Does Abortion Prevent Child Abuse?
One argument for legalized abortion is that it would prevent unwanted children from being born, and therefore prevent child abuse.
When people argue against abortion, they often hear that abortion is a blessing because it prevents unwanted children from being born. These unwanted children, we are told, would be abused and neglected if they were brought into existence. Putting aside for the moment that abortion itself is child abuse, that it is killing a child that already exists and is growing in the womb, statistics do not show that abortion reduces child abuse. It is a myth.
For one thing, the rate of reported child abuse has risen exponentially since abortion was legalized in the 1970s. While it may be true that child abuse is more frequently reported now than it was 30 or 40 years ago, surely we would see some reduction in the numbers if it was true that abortion was preventing children from being abused. At the very least, we would not see such an incredible increase.
Studies have also shown that it is wanted children, not unwanted children, that are more frequently the victims of abuse. Around the time that people were first debating whether abortion should be legal, a pro-choice publication attempted to prove a link between unwanted children and child abuse. However, they were unable to prove correlation. According to the writeup in Eugenics Quarterly magazine:
“There is a contention that unwanted conceptions tend to have undesirable effects… The direct evidence for such a relationship is almost completely lacking, except for a few fragments of retrospective evidence. It was the hope of this article to find more convincing systematic research evidence and to give some idea of the amount of relationship between unwanted conception and undesirable effect on children. This hope has been disappointed.”
This quote appeared in E. Pohlman. “Unwanted Conception, Research on Undesirable Consequences” Eugenics Quarterly, volume 14, 1967, P143
Even a pro-abortion publication, with all the bias that the authors of the study brought to the table, was unable to confirm a link between unwanted pregnancies and child abuse.
It has been suggested that many people who have unplanned pregnancies and originally don’t want the baby grow to love the baby after the baby has been born. Other women put their baby up for adoption and he or she goes to a loving home. It may be the parents of wanted, planned babies that have high expectations for their children and become angry when the children do not fulfill them. They may turn abusive when this happens.
According to a paper put together by the Rocky Mountain Psychological Association, most women who gave birth to a “unwanted” child later say that they are glad they have the child and would go through the pregnancy all over again to deliver them. According to the authors of the study:
“”It is clear that mothers who initially believed their pregnancy to be “the worst thing that ever happened to them” came to feel about the same degree of affection for their children as the mothers who were initially “ecstatic” about the pregnancy.
Most women who were most regretful of the pregnancy now claim that they would have the child again if given the opportunity [whereas] one of every six mothers who were initially pleased with pregnancy would choose not to have the child again.
[They conclude]… Initial feelings about pregnancy are predictive of how a mother will eventually feel about her child only to a very limited degree.”
P. Cameron et.al., “How Much Do Mothers Love Their Children?” Rocky Mt. Psychological Association, May 12, 1972
Child abuse is more frequently related to psychological issues in the mother and/or the father rather than how much the baby was wanted before birth. Most abusive parents were abused themselves as children, others have extreme stresses in their lives or poor coping skills which make them more likely to mistreat their children. It is been suggested by some psychologists that abortion itself may increase the amount of child abuse that goes on. A culture that discards babies before their birth does not value children after their birth. Those who’ve grown up feeling that abortion is acceptable, that one can get rid of the child who is therefore disposable, may lack maternal feeling for a child that is born. After all, most people intuitively realize there is not that much difference between a baby a month before birth and a month after it is born. In addition, women who have abortions may have unresolved issues of guilt that may lead them to abuse children later in life.
Abortion does not solve the problem of child abuse. Rather, abortion is a form of child abuse. Look at this picture of an 8 week-old unborn baby:
