Opinion: Root Causes and the Abortion Issue

By John F. Di Leo, Opinion Contributor

What is the abortion issue?

Put simply, it’s the question of whether or not the law should allow an expectant mother to hire someone to kill the dependent infant growing within her body.

But there’s more to it than that. In addition, the issue requires determinations on who should have a say in the decision – the future grandparents if she’s underage, the father if they’re married, the father if they’re not married.

The issue also requires societal decisions on the licensing of who can perform such an operation, and whether it should be allowed anytime in the nine months or only during some early, limited period. Should the abortuary be limited in whether and how they dispose of the remains? And what should be done if the baby survives the procedure?

Some politicians – primarily on the pro-abortion side – try to pretend there’s only one question: whether or not to allow the woman the freedom to choose. But more honest analysists recognize how complex it is, and try to think through all these difficult aspects, rather than just shutting down the argument and giving all the freedom and power to the abortuary.

These have been the political and societal questions for fifty years, as not just Roe v Wade, but the interpretations and common enforcement of Roe v Wade have caused an entire gruesome industry, the abortion industry, to establish itself as an embarrassing distant cousin to the medical profession, and as one of the nation’s primary political campaign finance and lobbying machines.

Since the long stalemate of Roe v. Wade was overturned by the Dobbs Decision, turning the issue back to the states (it never was constitutionally a federal issue to begin with), the Democratic party has made abortion their single biggest issue, not just for fundraising, but for campaigning and fearmongering, both in the 2022 election and now in the 2024 election as well.

Permitting abortion on demand – and more often than not, unlimited, taxpayer-funded abortion on demand – has become the top issue of many state level Democrat candidates. And yes, it is true that Republican candidates generally hope to at least partially if not largely restrict abortion – though not in as overwhelming a majority as the near-unanimity of Democrats on their side of the issue.

But there is a further question we need to ask.

Democrat candidates like to talk about the “root causes” of issues. The root causes of poverty, the root causes of crime, the root causes of illegal border-jumping, the root causes of world hunger. Whether they’re right or wrong about the issue, they say they want to talk about its root causes.

But they don’t want to talk about the root causes of abortion. I wonder why.

Why does a pregnant woman consider abortion?

There are rare occasions – incredibly rare – known as the “hard cases” – when the baby is the result of rape or incest, when the mother is so young, so sick, or so drug-addicted that doctors agree she could not successfully handle a pregnancy, or when the baby is so frail, so sick, that the baby cannot survive anyway. All tragic situations, and the pro-abortion politicians would have their voters believe they were the vast majority of cases, but in fact, the hard cases are less than one percent of the abortions.

In fact, abortion is overwhelmingly for the reasons one would expect: The mother is poor and scared. Or the father isn’t in the picture. Or the father is in the picture, and he’s the one demanding that she abort. Or the father just doesn’t want to get married. Or one or both parents is dirt poor and without prospects. Or the neighborhood is so bad, or so dangerously crime-ridden, or the local schools so awful, that she cannot imagine raising a child there.

So, the politicians and the teachers and the people at Planned Parenthood tell her to abort.

Sometimes they’ll even add “You’re young; you’ll have plenty of chances to get pregnant later, when you’re ready. You can wait ‘til you’re 25, or 30, or 35, when you have more time, more money, better conditions. Just get rid of this one, now. Because now isn’t the time.”

And yes, abortion seems like a quick, easy solution. It costs money, and there are often after-effects – “complications” is the euphemism – but it seems so easy. Nobody talks about saddling the young woman with a nagging guilt for the rest of her life; she doesn’t find out that such dreadful regret is the norm until afterward, when it’s too late.

But back to the root causes now. Abortion may seem to solve the immediate problem of a challenging pregnancy. But does abortion address the root causes?

No.

Perhaps the girl doesn’t have a boyfriend or husband with whom to raise a family. Will this abortion solve that problem? If her problem is that she has the wrong boyfriend now, how will getting an abortion solve that problem and turn him into a good boyfriend, or help her replace him with one who wants to be a husband and provider? Does this abortion help with this issue, or does it make her already bad situation worse?

