Wow, now that I think about this, such an insurance policy makes sense even if people aren't going to abort.
I'm not sure I understand. Are you suggesting an insurance policy that pays out if you get pregnant or give birth?
Normally insurance policies are taken against unwanted events. If you have a policy that pays out in case of abortion, that makes sense to the insurance company because if you're willing to abort, you probably tried to avoid the pregnancy by e.g. using contraceptives.
But if you have a policy that pays out in case of something that is generally wanted (ETA: by those doing it) - giving birth - then people would take out the policy only if they do want to give birth. Then the percentage of people with the policy who get paid would be near 100%, and the insurance company would make a loss on the policy, so they wouldn't offer it.
Yes, I hadn't thought about that. (And there's no obvious way of proving that you're using contraception to the insurance company, so you can't even have a policy that pays only if you are.)
(Not sure about "generally wanted", though: I guess that, among the people who are having sex today (in the developed world at least) the fraction who are trying to have a baby is much less than 1.)
EDIT: Maybe it could work if restricted to demographics who wouldn't normally want a child (say, unmarried, below a certain age, and with income below a certain threshold) -- though the premiums mustn't be so large that people would want to get pregnant only for the money.
Or is the convention against discussing politics here silly?
I propose a test. I'm going to try to lay down some rules on voting on comments for the test here (not that I can force anybody to abide by them):
1.) Top-level comments should introduce arguments (or ridicule me and/or this test); responses should be responses to those arguments.
2.) Upvote and downvote based on whether or not you find an argument convincing in the context in which it was raised. This means if it's a good argument against the argument it is responding to, not whether or not there's a good/obvious counterargument to it; if you have a good counterargument, raise it. If it's a convincing argument, and the counterargument is also convincing, upvote both. If both arguments are unconvincing, downvote both.
3.) Try not to downvote particular comments excessively, if they're legitimate lines of argument. A faulty line of argument provides opportunity for rebuttal, and so for our test has value even then; that is, I want some faulty lines of argument here. If you disagree, please downvote me, instead of the faulty comments, because this post is what you want less of, not those comments. This necessarily implies, for balance, that we not excessively upvote comments. I'd suggest fairly arbitrary limits of 3/-3?
Edit: 4.) A single argument per comment would be ideal; as MixedNuts points out here, it's otherwise hard to distinguish between one good and one bad argument, which makes the upvoting/downvoting difficult to evaluate. (My apologies about missing this, folks.)
I'm going to try really hard not to get personally involved, except to lay down a leading comment posing an argument against abortion, a position I don't hold, for the record. The core of the argument isn't disingenuous, and I hold that this argument is true, it just doesn't lead to my opposing abortion. I do not hold the moral axiom by which I extend the basic argument to argue against abortion, however; I'm playing the devil's advocate to try to help me from getting sucked into the argument while providing an initial point of discussion.
Which leads me to the next point: If you see a hole in an argument, even if it's an argument for a perspective you agree with, poke through it. The goal is to see whether we can have a constructive political argument here.
The fact that this is a test, and known to be a test, means this isn't a blind study. Uh, try to act as if you're not being tested?
After it's gone on a little while, if this post hasn't been hopelessly downvoted and ridiculed (and thus the premise and test discarded as undesirable to begin with), we can put up a poll to see whether people found the political debates helpful, not helpful, and so on.