“Here’s
Your SIGN”
Right to Lifers
Grammatical
note: Apostrophes are not allowed in a
URL, so the ‘ in here’s is omitted in the link.
Executive Summary
for people unable to read anything with more than the 280 characters in a Tweet:
Making abortions illegal will have
little effect on abortions by middle class, mostly white, women. It will result in an increase in the fraction
of children who are poor, and mostly minority, and also will result in several
hundred billion dollars per year cost to taxpayers.
I
took a trip to D.C., several months ago and was walking in front of the Supreme
Court building. I saw a bunch of people
with signs about abortion:
“God
is pro-life”
“Protect
the embryo”
“Overturn Roe v.
Wade”
I asked one woman
what would happen if she got what she wanted.
Her reply:
“No women will
have abortions, and people will use effective means of birth control. If the birth control isn’t 100% effective,
and a pregnancy results in an unwanted baby, there are lots of people who would
want to adopt the baby. And there won’t
be any significant costs to the taxpayers.”
Sure….
“Here’s
Your SIGN”
Right
to Lifers
For the background
behind the SIGN, go to
https://heresyoursignbackground.blogspot.com/2022/09/heres-your-sign-background.html
Now that Roe vs. Wade
has been overturned by the Catholic right-wing Republicans on the Supreme
Court, the SIGN will be even more richly deserved in many states. As columnist Marc Thiessen noted, “Millions
of precious unborn lives will be saved as a result of this decision.” Precious, indeed, to the tune of hundreds of
billions of taxpayer dollars per year.
Keep reading to see how precious these lives will be.
The reality
1.
Any middle class (most likely to be White) woman who wants to terminate
a pregnancy will still be able to do so after abortion is made illegal in her
state. She will easily be able to get
mifepristone and misoprostol (known as the abortion pills) by telemedicine from
another state or country (people are already using out-of-state address
services and anonymous mailing services for this purpose, as well as using out-of-country
doctors and pharmacies). It will be
impossible to intercept envelopes containing two small pills. Does anyone seriously think that California,
New York, Massachusetts, etc. will ban abortions? Alternatively, a cooperative doctor can
terminate a pregnancy by adjusting the coding of the procedure. Or a middle class woman can simply travel to
another state to terminate the pregnancy.
2. Who won’t be able to terminate pregnancies
safely and easily are poor women, mostly women of color (and mostly Black). Half or more of abortions are given to poor
women, and in some states the proportion is much higher. So if abortions become illegal in a state, middle
class women will still be able to terminate their unwanted pregnancies without
much difficulty. But it’s likely there
will be lots more babies born to poor women, again, mostly women of color. Such babies are unlikely to be adopted by
middle-class families. Most likely, they
will be raised by their birth mothers, with other relatives – and the
government! – pitching in.
3. The added, mostly poor, children will result
in large costs to taxpayers. A
reasonable estimate is that the annual cost to the government of a child is
about $15,000, mainly for schools (more than $10,000 per student) and, for poor
children, benefit payments, medical care, extra educational assistance,
etc. For a child from 0-18 years, the
total cost to the government is roughly $250,000. [Note:
this is roughly the cost to middle class parents to raise a child. It’s interesting that, to raise a child, the
cost to parents and the cost to the government are comparable.] When abortions
have been made illegal, and the number of added children is in steady state,
the cost of governmental services to these children is likely to be about $300
per taxpayer per year in Mississippi (see below). That is, the
additional children will cost each right-to-lifer hundreds of dollars per year. See below
for a simple sample calculation.
In short, what the
– mostly White – right-to-lifers will get from making abortions illegal is not
much change in the number of births or abortions by middle class White women, a
large increase in the number of births to poor women, mostly of color, and a
large increase in the cost of government.
Right-to-lifers richly deserve their SIGN!
A sample exercise
Let’s do a rough
estimate of what will happen in a state after abortions are made illegal in
that state. The calculation will be only
approximate, because there are often 10%-20% discrepancies in the data. We’ll also make the calculation be as simple
as possible for the benefit of the people with their SIGN, for example, using
2022 dollar values (not projecting to the future based on inflation), and we’ll
round off the numbers.
