The fall of Roe=more live births

CNN has some good news for those of us who are devoted pro-lifers: reducing access to abortion leads to more live births.

Who could have guessed?

That is wonderful news!

— Elisabeth (@grizzlymamabear) July 6, 2023

There is still a large number of caveman types like me who believe that every infant is a precious gift to be cherished, not a burden to be discarded or an accessory to be acquired.

Professor Suzanne Bell of Johns Hopkins doesn’t agree, and she was disappointed to find out that 10,000 more babies were born in Texas than would have been the case if their abortion law had been struck down.

A strict abortion law that took effect in Texas in 2021 may have led to nearly 10,000 more births than expected in the last nine months of 2022, according to research published in the journal JAMA.

Texas Senate Bill 8, which banned abortions after six weeks of pregnancy with few exceptions, took effect nearly 10 months before the US Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade and revoked the federal right to abortion.

For their study, published last week, researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health analyzed years of birth records to understand how the state law may have affected local trends.

Using data from other states and from Texas in years prior to the new law, they established a version of what birth trends in Texas would have probably looked like without the law and compared that with the actual number of births reported.

They found that from April to December 2022, the first months that would have reflected the effects of the policy change, there were about 297,000 total births: about 3% more than the 287,000 births that would have been expected without the law.

“Texas is really unique in that it is one of the states that had one of the higher abortion rates – and, because of the population size, a relatively large number of abortions,” said Suzanne Bell, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University and co-author of the research. “At first blush, seeing the number was higher than I might have anticipated or hoped it might be.”

Apparently she hoped that fewer babies would have gotten to see the light of day. Geez. Who ARE these people?

One of the weirdest quirks in the abortion debate is how abortion proponents simply ignore the fact that pregnancy is a choice in almost all cases. We hear about the very rare (and more morally difficult) edge cases of rape and incest, but the vast majority of unwanted pregnancies are due to plain old negligence and indifference to the consequences of unprotected sex.

The “shout your abortion”/abortion until birth crowd aren’t defending women who are victimized; they are pushing for legalizing killing in order to ensure that nobody has to behave responsibly. It really is that simple. When Chelsea Handler talks about her 3 abortions gleefully–and she does–she always puts the discussion in the context of how great her life is without having to care for others.

She had two abortions when she was 16, and another later in life.

In a 2016 essay for Playboy, Handler shared that she that she had two abortions when she was 16.

“When I got pregnant at the age of 16, getting an abortion wasn’t the first idea that popped into my unripened brain,” she wrote. Handler said that after her parents took her to Planned Parenthood for the procedure, she felt “relieved.”

“I felt parented, ironically, while I was getting an abortion. And when it was over, I was relieved in every possible way,” she wrote.

Later that year, she said, she had another abortion after becoming pregnant with the same partner.

“We have 7.3 billion people on this planet,” Handler wrote elsewhere in the essay. “Anybody who carefully decides not to become a parent—let alone a bad parent, which is what I would have become—should be applauded for making a smart and sustainable decision.”

Condoms? The pill? Abstinance? Naah. Keep on f*cking and keep on trucking. Have fun!

All the storm and strife about rape and incest I can sympathize with and I concede these are much more difficult moral issues; but these are also not the real issue we are fighting over. The abortion lobby wants to live in a world without any need to behave responsibly and impose the costs of their own behavior on others.

That isn’t how things should work. You shouldn’t be empowered to harm others in order to have a great time. Sorry, not sorry.

I still can’t get over how a researcher can say out loud that they are disappointed that 10,000 more babies are born. That is so clearly a good thing, and also a lesson to others who want to avoid having to deal with the consequences of their own actions. If they sincerely don’t want a child, accept responsibility for your own actions.

Birth control or restraint. It really isn’t that hard.