The cost of pro-life

[Munkers]

I was debating with someone today and did a bit of number crunching which was, frankly, pretty astounding.

I'm sure that every lifer would be ecstatic to see abortions halt tomorrow. Based on 2005 rates, that's an influx of 800,000 little people which would lead to a 19% increase in the annual birthrate. We usually see ONE percent increase from year to year.

Further number crunching revealed an approximate ADDITIONAL cost of $5.6 billion (that's B as in boy, folks) in labor and delivery costs alone. Which, by the way, is a figure I computed using the average cost of normal, uncomplicated vaginal birth and does not include the cost of additional anesthesia or the cost of care for the newborn's hospital stay.

So, we're looking at BILLIONS of dollars to just... what? Make magically poof into existence?


It really troubles me that so many people are working toward this end and don't have the slightest clue what they would do if they were ever successful. The person I was debating with suggested additional taxes, but seriously? Americans are foaming at the mouth with the taxes they pay now. How the hell are you going to get that type of increase past them? (Which honestly, I would imagine would be more along the lines of $50 billion or more to offset costs of both mother and child AND cover the influx of children into the foster care system since, these are children who would have been aborted otherwise, and I'm assuming that a large number of those women forced to birth have no interest in parenting.) It's just goddamn astounding.


Source for hospital costs from 2005
Birthrate for 2005 (used for consistency in data)  

[MipsyKitten]

Lifers always love to bring up the tax issue. They spout on about how they won't pay taxes that help pay for womens' health, but they'll suddenly pay for millions of unwanted children, and their mothers? I don't think so. Then again, they're not known for their logic.

I also love how they conveniently forget that those babies won't be babies forever. Those babies will become toddlers who'll have to teach with a crowded public school system. They'll then have to deal with the job market. In 20 years, how are we going to deal with all those people trying to find work? People think we have a problem now, what's going to happen when the number of people looking for work explodes? Again, they don't think about the future. As long as all those dirty women aren't getting abortions, they don't care how things end up for the people involved.  

[Fran Salaska]

I too find it funny that they haven't figured that one out yet.

/sigh  

[Munkers]

I actually worked on the numbers some more trying to figure out everything that would need to happen to support that sort of population increase. I came up with $29 billion as a starting point over the first 18 years. (With about $10 billion of that being needed in the first year alone.)

Munkers

Assuming that only 500,000 of the 800,000 births are relinquished for adoption (which I think it's a pretty damn conservative estimate, given the situation) it would be another $5 billion to care for those children in the first year. This site states that approximately 120,000 adoptions occur in the US each year. So now we still have 380,000 children to find homes for in addition to the children that were already in the system. For every child that remains in the system til age 18, it's another $100,000 (cost of raising a child to 18 minus the first year cost which I already stated). Let's be optimistic and say that half of those remaining children eventually find homes. Of those left, you would incur $19 billion in expenses.

So now we're sitting on a figure of $29 billion which still doesn't include the actual cost of placing any of these children, adoption subsidies, newborn care, additional infrastructure needed to deal with this influx of people (which I don't even want to think about the cost associated with that), and goodness knows what else cause we're really just skimming the iceburg here, and we're supposed to accept this as the responsible answer?

Later that night I decided to do some reading about schools per capita in the US and what it costs to build another one. Came up with another $5 billion just to build the additional needed elementary and middle schools. Never got around to figuring out how many high schools would be needed and the price tag on that and didn't even consider trying to figure out staffing needs, electricity/water/sewage, textbooks, and I don't even know what else.

Also didn't examine the housing situation.

And, obviously, because I'm not an economist or anything, didn't look into seeing how this would affect assistance programs like medicaid and WIC.

But seriously, if someone like me who has little, if any, working knowledge of what it takes for the government to support bringing another person into the world can come up with that kind of figure with just a few hours of searching, then that should be a serious wake-up call.

I am deeply frightened by this possibility. And just as scary is the fact that lifers just... don't care. Either they secretly believe that they'll never pull it off or they've successfully graduated from misogyny to misanthropy.  

[LadyInWhite]

Anyone seen any reaction from the antis for this? I think it is important that they see it.  

[Munkers]

LadyInWhite

Anyone seen any reaction from the antis for this? I think it is important that they see it.

The individual I was debating with shrugged it off with, what boiled down to, "Hur hur, we just had a tax bailout this is small potatoes." He then went on to b***h about how it was all just "layman speculation" and was therefore meaningless, but refused to offer up any sort of solutions because he "wasn't an economist" OR address the issue that it does, in fact, take money to put people on this planet. rolleyes

I know that Ottery used my post in a debate recently and I think the reaction was about the same. (She even had the misfortune of running into the same idiot lifer that I had been debating with.)  

[Jaaten Syric]

Drake isn't that bad if you know how to deal with him. Granted, I hate debating him too, pedant that he is... I'm currently trying to get him to see that this argument that in a pro-choice world we might have to deal with things like (eventual) human extinction isn't comparable because, in the lifer example, the increased birthrate (and everything that comes with it) is a direct result of the policies lifers want enacted while his relies on outside elements swaying the population, not as a direct consequence of legalizing elective abortion. Expectations are low...  

[Munkers]

For awhile debating with him wasn't bad at all. It was actually a rather pleasant change from the lifers I used to deal with in the ED. But then I made the point about "sudden influx of humans=big deal" and things quickly went down the drain.  

[ottery]

Munkers

LadyInWhite

Anyone seen any reaction from the antis for this? I think it is important that they see it.

The individual I was debating with shrugged it off with, what boiled down to, "Hur hur, we just had a tax bailout this is small potatoes." He then went on to b***h about how it was all just "layman speculation" and was therefore meaningless, but refused to offer up any sort of solutions because he "wasn't an economist" OR address the issue that it does, in fact, take money to put people on this planet. rolleyes

I know that Ottery used my post in a debate recently and I think the reaction was about the same. (She even had the misfortune of running into the same idiot lifer that I had been debating with.)

Yeah, he kept side-stepping the question and saying that he wasn't equipped to make a decision about compensating for the influx of kids. I just wanted to scream, "Then what makes you think that you can decide what women do with their bodies?!?!?"  

[Munkers]

ottery

Yeah, he kept side-stepping the question and saying that he wasn't equipped to make a decision about compensating for the influx of kids. I just wanted to scream, "Then what makes you think that you can decide what women do with their bodies?!?!?"

Well obviously it's because dealing with a woman's body is so much easier than economics. A woman has a uterus and those make babies so what else is there to understand? rolleyes