Let’s take
Mississippi as an example of what is likely to happen if abortion becomes
illegal. There’s no question that Mississippi
politicians will leap at the chance to make abortion illegal!
First, some
numbers:
The population of
Mississippi is about 3 million, with about 2 million 21 or older. There are about 37,000 births per year, about
50% White, 43% Black, and a small number of births to other races, which we
won’t bother including in these simplified calculations. There are about 3,000 abortions per year, 22%
of them (about 660) by White women, and 72% (about 2,160) by Black women. The number of abortions is about 8% of the
number of births.
What will happen
if abortion is made illegal in Mississippi?
A reasonable
estimate is that 2/3 of the White women (440) will still get abortions, so
there will be an increase of about 220 White children per year. A reasonable estimate is that only about 10%
of the Black women (about 216) will be able to have access to an abortion, so
there will be an increase of about 1,944 Black children per year. The total increase will be about 2,164
children per year, which is about 6% of the current number of births. The increase will be about 90% (1,944/2,164)
Black children and 10% (220/2,164) White children, increasing the proportion of
Black births to about 46% and decreasing the proportion of White births to
about 48%.
Government
expenditures on these 2,164 children will be about $32 million per year, using
the figure of $15,000 per child. This
amounts to about $16 per adult in Mississippi.
The $32 million cost of these additional children will be result in
higher taxes and/or fewer government services (roads, average school funding
per student, fire and police protection, etc.).
However, this is a relatively small cost – if there were only 2,164
total additional children. And there
will be only a relatively few additional children in the first few years after
abortion becomes illegal.
Where the
additional children become expensive is after several years of abortion being
illegal. After 18 years and after that
(steady state) the number of additional children under age 18 will be about
39,000 (2,164x18), about 8% of the total number of children. At $15,000 per child per year, the total cost
to the government will be about $585 million, or about $290 per adult in
Mississippi. This $585 million cost to
the government is a large enough figure to result in significant tax increases
and/or decreased government services.
One can argue that
a significant portion of the costs of these additional children will be paid by
the federal government (federal contributions to school costs, Medicaid,
benefit payments, etc.). However, the
direct costs to the taxpayers of Mississippi will still be substantial.
On a national
level, there are about 900,000 abortions per year (Mississippi has an abortion
rate lower than the national average).
If there were a national ban on abortions, let’s suppose the actual
number would go down about 75% (about the same as the projected decrease in
Mississippi), meaning there would be about 700,000 additional children born per
year. The cost to taxpayers per year for
these 700,000 additional children would be about $11 billion per year
(700,000x$15,000). When a steady state
is reached after about 18 years, the cost to taxpayers of these additional 12,600,000
children will be about $200 billion per year, about $600 for each of the 330 million people in the U.S..
What’s the non-stupid answer?
The answer, as was
said many years ago, is to make abortions safe, legal, and rare. “Rare” begins with effective contraception,
especially for younger women. Government
funding of IUDs for women would be likely to be the most cost-effective
government program in history. Here’s a
link to a somewhat amusing take on this idea:
If there were easy
access to and education about effective birth control, the number of abortions
would be likely to plummet to almost-insignificant numbers. The number of abortions performed by humans
would be only a tiny fraction of those due to The Great Abortionist, a.k.a.
God, since it’s estimated that somewhere between 1 in 10 to 1 in 2 pregnancies (the
fraction depending on details of the criteria for pregnancy) end in God-caused
abortions, which are also known as miscarriages.
What’s the “Maybe they’re not stupid” thinking/alternative?
A reasonable
possibility is that the politicians pushing making all abortions illegal know
very well what the reality is, including the long-term costs. However, the long term isn’t important to such
politicians; all that’s important is the next election. As noted above, for the first few years the
financial costs of abortion bans will be small because there will be relatively
few additional (and mostly poor) children born.
The additional costs become large only after ten or so years. So if such politicians can cynically use
abortion to fire up their base and get themselves re-elected, it doesn’t matter
to them what the long-term consequences are.
In the long term, these politicians expect to have moved on to greener
pastures, leaving their followers holding the bag and their SIGN.
