POVERTY, NOT MORAL DECAY DRIVES ABORTION DECISION

Renee Bracey Sherman authored an article yesterday on Aljazeera America’s website explaining why Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley should discuss and debate the issue of abortion as part of their campaigns. It was a thoughtful article, filed to coincide with the 43rd anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade, the case which guaranteed women the right to an abortion, and I’d recommend that everyone read it. The article can be found at http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2016/1/why-democrats-must-debate-abortion.html.

I applaud Ms. Sherman’s logic in writing that the candidates’ views are nuanced and citizens deserve to hear positions on all sides of the abortion issue. Right now, the only voices heard are the loudest and shrillest voices on the right, and all that shouting doesn’t advance the public’s understanding of the issue one iota. It’s time for reasonable voices on the left, hopefully at a much calmer level, to join the conversation.

One of the statistics that Ms. Sherman mentioned in her article is the fact that “two-thirds of the women in the United States who have an abortion are already parenting and live near or below the federal poverty level.” That fact illustrates why abortion in this Nation is primarily a poverty-related decision and not the product of a morally-depraved subset of our population as right-wing politicians and some in the clergy would have folks believe.

It’s easy for people to decry a woman’s decision to have an abortion when their own bellies are full and their primary concern in life is not where the next meal or shelter or dollar will come from. To a woman with children who’s already drowning or near-drowning under poverty’s crushing weight, having another child represents a burden of enormous magnitude that those with betters means often fail to appreciate. That’s why so many women already facing the poverty struggle choose abortion instead.

Abortion’s critics claim that it is a moral decision that our government should prohibit pregnant women from making, but there’s a large measure of hypocrisy in their argument, because they are very often the same critics of government attempts to make child rearing easier on parents. “Don’t give that woman welfare or food stamps,” the critic will complain, “because that will encourage her to pop out child after child,” as if women are merrily going through pregnancy and eighteen years of parenting just to game the system. But then in the next breath, that same welfare critic will decry that poor mother’s decision to terminate her pregnancy. What else can be concluded but that abortion critics who decry welfare are the most callous of them all?

I’d say that is an issue worthy of debate, and like the thesis of Ms. Sherman’s above-referenced article, I hope the Democratic presidential candidates engage in it.