The most frustrating part of discussing abortion with people who totally oppose it except to save the mother's life is when challenged, they never answer the title question. So I am putting it here hoping all abortion opponents will stop dancing around the extremely obvious and repeatedly proven fact that without a lot of help from the government, hundreds of thousands of pregnant girls and women need abortions for many justifiable reasons. It is literally impossible to oppose both abortion and all government programs that can prevent most of them unless you happen to be a misogynist whose real intention is to control women, which I am sure no Christians are because they believe in love.
One reason I am a Democrat is I want the number of abortions to drop. I want all of the reasons many girls and women suffer psychologically, physically, and socially during their unwanted pregnancies to nearly disappear. I also want the reasons women who wanted babies, but suddenly find themselves unable to care for them, to be gone. Only the federal and blue state governments can do that for them.
So, what do you want the federal government to do to help pregnant girls and women who lack the ability and resources to carry their unborn babies for nine months and take care of them for the next 20 years? What would be your plan if you were a politician? Would you prefer they get all their help from states or the federal government? Keep in mind we are not talking about crisis pregnancy centers here because they have very limited resources and, as Catholic Church-based organizations, will do nothing for non-Christians who need help. It truly is the government or nothing, no matter how she got pregnant or why she is considering abortion.
One Eastern Orthodox priest wrote:
Harvard Law professor Mary Ann Glendon has pointed out that the United States not only has the most permissive abortion laws in the industrialized West; its social policy does less for women and children than any other industrialized nation. She sees a connection. A nation in which single women, or poor married women, are afraid to have children because they will be left alone if they do is one in which abortion will often be seen as a lesser evil. To see it that way is wrong, from a Christian point of view. But it is also wrong to condemn abortion, without trying to help those for whom bearing a child will involve real burdens.
Changes in law are part of this. Bearing a child should not mean the end of educational or work opportunities, and these possibilities weigh most heavily upon poor women in our society. In addition to working for changes in the law which might erode the permissive approach to obtaining abortions, it is important to work for positive justice, for a climate in which those women who bear children will not be penalized for having made that choice.
My daughter's best friend who already has one child by an abusive former bf, got pregnant and had an abortion. She's 22, without job prospects, and struggling. Yet childcare is so expensive that working may not even be worth the money. For example, when we had our kids, we saw that my wife, with only an associates degree, would only make $1 per hour once we factored in daycare. So I started working part-time as well. No matter what she could do, I would make up to triple what she could earn. Now in our mid fiftys, I make five to six times what she might be able to pull in. So the income imbalance is a major factor.
So my dream list
Better sex and mental health education
Expand the social security network to include health insurance, wellcare for parents, paternity time off to encourage fathers to be able to help at home.
Encourage local governments to build low cost or subsidized day-care facilities.
Provide better educational benefits for post-high school programs with vocational programs that allow someone to get a decent job.
As for the "We give some foreign power money, why didnt we use it here?" this cartoon sums it up for me
