I haven't read the entire thread very carefully, but one obvious-to-me argument that I haven't seen raised is:
People will get abortions whether they are legal or not. If they are illegal, they will be much more dangerous; that means more deaths from "back-alley" abortions. More people will be criminals and that means higher law enforcement costs, jail costs, and/or crime rates, which makes your (city, state, not so much in the case of a nation) less desirable and hurts economic activity.
I believe similar arguments have been made on Less Wrong about the "war on drugs." Prostitution and gambling come to mind as other key examples.
I can imagine a time in the future when technology allows us to live in a world where abortions are unnecessary, since birth control of various types (plan B is a huge step in this direction) and simple laboratory fetus nurturing environments will displace it, but that time is certainly not here right now.
People will get abortions whether they are legal or not. If they are illegal, they will be much more dangerous; that means more deaths from "back-alley" abortions. More people will be criminals and that means higher law enforcement costs, jail costs, and/or crime rates, which makes your (city, state, not so much in the case of a nation) less desirable and hurts economic activity.
As of a few years ago, when we covered this in one of my classes, the average age of an abortion providing doctor in the United States was over sixty, because any doct...
Abortion is one of the most politically-charged debates in the world today - possibly the most politically charged, though that's the subject for another thread. It's an excellent way of advertising whether you are Green or Blue. As a sceptical atheist who thinks guns should be banned and gay marriage should be legalised, I naturally take a stance against abortion. It's easy to see why: a woman's freedom is less important than another human's right to live.
Wait... that sounds off.
I really am an atheist, with good reasons to support gun bans and gay marriage. But while pondering matters today, I realised that my position on abortion was a lot more shaky than it had previously seemed. I'm not sure one way or the other whether a mother's right to make decisions that can change her life trumps the life of a human embryo or fetus. On the one hand, a fetus isn't quite a person. It has very little intelligence or personality, and no existence independent of its mother, to the point where I am comfortable using the pronoun "it" to describe one. On the other hand, as little as it is, it still represents a human life, and I consider preservation of human life a terminal goal as opposed to the intermediate goal that is personal freedom. The relative utilities are staggering: I wouldn't allow a mob of 100,000 to kill another human no matter how much they wanted to and even if their quality of life was improved (up to a point). So: verify my beliefs, LessWrong.
If possible, I'd like this thread to be not only a discussion about abortion and the banning or legalisation thereof, but also about why I didn't notice this before. For all my talk about examining my beliefs, I wasn't doing very well. I only believed verifying my beliefs was good; I wasn't doing it on any lower level.
This post can't go on the front page, for obvious reasons: it's highly inflammatory, and changing it so as not to refer to a particular example would result in one of the posts I linked to above.