs. Wade decision gone the other way.

Assuming those 55 million abortions all took place in the U.S., I believe that not having an extra 55 million welfare recipients on the government's dole is a good thing.

Its "for the children", DONT YOU FORGET THAT!

Forget the 55 million, lets only talk about the 22.

we are not better off today than we were 40 years ago. period.

Its not going to get better by killing children -then or now.

ain't going to get any better by forcing people to birth crack addict zombies. well, maybe more women will die from the improper use of coat hangers and there will be a decline in crack addict baby zombies.

For you people that hate abortion

who should take care of all these 55 million babies had they been born?

Adoption? Our foster homes are horrible, most of these children would of probably become gang members. The United States so has the capacity to incarcerate 10's of millions of new inmates *rolls eyes*

Republicans are all for "saving the child's life" until it is born, then to hell with it. If the child gets raped, beaten, lives a miserable life it is not there concern. They want to cut the federal government down until there is nothing left of it.

Funny thing is, Mississippi (who just made the only Planned Parenthood clinic illegal (based on the fact they have to have a full timer there), is one of the poorest if not these poorest state.

Republicans want individuals to "stop sucking state and federal resources dry" but when young individuals, or poor individuals, have sex, they do not have any options. So the poverty rate continues to climb.

The worse thing is, this country cannot support an indefinite population. *shurgs*

If Christians decided to not make science their enemy, they'd have a much better chance of limiting the scope of abortion.

Obviously there needs to be a point where an action goes from acceptable to unacceptable. If a woman has her period without conceiving, that is not murder. If she chooses to not have sex for a month, that is not murder, even though an egg goes to waste.

Obviously, once a child has been born, killing him or her is unacceptable.

So where do we draw the line in between? Most Christians claim it is at conception, but they offer no scientific backing for that claim. Furthermore, their Biblical backing for that claim isn't even a solid one.

If you see a baby during the last trimester, you can see that killing him or her is wrong.

But a week after conception, the baby is about the size of a tip of a pen.

And most Christians believe that killing a collection of a couple hundred cells just one week after sperm meets egg, a collection smaller than a drop of rain, is murder. Not only do they believe that (which I am fine with them believing), but they believe themselves to be justified in attempting to enforce that belief on the entire country, regardless of whether or not other people agree with them, regardless of whether or not other people are Christians, and regardless of whether or not science supports them. And I am not okay with that. That's fine for their religious belief, but its not fine to force that on other people.


The basis for any regulation of abortion needs to be scientific, not religious. Christians harm their causes by attempting to bring religion into it. Maybe I should be thankful that Christians haven't joined the pacifist movement and ruined that, too.

I'm all for you spending as much money as you want to on them. i just don't think you should be stealing it from me to do it.

Many of those women will most likely have had a child later in their lives at a better time. Which many of them would have chosen not to have, had they not have had the option of abortion and thus had already been saddled with an unwanted child.

I forgot what my point was exactly.. hmm. But its not the case that without abortions there would have been 55 million more people now.

Its probably for the best though. It's really sad for a child to be put on this world while it's unwanted by its parents, the people that should love the child the most.

I'm somewhere between the Republican stance on this and the Democrat's FORMER stance on this, when they said they wanted to make it "safe, legal and rare." Now the "rare" has been removed and it's just "safe and legal."

I think that's a sad state of affairs.

We might be better off with abortion being legal but rare, but I really question the logic of saying a child is better off aborted than being in a less-than-perfect home life.

All i know is i cant imagine my life without my kids (1.5/2.5yrs old). They weren't planned, and both of us were in party mode when my gf first got pregnant, which forced us to change our lifestyles drastically.

They only made my life better by forcing me to grow up, and start loving something other than booze n drugs.

Sure, some people may have a good reason to abort. The rest just need to grow the fluff up and take responsibility, instead of killing a baby just because its easier.

(im not religious btw)

bonus post for the week!

