When women can’t get abortions, what happens to the children they birth?

• Group 1: children born because women were denied abortion.
• Group 2: children born to women who were not seeking abortion.

• Group 1: children born because women were denied abortion.
• Group 2: children born to women who were not seeking abortion.
• Group 3: children aborted.

It was with this mentality that I read the above article and its underlying study; while it’s interesting to compare Groups 1 and 2, the backdrop is always the comparison between Groups 1 and 3. How do children born to women denied abortion fare compared to children aborted? They fare better. Because they aren’t dead.

I’m not trying to be glib here. From the perspective of people who believe prenatal children deserve protection, this whole study is like asking “How do poor children fare compared to middle class children?” or “How do children with developmental delays fare compared to children without delays?” or “How do children raised by single mothers fare compared to children raised by stably married parents?” Those are all questions worth studying, but they take a much darker meaning if the suggestion for improving aggregate child outcomes is to kill all the disadvantaged children.

FB shareable version here or see a similar dichotomy here.

When women were denied legal abortion, the vast majority of them birthed their children. Contrary to the common pro-choice talking point, preventing women from getting legal abortion doesn’t simply push them to get dangerous illegal abortions. In this study, of the 195 women turned away from abortion clinics who completed all the study’s interviews, 2% miscarried, 23% obtained abortions elsewhere, and 75% gave birth. (This result dovetails with the many studies that find abortion restrictions decrease abortions.) Of the women who gave birth, 90% raised their children themselves (compared to the 10% who chose adoption).

Mostly the kids fared just as well either way. This study defined “index children” as children born to women who were denied abortion and “subsequent children” as children born to women who received abortions and then birthed a child in the ensuing 5 years. By most metrics, index children had the same outcomes as subsequent children.

Index children were no more likely than subsequent children to experience:

• premature birth
• low birth weight
• admission to NICUs
• physical disabilities
• asthma
• household incomes below the federal poverty level
• receipt of public assistance (WIC, TANF, SNAP)

• be breastfed
• achieve the same mean scores on developmental milestones
• reach the following specific developmental milestones:
  • fine motor skills
  • self-help skills
  • social emotional skills
  • receptive language
  • expressive language

The two groups did have some differences, though. Index children were slightly less likely than subsequent children to achieve gross motor milestones. They were more likely to have been injured (mostly accidents and falls) in the last 6 months. Index children were less likely to live in households with the mother’s male partner and more likely to live in households with other adult family members.

Mothers of index children were more likely to report they struggled in the last month to afford basic needs (75% of index mothers reported this struggle compared to 55% of subsequent mothers). Index mothers were also more likely to struggle to bond with their children. In her article, Foster elaborates:

Women are also much more likely to report poor maternal bonding — feeling trapped as a mother, resenting their baby, or longing for the “old days” before they had the baby — with the child born after abortion denial than with the next child born following a wanted abortion.

Specifically the study found that 9% of index mothers reported poor maternal bonding compared to 3% of subsequent mothers. This difference is substantial but the statistic also still indicates that over 90% of mothers bond just fine to the children they weren’t able to abort.

It’s also noteworthy that the study doesn’t measure whether women raising index children retrospectively wish they had gotten abortions instead. Struggling to bond with your child is not the same as wishing your child didn’t exist. All parents experience resentment and frustration at some points or others, but that doesn’t mean we wish we weren’t parents or wish our kids weren’t our kids.

[March 2021 update – Other data from the Turnaway study indicate 96% of women denied abortion no longer wished they could have one five years later. This stat would include even most of the women who reported struggles with maternal bonding.]

Of course we don’t want children to grow up in harsh circumstances. While the circumstances of a child’s birth aren’t fate for the rest of the child’s life, they are still a major influence. Ideally all children would be conceived in circumstances where their parents are as prepared as possible to best care for them. Fewer unintended pregnancies mean not only fewer abortions but also fewer births and less child-rearing in difficult situations, which is why preventing unintended pregnancy should be easy common ground.

Still, we don’t share the pro-choice view that it’s better to help a woman get a wanted abortion and birth a different child later than it is to try to protect the child she is already carrying. We can’t share that view because we believe that:

1. Prenatal children are morally valuable and deserve protection and care;
2. Killing innocent people who have no say in the decision is immoral, even if it’s ostensibly done to prevent their future suffering; and
3. It’s a mistake to assume a child born of a denied abortion will deeply suffer for it anyway.