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Originally Posted by Roux-en-Y";p="
I agree that there are other socioeconomic / ethical issues or “difficult problems” that contribute or correlate to person’s decision to have an abortion. These issues need to be addressed but I do not think that the banning of abortions done for reasons of convenience should be delayed while we try to figure out the other contributing factors. Example) People that rob convenience stores also have other difficult issues contributing to the crime, but we don’t legalize it because we haven’t figured out these other problems. Otherwise we’d have no convenience stores. We made the offense illegal and enforced the law with punishment, and that makes people think twice about doing it. Now you go about addressing the other issues.
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But you'll notice that we don't deal with the other issues. The primary difference is that would-be robbers are successfully deterred by laws. Those who would commit abortion are not. Otherwise we would not see the numbers of improvised abortions that we do. The trouble is that when we make laws, we tend to think the punitive measures are enough and ignore all else. Certain laws must exist anyway simply to defend the public. People are less likely to forcibly rob if they know that they will be jailed if caught. There is also a difference in the mentality behind the two crimes.
In the case of abortion, it will be easier and more productive to work on the tougher issues before using punitive measures because for one thing there is no consensus on illegalization, illegalizing it wouldn't prevent (and it's hard to say that it would even reduce) infanticide or abandonment, and because enforcing the laws would be expensive and inefficient. Not to mention that the mentality that leads to abortion is destructive even if the child is not aborted and that is what must be stopped. In short-sightedness, many pro-punitive pro-lifers would coerce people with such a mentality into having children and do nothing about those consequences. I truly find it hard to believe that after illegalization, we'll see a finger lifted to fix the remaining underlying problems. The human race is good at ignoring things.