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Comment by bibanez | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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.

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. :)

>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.

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

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