Okay. This grinds my gears. You know what he meant to say. Clearly you were able to infer his meaning. But instead of answering his question, you chose to do what? A public service? You wanted to educate him on the error of his wording? To what end? You added nothing meaningful to the conversation. It's like you were showing off to the world that you're smarter than the OP. And really, I'm doing nothing different. I'm not adding anything to the conversation. I really have no reason to be posting this other than to tell you that I think you're wrong and to show off to others that I'm right. Ugh. I hate the internet.

hawk it's ok. If you don't understand my statement then I feel sorry for you. In other news h4 is my buddy so i still love him :)

It is hard to say. A lot of the people aborted would have been from low income mothers, likely without fathers. Are we better off without those people? Well, probably in terms of government spending and crime. Does that justify ending a life before it was ever given a chance? No, not in my opinion. It is no more justified than killing children born to low income, drug-addicted mothers because they are likely to grow up into a similar lifestyle.

At the same time, we may have killed off the next Bill Gates or Steve Jobs.

Just imagine how many Einstein's, Gate's or Barack's we have aborted.

edit. Klown gets it.

I'm generally on your side crest, but that argument goes both ways. Think of if the next Hitler were aborted.

If you go "ends justifies the means" then you're walking down a dangerous line.

Consider this... in the states that legalized abortion 40 years ago- 20 years after roe vs wade the crime rate dropped dramatically.

Those who lived in the lower echelons of socio economic conditions in dangerous neighborhoods or drug addled homes now had an "out" when a pregnancy in the house occurred. Is it worth the price? That's for each to decide on his/her own.

All I know is I'll never consider trying to talk my wife into having an abortion ever... but I know there are some situations where a child should not be forced to live in...

so i guess, Klown and I agree. !!

http://www.freakonomics.com/...e-who-should-you-believe/

we would be worse off without abortions being legal. there should be a line drawn though, deciding you dont want a kid after 7 months is retarded. if you havent done it withing the first 3-4 months theres no reason to do it.

ok, so you who say abortion should be illegal, but now because it is illegal, instead of in your words "killing a child when it does not even have sentient awareness"

those individuals have just probably killed at least 1 individual, if not more individuals. So your "act" of saving 1 life, has in-turn caused many lives to be ended. How the hell is that Christian? Many lives of innocent individuals have to be lost due to 1 group's religious beliefs?

You all say that socioeconomic surroundings and backgrounds should not matter, but unfortunately, nobody wants to teach young kids and teenagers about sexuality. The schools do not want to do it because of loss of funding and because parents do not want their children to learn about sex, but at the same time, they do not want to teach their children about sexuality, about diseases related to sex. Republicans only want abstinence sexual education taught because they live in some fantasy land where there is no raging hormones.

It is worse for the poor where many children only have 1 parent, and it is, sadly, usually the mother.

The irony, Republicans want less government in our lives, unless it is what they want done. I strongly support abortions for reasons of this world cannot contain an infinitely growing human population. The more lives that are on this planet, the less fresh water that is going to be available, far less food, as more land will be needed for homes, and with less land comes fewer farms and diminishing wildlife and trees.

This country, especially in the southern stats, is sadly, still quite raciest. Those that need help the most, and truly need it, often cannot get the help they need and they have to fend for themselves.

Reduction in population growth is one of the things most vital going forwards; Also, as others pointed out, crime rates!

+rant
as much as I am pro-choice, freakanomics is a piss-poor source to be quoting statisics from as it blindly applies statistics to find causality which is completely invalid. (you reasons for causality have to be based on something other than statistics and statistics provides evidence to support/not support your theory. It does not work in reverse). The crime rate has to do with the baby boom and demographics more than it has to do with abortion. I think that if you look at violent crime by age bracket, the trend is somewhat (not completely) off set. No one is going to claim that abortion is the cause for the change in demographic trend. There are also studies to suggest that humans have been gradually become less violent over the past 500-1000 years and our attitudes towards violence have changed. Of course it's not a linear or a consistent trend..
/rant

