I am strongly pro-choice. I spent more years than I care to admit pre Roe marching, rallying, writing letters, and helping women get to clinics and helping round up enough spare change to finance abortions (which were incredibly expensive pre Roe).
Having said that, I think those of us who support abortion rights are barely treading in very deep waters. I hear time and again that the Republicans don't really want to overturn Roe and that they won't. This makes no sense to me. Of course they want to overturn Roe. They want to turn the abortion issue back to the states where they can have a galvanizing issue every single year over and over and over again.
Of course we should continue to try to defend Roe, but I think we should start looking at fighting proactively on what is increasingly looking like the loss of Roe and loss of women's choices and lives as a result. I think we need to think out of the box.
Here's my idea.
It is a given, both sides would have to agree, that if women cannot get abortions, many will be forced to have unwanted children. This means, among many other things, new mothers without enough money or any other means to pay the high costs of raising a child.
As a result of this "given," Pro-choice legislators should introduce bills that "assume" the loss of Roe. These bills should logically assume that if the state or federal government insists that a woman have a child she does not want, the state or federal government must, in turn, assume all the responsibilities of the unwanted child.
So--what kind of state or federal responsibility are we looking at? What do state and federal governments need to do now in preparation for the overturning of Roe?
According to the Guttmacher Institute:
About six million women become pregnant annually [in the United States]. Nearly two-thirds of these pregnancies result in live births and about a quarter in abortions; the remainder end in miscarriage.
My handy calculator tells me that means 1.5 million women have abortions in the United States each year.
Bills introduced by legislators must therefore assume that none of these 1.5 million abortions each year will take place once Roe is overturned and, therefore, there will be 1.5 million additional infants each year that someone has to support. Surely all agree (pro Roe and anti Roe) that we don't want these 1.5 million unwanted children ending up in trashcans or otherwise on the streets? The primary focus of these introduced bills should therefore be: how will the state and federal governments provide for an additional 1.5 million unwanted children a year?
In anticipation of these problems, the bills should mandate an immediate "socking away" of all the anticipated money it will take to assume all costs associated with 1.5 million additional unwanted infants each year.
Specifically, the bills should address:
(1) A national plan to assume all costs associated with the pregnancies and births of an additional 1.5 million unwanted infants a year. This plan would need to focus on all pre-natal care needs as well as the costs associated with the births themselves;
(2) Cough up the finances needed and determine the locations of the needed number of orphanages to house the 1.5 million new infants a year whose mothers choose not to keep them;
(3) Call for and finance the immediate implementation of a free national health care plan to take care of the health needs of the 1.5 million unwanted infants per year once they are born;
(4) Take on the costs and determine the locations of national food centers where the 1.5 million mothers each year who choose to keep their infants can take them for three squares a day;
(5) Address and anticipate all the educational needs of 1.5 million new children each year in our local school systems. There will need to be significant funding for new or renovated local schools to handle the new numbers.
(6) More than one-third of U.S. women need publicly supported contraceptive services and supplies because their income is below 250% of the federal poverty level. As a result of this dilemma, a bill should be introduced to provide free birth control to all women in order to hopefully cut down on some of the above costs and in the interests of saving Americans the high costs of "saving" these children.
I believe the introduction of these types of bills will wake sane people up to the financial and other results of what an overturning of Roe will bring AND force those who oppose Roe to saddle up to their responsibilities. It's high time they put their money where their mouths are.