Countering Pro-Abortion Arguments 19

If we restrict abortion, it will be the poor that suffer. The rich will always be able to get abortions.

• Basic response: “No, the poor will not suffer. Abortion is not a good thing.” However, elaboration is needed for the casual listener to understand the underlying “poor will suffer” premise. Here, not having abortion legally available is equated to suffering. Thus the illicit idea “abortion is good” (at least if legal) is implied.
  
• Let us compare abortion with drug abuse:
  • If cocaine availability were restricted, through perhaps superior interdiction, its price might increase to $2000 an ounce. As a result, only the rich could then afford it. Here one would not say, “If we restrict cocaine, it will be the poor that suffer. The rich will always be able to get cocaine.”
    
  • If states could make drug usage legal or illegal, would the poor in “drug-free” states suffer? The rich could always go to “pro-drug” states and purchase “safe, legal” drugs. But the poor would be “forced” into getting unsafe, illegal, “back alley” drugs, right? Obviously, this argument is valid only if drug abuse is a good thing. The poor would not be disadvantaged by being unable to travel to legal drug areas. The reason, of course, is that drug abuse, legal or not, is wrong. Abortion, like drug abuse, is inherently wrong.
    
• Even equating suffering to having back alley abortions as ones only available abortion option is untenable. This would merely mean that being capable of breaking the law in only an inefficacious fashion (here, due to poverty) is a type of “suffering.” Wealth and power will always make breaking the law easier. This does not mean that the law abiding poor are victims.
  
• Restricting an evil does not cause suffering to those who can no longer procure it.
  
• The ones who will suffer are the preborn of the rich whose right to life will be harder to secure.
  
• The action of killing a preborn baby accomplished through personal wealth is a gruesome abuse of money. Those not capable of killing their babies due to poverty are only being prevented from committing an evil.
  
• Protection vs. restriction:
  Anti-abortion laws are seen very differently by pro-lifers and pro-abortionists. What pro-aborts consider “restrictions on women,” pro-lifers see as protections for preborn children. This brings up an interesting question: when is a protection a “restriction,” or more pointedly, to whom? Obviously, a protection is only a restriction to an aggressor, one who would do another (or oneself) harm.Thus, in regard to abortion, our efforts to protect babies is a restriction only to those who would kill/harm babies. A protection for a preborn child is a restriction only to someone who would harm that child.