Perhaps the girl is from a bad neighborhood, and doesn’t want to raise a child in squalor, in crime, in surroundings that might involve bugs or stink or abuse. That’s understandable – an honorable thought, in fact – but does the abortion solve the problem, or just keep her in that neighborhood, in those conditions, for the long term? Should our goal be helping her get out, and into a better neighborhood?

Every situation is different; no one should claim that a single, simple pronouncement will solve these problems. But it should be abundantly clear that having an abortion doesn’t solve any of the problems that led the woman to choose that abortion.

So the next question, the important question for a campaign season, is this: Where do the two parties – the two sides – whether you call them Republicans and Democrats, or conservatives and leftists, or Americans and statists – really stand on the underlying issues, the root causes?

The Democratic Party has spent fifty or sixty years, but especially the last ten, easing penalties on crime, releasing convicted criminals from jail or not prosecuting them at all, filling the neighborhoods with criminals who ought to have been behind bars. The Republicans favor prosecution of rapists and robbers, drug pushers and abusers, and locking them up to remove them from the neighborhoods. If the girl is afraid to raise a child in a crime zone, shouldn’t part of our goal be ridding our cities of crime?

The Democratic Party has spent fifty or sixty years encouraging all forms of sexual libertinism – popularizing the hookup culture, undermining the traditional morals of sexual restraint. Republicans may take some hits on this for being stodgy or hypocritical, but at least the Republican approach – dating leading to marriage, teaching sexual restraint in Sunday school and at church and synagogue – is the way to reduce the deadbeat dads out there, the way to build a society in which a man who finds his girlfriend in this situation will do the right thing.

The Democratic party has spent fifty or sixty years, but especially the past thirty or forty, driving American manufacturers to foreign shores. This reduction of good jobs with broad career paths has caused the economic stagnation that so many people suffer. The combination of high taxes and crushing regulations, of a crippling litigation system and suicidal unionization, have caused the job opportunities to dry up that this young mother and her boyfriend or husband so desperately need. The Republicans stand for the economic growth that creates those opportunities. The Republican positions are the path to prosperity that this young mother – and her child – are silently crying out for.

The Democratic party, through everything from rent control, high interest rates, oppressive property taxes and unconstitutional appliance restrictions, has made housing costs skyrocket in recent years. Young couples are afraid they can’t find affordable housing, and they’re often right; Democrat policies have filled up the affordable housing with millions of illegal aliens, leaving only the unaffordable housing available. Republicans are working to close the border, to bring our housing stock, our job stock, our healthcare, utilities, and other resources, into line with our population. It’s not exciting, but these Republican policies get at the root causes; Democrat policies just make those root causes worse.

What of the schools? The Democratic party has spent a century, but especially the past ten years, undermining the curricula of our school systems. The bigger and denser the city, the more lawless the school and the more shabby the coursework. In cities like Chicago, there are dozens of schools at which not one single student – not one – can read at grade level. Republicans are fighting this problem, but the cities only elect Democrats, keeping Republican solutions at bay. Democrat policies reward teachers unions for helping their politicians get elected; Republican policies reward teachers only when they help their students attain a future.

On issue after issue, cause after cause, one thing is clear: Republican policies tackle the root causes of the abortion debate. Democrat policies leave the root causes in place, keeping abortion an all-too-frequent choice for young women in trouble.

These aren’t simple issues. Some are complex, painful, heart-rending.

But politics is a serious business, and voting is the most serious of all. As we go to the polls, we must ask the tough questions, and respect wherever logic takes us.

When a young woman wants to abort her baby – or when she’s pushed to do so by people or conditions – the Democrat position is to end it there, and dig no deeper into the motivation.

By contrast, the conservative positions recognize that the young woman has a point – there may indeed be difficult conditions, from housing to schooling, from crime to economics – and the conservative is working to address those conditions.

There is an old saying, popularized a generation ago by Speaker Newt Gingrich, regarding the difference between the conservative and the liberal: The leftist considers it a victory when he helps put more people on welfare; the conservative considers it a victory when welfare recipients succeed in life and no longer need welfare.

The tragic political and cultural issue of abortion can best be viewed in a similar frame: The leftist considers it a victory when a woman gets an abortion; the conservative considers it a victory when the conditions that drove that woman to the desperation of abortion no longer exist, and she and her husband can happily welcome that new life into the world, confident of a bright, safe, and happy future ahead.

Copyright 2024 John F. Di Leo