Here’s what we know: Access to contraception and comprehensive sex ed are what lowers abortion rates.
Banning it usually has the opposite effect, because those doing the banning also oppose contraception and comprehensive sex ed.
In general, the banners also oppose universal healthcare, funding education, raising the minimum wage, and women’s equality in the workplace.
In other words, what they’re doing will cause more unplanned pregnancies.
We will also have more:
*Women forced to be pregnant in a job market that will often lay them off for it
*Women forced to give birth in a country with the highest maternal mortality rate in the Western world
*Women thrown into poverty
*Children born into poverty
*Women with pregnancy/birth-related problems that will make them ineligible for insurance if they try to get it later
*Women who might be able to get healthcare for their child in some states, the same states who tell them they can’t have it (even though most would agree a household can’t survive when a parent is fighting chronic or potentially life-threatening illnesses)
*Women struggling to support their families with low wages, which have not caught up with inflation
*Women struggling to go to college and to send their child to college, considering tuition is over 1100% higher than it was in the 1970s
*Children struggling to stay alive in a school system where they might be murdered on any given day
*Women struggling to feed their child, as there are actually politicians who say children should be made to feel shame if they need free lunch
*Children struggling to learn in chronically underfunded education systems
*Women who will forever struggle to find firm financial footing, along with their children often trapped in a cycle of poverty
*Women struggling to pay for their child’s daycare (they have to work; they aren’t allowed to be on public assistance to stay home with their child (they will be made to feel guilty for not staying home with their child)), since daycare is sometimes more than a women will get paid
These women will be told that all of their problems are their fault for having a child.
(These same people will say that if poor women don’t have a cellphone, which employers count on them having, all of their money problems will disappear.)
Most women who get abortions are married women who already have children, who are doing what they have to keep their marriage together, to keep their existing children fed. They know the cost of a child in a struggling household. And we can’t tell them to be abstinent.
There is a three-step process to lowering abortion rates:
1. Give access to contraception
2. Provide comprehensive sex ed
3. Work to fix societal problems, so that women can choose to have that child in a world that won’t leave them and their children to starve