Regarding abortions: Rich people have always had access to abortions and will always have them regardless of their legality (see the resarch done in Chritons "A case of need") plus it's easy to bribe a doctor buddy to have an abortion be labled "a miscarrage". For those people who are more disadvantaged (poorer), they are impacted more. As an aside, human cilizations have selectively killed their children (born/unborn) for purposes of population control/group survival for thousands of years. The notion is somewhat horrifying in most of today's society mind you.
The biggest hypocracy I see is that many of those people advocating putting babies up for adoption rather than aborting the kids do not wish to have any of their tax money fund adoption agencies. As an aside, I believe that there is also nothing in the bible saying abortion is wrong.

Spot. On.

Martain its more about what we as a society deem acceptable or not.

@requiem: right but it's never one set of rules for everyone. Prohibition is a great example of this.

Thats the job for politicians and our job to vote!

That's a stupid argument Martian. The rich and powerful are able to get away with any crime far more easily than the lower class. They can easily get away with murder; should laws against murder be taken off the books?

I am an extremely literal person and I answer the questions I am asked, not the questions I think people meant to ask. You start assuming what people meant instead of reading what they said then you run into problems.

His question and its construction was poor, and could have easily been misinterpreted by people. I added plenty to the conversation by pointing that out.

The difference is that there is a much larger consensus against murder than abortion. When to try to make something illegal against the wishes of a significant portion of your population the argument holds more weight because it's about imposing morality on some but not others, many of whom do not agree.

If 40% of the population thought that murder should be legal then yes, I would be arguing the same thing.

You are also arguing about a law that disproportionately impacts low income individuals. Homicide (under the current definition) impacts everyone equally (you die. rich people can't resurrect either :P)

I always thought Roe V Wade was trying to stop people dying from botched procedures.

I don't think so. Murder, just like abortion, is largely a poor person's game.

Only because you usually only hear about the criminals that actually pull the trigger getting convicted.

You hardly ever hear about the rich person that gave the order to kill being brought to justice for his part in the crime.

I think you have been watching too many movies...

I think you haven't been reading enough history.

Do you think as a society we've devalued life a little bit?

In the context of Roe v Wade, you'd need to define "life" first.

I find abortion morally wrong, but I think it's pretty clear abortion has made those of us who are alive today better off in an economic and social stability sense.

So I might compare the question of whether we are better off to a similar one that can be asked with respect to the finding and killing of OBL. We are better off w.r.t that killing in the sense that we are safer he is dead. But are we worse off because of the moral cost of the torture we used to find him?

If I was made dictator for a day I think I would ban abortion, but I realize there would be many negative consequences of such a dramatic shift in policy.

One could argue reduction in population growth paired with increased life expectancy is one of the greatest threats to our economic prosperity.

Abortion exists. It has been invented, and can never be un-invented. Banning it, for all the bluster, will not prevent abortions from continuing to happen. Sorry!

Peak oil is a bigger one; if there's not enough oil, need to reduce population! Reduction in demand required.

I am in no way for telling somebody that they can or cannot have an abortion, what I AM against is allocating my tax dollars (that are already horribly allocated as is) to subsidize their medical procedure that I personally do not believe in. If they want to spend their own money to do it, go ahead. I will not try to stop them.

It comes back to personal responsibility, something the world severely lacks these days.

oh if only the people could understand this logic with the gun battle going on...

Funny how that works eh?

One fringe says ALL [abortion is/guns are] TERRIBLE AND MUST BE OUTLAWED. The other fringe says ANY RESTRICTION WHATSOEVER ON [guns/abortion] IS UNACCEPTABLE. Reasonable folks in the middle who think that neither should be outlawed but maybe both regulated just a little are pushed aside.

(I know it's a false equivalence, but then I wouldn't be trolling!)

I think it's interesting that the side who wants all abortion eliminated happens to be the side that also wants no government involvement in anything...

Difficult to control all women with a small government, don't you think?

they would be barefoot and pregnant. how much control would need to be exerted? you think they might run away?