Well, I would offer a dissenting perspective with respect to you, Bill.
If, said woman is impoverished, then State and Federal dollars pay for what might be a lifestyle choice. That is asking others to fund her choice. I'll agree, she can decide, but her decisions should be born at her expense, don't you think?
The thing is abortions are far cheaper to federal, state and local governments than providing assistance and care to a mother who might not have the means or will to care for that child. It costs the government ~$11,000/yr to send a child to school. Now tack on all kinds of other things a single mother might need help with from the government, and the costs will rapidly balloon out of control. What if she gives the child up for adoption? Now the government has to directly care for that child until someone adopts it. It costs the U.S. over $11 Billion/yr to deal with unintended pregnancies and raising the resulting children.
Even cheaper than all of that are contraceptives. For less than $1, you could prevent the need for an abortion in the first place. They should be handed out for free at high schools and colleges. Young people are going to have sex, there's no way around it. The best way to solve unwanted and teen pregnancy is to just let them have sex, but in a safe manner that will prevent a child from even being conceived.
Sorry, this is horse hockey and very recently proved to not be true. Despite their claims.
Please provide your sources.
My belief is our culture has lost its keen sense of life being precious. Vast majority of abortions are simply due to carousing, drunkenness and the like. To call abortion a woman's health issue is a cheap excuse for the inconvenience of a momentary lack of self control resulting in pregnancy.
That is simply not true. 45% of all pregnancies in this country are unintended. It's simply a lie to say that all of them are caused by drunken sex. It's pretty simple for a passionate couple to get lost in the moment, or to "forget" something, or whatever.
Thank you to those who have stood here and voiced their pro life concerns, to us and (hopefully) their particular political state representatives to push back on unPlanned Parenthood and the use of billions of our tax dollars to murder innocent children. Yes it is a hot topic with a definite line between the two viewpoints...right and wrong.
You say that as if Planned Parenthood has some kind of giant abortion furnace that we just funnel billions of dollars into every year to keep the fire roaring. Like every Planned Parenthood is some kind of massive abortion factory where pregnant women walk in one end, and dead babies come out of the other.
Except none of that is true. Planned Parenthood receives $300-500 Million dollars yearly from the government - not billions of dollars. Abortions represent
3% of Planned Parenthood's services (which translates into ~10-12% of people that go to planned parenthood getting an abortion). But even then, under federal law,
government money cannot be used for abortions at Planned Parenthood. Your tax dollars can not be used to "murder children". Over 90% of Planned Parenthoods services are used to screen for STI/STDs ( to prevent horrible diseases like AIDS & HIV from spending), cancer screens, and other women's services. Of those other services, 34% of that is providing contraceptives - to
prevent those unwanted pregnancies from occurring in the first place.The facts are, even with Planned Parenthood offering abortions, the unintended pregnancy rate and abortion rate has been dropping steadily in this country for the past
40 years. The teen pregnancy rate is the lowest it has been since at least the
1940s. What's more is the abortion rate is now lower than it was BEFORE Roe vs. Wade made it legal country wide. Much of that is thanks to efforts by Planned Parenthood providing contraceptives. De-funding Planned Parenthood will just cause more abortions, more unwanted pregnancies and will undo 40 years of work they've done getting the numbers down to where they are today.
You guys are clamoring for Planned Parenthood to close up shop, when teen pregnancy and abortions are at
historic lows. It's absolute lunacy.