by Matt Barr

The cost of abortion

Jane Galt will put a lot of people off with the title of her post Want to cut down on abortions? Make them illegal, but its argument is sound: Sex education, abstinence or otherwise, is not the answer to reducing abortions. Abortion is as ubiquitous as it is because its costs are historically low. Jane says,

Abortions are relatively cheap, and relatively painless (or at least, they sound that way if you haven't had one -- I don't actually know if they're painful or not), and America's youth, like youth everywhere, are not very good at correctly estimating the future disutility of current actions. This is why smoking continues to be popular. And the back seat of a car is a terrible place to [be] trying to do an expected value calculation in your head.

I have an observation in the spirit of the post, which is not advocating that abortion be made illegal. The true "cost savings" in abortion has not been primarily in its monetary expense, its level of physical discomfort or inefficient market decisions by teenagers. Instead, unwed pregnancy has become more socially acceptable. Are abortions more prevalent (per capita) in New York or Tuscaloosa? Is it because abortions are cheaper and less painful in New York and Tuscaloosans are more level-headed at the "moment of truth"?

The cost of shame has been removed from the pregnancy equation, further reducing pregnancy's disutility. You will expect me to say this is a bad thing, and to a very real extent it is, not because teenage pregnancy itself no longer has an appreciable stigma but because there is very little of anything that has a stigma at all anymore, and I think it's beyond question that shame can play an important positive regulatory role in society. (Libertarians hate shame, but are supposed to hate laws backed with government force worse, so should be keen on the voluntary behavior modifcation shame can be.)

In other words, if the reduction of the stigma associated with teenage pregnancy had been accompanied by, for example, an increase in the stigma associated with teenage boys treating teenage girls like objects, we could have an argument over where our shame was more productively directed. But instead, all sorts of things no sensible teen would have wanted to try his luck getting away with 50 years ago are now off the judgment table. I would think very few constituencies, possibly including only teenage boys, would object to there being social consequences when a bratty 15-year-old fails to act like a gentleman, but we've thrown the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak, and boys will now be boys.

To be sure, there are some good points to the reduction in shame accompanying teenage pregnancy, first among which I think is that the "father" almost never shared in it equally. This isn't just a blame proportionality thing but more insidiously resulted in girls bearing an unfair share of the burden of ensuring against pregnancy. (They still do, as far as I know, but it used to be worse when there were consequences.) But all this being said, I started by saying this observation was being made in the spirit of Jane's post, and it is: I have no desire to argue that we should or should not stigmatize teenage pregnancy more than we do, I'm just observing that I think that is the cost reduction that's most contributed to abortion.

At the personal level, it's a quandary. My seven year old daughter, for example, knows even now that she can't possibly do anything that will make me think badly of her (to her credit, she hasn't yet taken advantage of this, I'm bracing for it in her teen years). The challenge will be making her understand that even given this, irresponsibility leading to pregnancy is absolutely not acceptable. Maybe I'll have to impress upon her that the guy will be found beaten to within an inch of his life in the ditch outside his home, hoping that's enough to dissuade irresponsible behavior.

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