Comment by odysseus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by odysseus | Hacker News Reader

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Unpopular opinion, but I'd argue the last ~50 years of legalized abortion, with over 60 million lives lost, also accounts for a large percentage of the missing workforce. (Even more so when you consider the loss of their children and their children's children.)

> 18% of the workforce has been wiped out by abortion, and this number will climb to 23% by 2035.^1

> While labor force participation may rise in the short run due to mothers choosing to work instead of taking time off to raise kids, unrestricted abortion is likely to decrease labor supply in the long run. Since the Roe decision in 1973 an estimated 63 million abortions have occurred in the United States. If all of these aborted babies had been otherwise carried to term and survived until today, they would add nearly 20 percent to the current U.S. population, and nearly 45 million would be of working age (18 to 64).^2

(1) https://www.hli.org/resources/abortion-affect-united-states/ (pro-life site warning, but it cites sources including the Census Bureau and Planned Parenthood's own research arm, the Guttmacher Institute)

(2) https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/b8807501-210c...

Out of those 45 million, how many of those unwanted kids would end up getting enough education that they can participate in a modern knowledge economy? And how many would end up needing society's support to make ends meet?

Restricted abortion leads to the availability of plentiful cheap, low-level labor, but mostly not the sort of labor that the modern economy really needs.

Those are interesting question, but what are the answers?

Declining birth rates as a whole are to blame for this, not just abortion. Plus, legalized abortion helped reduce crime rates. https://law.stanford.edu/publications/the-impact-of-legalize...

Presumably, hormonal birth control, condoms, and allowing women to get educations and have careers has slowed population growth far more than legalizing abortion. That and just becoming a rich country. If we could have stayed more like Niger, we might have 2 billion people by now and wouldn't need immigration at all.

I guess that's what sucks about public policy. You have to pursue many goals and some of them may conflict with others.

Personal liberty and societies needs often conflict. I am happy we mostly choose to favor liberty and I am convinced in the long run this make a better and more productive society. Even if it isn't that is clearly the society I want to live in.

I can't see any systems in place for raising 60 million unwanted children. Would you be able to raise any yourself?

There's a gap between understanding the numbers and practice.

That's 60 million children missing over almost 50 years, or ~830K/year. But not all of these were "unwanted". Many women are pressured into abortion by abusive, manipulative, cowardly, and responsibility-shirking men.

As for the truly unwanted ones, ~33 million couples in the U.S. are infertile. There are untold thousands of families waiting to adopt. A few of them are listed at https://www.americanadoptions.com/family_profile/browse

As for me, I'm raising several children. My wife and I have considered adopting on top of that. I was adopted.

Steve Jobs was adopted. So was John Hancock. Nelson Mandela. Leo Tolstoy. Ray Liotta. Simone Biles.

In terms of economic and societal impact, I'd wager somewhere in those 60 million missing children, there were a few hundred kids that could have grown up and made a real positive impact on our lives. We'll never know how many diseases would have been cured by now, or Olympic medals won. Millions of lives. Just gone.

And women that want to can still go trough with pregnancy and adopt the child out if they want to. It is their right to choose if they want to dedicate 9 months of their lives to giving birth, including sacrificing their body and possibly going through the most painful and dangerous part of the lives. Made even more difficult now as many hospitals in red states are holding back needed medical care just so they don't get accused of supporting abortions.

It is certainly not our right to demand this so we can get cheap labor.

>But not all of these were "unwanted". Many women are pressured into abortion by abusive, manipulative, cowardly, and responsibility-shirking men.

So if they didn't abort, how exactly were these children going to be raised? By homeless single mothers now that the cowardly, responsibility-shirking men have left them?

You seem to think that preventing abortion will magically turn accidental parents into good parents.

>We'll never know how many diseases would have been cured by now

We'll also never know how many people who made big contributions would have been murdered by unwanted, abused, and neglected children who grew up to become criminals.

I agree it's difficult to care for an impoverished child. My mom was a single mother that was close to becoming homeless, and we both survived. There are many free resources for single mothers. (for example, WIC, a program that provides nutritious free food for Women, Infants, and Children)

But imagine a two-year old child in front of you. His mother is poor and feels she cannot care for him. He lives in the slums of a country where children cannot be adopted. Should his mother be allowed to kill him?

> We'll also never know how many people who made big contributions would have been murdered by unwanted, abused, and neglected children who grew up to become criminals.

It's probably true that if we kill impoverished unwanted toddlers, future crime rates could potentially decline. That doesn't make it moral to do so.

So basically you want to condemn countless women to being forced to living in poverty and raising children in poverty, while letting men off scot-free. Bodily autonomy means absolutely nothing to you, because to you, women's only real role in life is as an incubator. Nice values you have there.

Most of the sites I found were not primary sources and many were clearly cut & paste jobs to fill some content quota or something. All the same, from what I gathered, it sounds like about 100,000 children are adopted every year, and it is about half of those were due to step-parents adopting the children of their partner.

So say about 50,000 adoptions that are foster children or given up at birth. Who is going to adopt the extra 830,000 per year? Maybe those 33 million infertile couples? There are 400,000 kids in foster care right now and apparently those 33M are not jumping at the opportunity to adopt them.

Yes, some famous people were adopted. So were some terrible people. I don't see either one being an argument for or against.

I mean, if we're talking about what might've been then there are easily a hundred million lives lost each year to menstrual cycles in the US alone. Just gone. Think of how many Einsteins, Mozarts, and Davincis have already been lost to us! Abortion is <1% of this much bigger problem, practically a rounding error.

^This may sound ridiculous (I certainly think it does) but I think contrasting it with your post is a good thought experiment. Can you see any meaningful difference between your comment and mine? I can't, but I'd be very interested to hear your reasoning if you feel they are different somehow.

I don't know how I've not come across this specific argument/perspective in this conversation before. I'm stealing this for the future, thank you. :)

Interesting perspective, I see how my argument doesn't work. Still, I can't help but feel that forcing a woman through pregnancy is justified if it's not consensual... I hope the technology for artificial uterus is developped during our lifetime

Are you suggesting that abortion be illegal for the sake of maintaining a sizeable workforce?

Literally oppress and remove women's basic bodily autonomy so that Amazon can keep paying people $20/h

> Nearly 45 million would be of working age.

And how many of those would be well-adjusted productive members of society?

Population is not synonymous with workforce. Those potential children would have overwhelmingly been low cost labor. Flooding job markets with people is how we have work that doesn't pay what it's worth.

That assumes that people would not have changed their habits around sex and birth control. I've heard this is what has been happening in states that recently restricted abortion. Also there are illegal abortions, which have always been a thing. Women aren't stupid, they have always had options if they don't want to have kids. Birth rates go down everywhere with more urbanization and education. It doesn't pay to have kids like it used to when we were all farmers.

The difference is that bodily autonomy is good, actually.

The meta level is the last refuge of the scoundrel. Most arguments are best evaluated at the object level.

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