By Mike Tront
Abortion is a tough subject. Both sides have a strong case and both sides make valid points. This is not going to be another article about whether or not the government should outlaw abortion, or whether it should be up to the individual states, but I just want to answer this question:
What would it look like if the federal government outlawed abortion?
Like all laws, it will be broken. Just because the government outlaws something, it doesn’t magically stop happening. The first consequence of this ban would be that otherwise law abiding and tax paying people will be jailed for a long time.
But how would we know who is getting abortions? Abortions are much like drug and prostitution “crimes.” When those “crimes” happen, there’s no victims to report the “crime” like a murder, robbery, or assault. Under this law the fetus is the victim, but the parents and doctors involved in the abortion won’t report themselves. So how do we know who is getting abortions? How do we enforce this ban? We would need some sort of government agency for abortions for the same reasons they have a DEA and ATF.
For an effective ban, the first step is that every pregnancy would have to be registered with the government. When a woman goes to the doctor and finds out the good news, that doctor would be bound by law to report this pregnancy to the new federal department along with all the Mom’s information. Without this intrusion, how else can they effectively find out who is getting abortions?
But it doesn’t stop there.
Every birth right now is recorded with a birth certificate and nearly every baby is given a social security number. But with the abortion ban in place, every birth would also have to be registered federally in the baby database to be matched against all reported pregnancies. If you got entered in this database when you got pregnant, but 9 months later there isn’t a birth, you’ve got a problem. Now the agency has cause to believe you may be guilty of an abortion.
Unfortunately miscarriages are a terrible fact of life. It is a tragic, private matter. With this law though, it’s now a government matter too. After all, how do we know this wasn’t intentional in some way? How do we know you didn’t have an abortion and call it a miscarriage?
For any kind of abortion ban to work, EVERY miscarriage would have to be scrutinized and investigated.
If you have miscarriage symptoms and you go the doctor and find out your worst fears are true, what happens next? Can the doctor simply take care of you? Not with this ban in place. There would need to be a government agent at every hospital and doctor’s office for this very case. This government agent would need to verify that there was no foul play involved here before you can be treated. Basically a coroner for fetuses. Without this integral government agent, there would be a huge loophole. Any pregnant woman could collude with a doctor to get an abortion and just call it a miscarriage. Who would know otherwise?
Like all government police agents, it is their job to find guilty people. If an agent has been on the job for a year and hasn’t found one suspicious miscarriage, do you think he’ll still have a job? Hell no. It is his job to find guilty people and he will do whatever it takes to beef up with arrest numbers. Police who don’t bust people don’t keep their jobs. If you happen to be a doctor, or a patient who suffers the misfortune of a miscarriage, be prepared to be treated and questioned like a criminal.
Like all government bans, there are going to be unintended consequences. In this case, a huge federal bureaucracy would have to be created to track every pregnancy in the United States. There would be massive costs. Like all government programs, mistakes would be made, data entered incorrectly, and people will be prosecuted who are guilty of nothing except for being incorrectly entered in a database or suffering the misfortune of having a miscarriage.
The question we never ask ourselves is this: If we’re willing to get the government involved in something, are we willing to live with the intrusion to our privacy, our wallets, and our freedoms that will inevitably follow?
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