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Kivektanna wrote:

Thank you for the input everyone! Getting to know both sides of the argument is always quite enlightening. How would you guys feel about funding more extensive sex education programs, rather than banning abortion as a method of lowering the abortion rates?

I think the effect would be very marginal compared to a ban, talking about, in what I think would be an extremely optimistic situation, maybe a decrease of up to a quarter (I think it would be far less than that and may not decrease at all) compared to a ban that would likely cut rates 80-90% or more at minimum. An argument could be made for more extensive sex ed on its own merits, but I do not think there is any situation in which it is an actual replacement for a ban on abortion.

The flip side of it is that for me, and many others, abortion ought to be illegal on moral grounds even if it cannot be effectively enforced. My comparison is usually that of rape: imagine that you lived in a society in which it is not illegal to have sex with another person without their consent, and a proposed solution was increased education, or increased welfare, or something of the sort. Could they help reduce rape rates? They very well could-but there is something fundamentally wrong with a society that allows rape to be legal, and in the same sense there is something fundamentally wrong with a society that allows killing an unborn child to be legal. You want there to be less of them, but that's a bit hollow if a person is not legally protected from either having sex forced on them, or having a scalpel and forceps forced on them.

There's probably not universal agreement on that point among pro-lifers, but I think it is a strong majority opinion. We very much want to reduce the rate of abortions, but we also see it as critical that life is legally protected. Legal protection of unborn children happens to be the most effective way to reduce abortion rates, which helps the two goals go together nicely.