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Comment by colemannugent | Hacker News Reader

I see this argument made quite frequently online and I don't get it. Isn't it obvious that more people think the state should prioritize preventing murders over helping people raise their children? Isn't the debate over the beginning of life more contentious than the debate over whether we should help raise other people's children?

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The issue is the hypocrisy of ensuring that a mother delivers a potential baby and simultaneously removing the social safety net that ensures it will be cared for once it arrives (even if she isn't financially able to).

Many of us don't believe abortion is murder, so we think that it should be left to the woman involved to decide whether her life circumstances are appropriate for raising a(nother) child. If anti-choicers want to insert their own beliefs into someone else's very personal decision, it seems only reasonable to expect them to take some responsibility for the effects of that insertion.

It's because preventing crime ought to include reducing motivation for committing the crime. It's not like before Roe v Wade no abortions happened, and availability of abortions in Canada is probably even easier now than then. If we truly want to prevent abortions, we might want to address some of the causes, which include poor access to birth control and very low state-mandated support for new mothers compared to other wealthy countries.

I've argued in other places that cutting funding to planned parenthood is likely to increase rather than decrease abortions due to the improved access to birth control that PP provides.

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