Abortion. Or Compulsory Pregnancy?

The problem of is usually seen as one of justifying a particular surgical operation on the assumption that great social loss is incurred by it. This approach leads to intractable administrative problems: rape is in principle impossible to prove, the paternity of a child is always in doubt, the probability of defective embryos is generally low, and the socioeconomic predicament of the supplicant has little power to move the men who sit in judgment. These difficulties vanish when one substitutes for the problem of permissive the inverse problem of compulsory pregnancy. The latter is a special case of compulsory servitude, which the Western world has agreed, in principle, has no valid justification. Unfortunately, state legislatures are now in a process of setting up systems for the management of compulsory pregnancy. The experience of Scandinavia indicates that women do not accept bureaucratic management of their unwanted pregnancies; therefore we can confidently predict that the reform bills now going through our legislatures will have little effect on the practice of illegal abortion. Only the abolition of compulsory pregnancy will solve the erroneously conceived abortion problem.