Editor,
The arguments made in favor of anti-abortion legislation range from offensive to absurd. For the remainder of this letter, however, let us neglect the audacity of our society, legal system and state-sponsored Christian doctrine to dictate to a woman what she can and cannot do with her own body. We will consider only more concrete issues.
Those responsible for our nation's legislation clearly cannot seem to grasp the wider socioeconomic implications of outlawing abortion. They are not the parents who will be forced to give birth to and raise a child they did not want. They will not grow up in an unfit living situation, or with parents uninterested in raising them. And they are not the teenage mothers who will have to forgo a high school or college education in order to take on the responsibility of raising an unwanted child.
There has been little, if any, mention of the infrastructure required to support the backlog of children created by anti-abortion legislation, either due to being unwanted or as a result of unfit living situations. Will an orphanage system be funded for every major city? Will adoption agencies be federally compensated in order to increase capacity? Anti-abortionists claim that they are saving lives, but what kind of lives are we creating for these children? Are we as a society willing to accept the economic implications of anti-abortion legislation? Have we even fully considered them?
It may be particularly pragmatic to bring up the critical problems our world is facing with regard to overpopulation, but I will do so nonetheless. Is humanity so foolish and conceited as to think that the Earth's resources will continue to sustain our exponential population growth? China, realizing the dire need to control population growth, imposes a limit on the number of children a family may have. Since Americans have historically had a problem with governmental imposition, wouldn't it be logical for us to at least honor the wishes of those individuals not wanting to bear children?
Put simply, anti-abortion legislation is a thinly-veiled and ill-thought out attempt by the conservative Christians in our nation to impose their particular value system on the rest of us.
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Ironically, I do not consider myself to be a supporter of abortion rights, per se. I support life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, however each individual - not our Legislature - defines them to be.
Ahmad Douglas
UNM student
