Anonymous asked:
I’m actually unsure what the effect of the marginal Republican on abortion rates is. Republicans tend to make abortion harder to get, but they also tend to reduce access to birth control, which increases the rate of abortion. As someone who has mild pro-life sympathies, I’d much rather everyone have access to long-acting and effective birth control. (I’ve put this in practice myself– I have the implant.)
I think if I were a single-issue voter on abortion, I’d vote for Republicans. When I was writing this post on preventing abortions I didn’t find evidence that the Democratic abortion prevention strategy of “better sex ed and contraception availability” is really … doing anything? (Not that I’m sure it isn’t, just that I haven’t seen convincing evidence that it is.) Whereas the Republican strategy of “shut down all the abortion clinics in the state” or whatever they do does seem kind of effective.
But even if abortion is morally equivalent to murder, I don’t think it dominates everything else to the extent that you should be a single-issue voter. PEPFAR is estimated to have saved 400,000 lives a year, for only like 5% of the US foreign aid budget. (Compared to 700,000 abortions a year in the US.) If we devoted a bit more money to effective foreign aid, or if some of our foreign aid spending were redirected to more effective things, that could way outweigh abortion. PEPFAR was started by a Republican, but Democrats are generally more in favor of increased foreign aid.
You could argue abortion is the most important state-level issue, so you should vote Republicans for statewide office. Though of course animal agriculture is another issue that’s mainly decided at the state level, and there are 9 billion chickens killed for food in the US every year so