About Miscarriages
The National Institutes of Health report that the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists estimate as many as 26% of all pregnancies end in miscarriage and up to 10% of clinically recognized pregnancies end up in miscarriage. Maternal age is a big factor. For mothers from 20 to 30 years old, the miscarriage risk before 20 weeks is estimated to be 8.9%. For women over 40, this increases to 74.7%. The risk of miscarriage in a future pregnancy is 20% after 1 miscarriage, 28% after 2 consecutive miscarriages, and 43% for 3 or more consecutive miscarriages.
If you are facing these statistics, hoping that you will be an exception and you won't miscarry, put your faith in God and trust in Him. God can give you children after a miscarriage. He can even give you many children after a miscarriage. You can look at women in the Bible who were thought barren who later had children. Many of these women may have miscarried many times, which probably wouldn't have been recorded, but ended up having the child or children that God wanted them to have.
For those against abortion who say life begins at conception, are you saying these struggling women should be thrown in jail for murder or involuntary manslaughter? Of course not. That's how ridiculous your position is for those women who have chosen abortion.
About Live Births
There is a cost to the mothers to carry a child to term and deliver it. According to the CDC, in 2020, 23.8 mothers out of every 100,000 died during childbirth in the United States. That's an awful statistic. It has been trending up since 2018 where the rate was 17.4. I'm not sure whether this was due to Covid-19 or not, but the rate in 2019 was 20.1 so it isn't a good trend.
Giving birth is dangerous. Age is again a factor. In 2020, for mothers under 25, 13.8 out of 100,000 died. The rate worsened to 22.8 if the mother was in the 25-39 age range. It shot up to 107.9 for mothers 40 and over. Race is also an issue, undoubtedly due to access to health care. White women do better. Non-Hispanic black mothers do worse. Hispanic mothers who are young do the best. Rates for the next older age range of Hispanic mothers are slightly worse than white mothers, but the oldest group of Hispanic mothers do slightly better than their white counterparts.
The emphasis to carry your child to term in order to not have any abortions does have a real cost to mothers.
How Many Kids are Born With Birth Defects
Sadly, not every child is born without problems. It is estimated that about 3% of all babies born in the United States each year have birth defects of some sort. A child is born with some sort of birth defect every 4 1/2 minutes. You can look at the tables at the CDC which break down the specific defect as seen in the Atlanta area, and can read about what each birth defect does.
Modern medicine can take care of many of these for some cost. The CDC reports that hospital costs for U.S. children and adults with birth defects runs $23 billion per year, not including outpatient care or many provider charges.
Some cannot be fixed by modern medicine. Some are more common for older mothers. Lower birth weights and preterm births are also noted as a factor. Some are more common in families with particular genetic problems. On my father's side of my family, cystic fibrosis was an issue. An uncle, some of whose children had cystic fibrosis, was willing to be tested to check what defect my family tree was cursed with, and I was able to be tested to see whether I was a carrier, which fortunately I wasn't. But genetics and birth is never a sure thing.
In the particular Atlanta study, clubfoot appears to be the most common, affecting 1 in 593 births. Down syndrome is second, affecting 1 in 707. I pointed out cystic fibrosis, because it isn't even in the table of birth defects. The 3% number is just the number of major structural or genetic defects, and just in the United States. The report says that for the period from 1978 to 2005, the risk of each defect was relatively stable. Birth defects are responsible for 1 in 5 deaths during the first year of life.
Should Christians be full of the Holy Spirit and should anyone with a child born with a birth defect be able to rely on the church to get their child healed. I think that might have been God's plan for the New Testament church, along with healing of many other things. Sadly, it hasn't happened. Before criticizing people about choosing abortion, when the outcome isn't in any way certain, ask yourself if you are doing what you should to be full of the Spirit and working with the gifts like the apostles.
I know or at least used to know a family with an autistic kid and have known another autistic kid through my kids. I've known a family with a child with Down's syndrome. One of my daughters works in a day care with many special needs kids. My heart goes out to them and every other parent and child who have any sort of birth defect. I wish my faith or someone's faith and the work of the Spirit and God through Holy Spirit baptized believers was sufficient to heal and restore all that is wrong. But we aren't at the level that Christ worked at by any stretch of the imagination.
It is true that not everyone who was around Him was healed just because He was near. But the Bible doesn't record any instance where someone came to Him for healing and didn't get that healing. The church needs to step up, and the anti-abortion wing of the church needs to realize that until this is fixed, they have no right to make someone else play the genetic roulette wheel and handle the consequences by restricting access to abortion or making it illegal. It takes a special spirit from God to handle a special needs kid. Few have it, and even those who do have a struggle much of the time.
About Abortions
So let's talk about the abortion statistics themselves. In 2020, it is estimated there were 620,000 legal abortions in the United States. That's down significantly from the peak in 1990 of 1,429,000, but seems to have roughly stabilized over the last five years.
I suspect that the number will go down as access to abortions is restricted or made illegal in many states - some even going so far as to make it illegal to travel for an abortion. More illegal abortions will occur with their higher risk of infection, permanent injury, and death being inflicted on mothers who feel there is no other option, which was one of the primary reasons Roe vs. Wade was settled law for so long - to get rid of such nonsense. But for now, we'll work with that as a base number.
In 2019, 120,869 children were legally adopted. A declining percentage of these are inter-country adoptions. The stats are around 2% as of 2019. Combining that with 620,000 abortions, we need to place roughly 740,000 children per year, each and every year. So, for the "Choose adoption instead of abortion" group, let's talk about what to do with these kids each and every year. Realize that 3% of these, or 18,600 to 22,200 may have birth defects, so they will be about impossible to place. The range is depends on your assumption of 120,869 being healthy and thus adopted or the 3% applying to everyone.
We had roughly 325 million people in the United States in 2020. Clearly, not all of them are able to adopt due to age. I generally wouldn't grant any adoptions at 19 or under unless mom and dad both died and a son or daughter wanted to raise the rest and was of legal age - there are always some side cases. When you consider people 20 to 24 years, they could probably adopt, but are very unlikely to. It's getting so you could say that for the 25 to 29 year group as well as we are marrying later and probably won't be looking to adopt until we see if we can have our own families. So let's guesstimate that 50% of that group would be a definite no for adoption as well. Using these admittedly debatable assumptions, that eliminates 113,724,500 people or so.
Sometimes old folks have to adopt. My boss's daughter was killed in a car wreck and he adopted his granddaughter. But I'm sure their family thought they were done with kids a long time ago. So let's cut out everyone who would be retired by the time the potential adopted child graduates high school. That's everyone in the available tranches 50 and above assuming a retirement age of 67, although again 45 to 49 years old would be iffy for adoption so we'll take out 50% of them as well. Eliminating the older group removes another 126,586,500 people from the pool. So you're down to roughly 84,689,000 potential adoptive parents - either married or single.
In 2020, the prison population was 1,137,410 men and 83,754 women, so take them out of the pool since they can't have children in prison with them. We're down to 83,467,836 folks. Since all the pro adoption and anti abortion group would prefer them to be married, that theoretically halves the selection - although the male/female mix isn't exactly 50/50, not everyone is married, not everyone is or isn't ... fill in the blank for whoever you don't think should be allowed to raise a child. These numbers are just a sample of the biggest pool we can get. Optimistically 41,733,918 "couples", and again, this is very optimistic.
There are a huge chunk of these folks who either don't want kids at all - an admittedly newer thing to be seen in so many people, or are married with families of their own with no desire to add to the family - which would describe my family. Recent statistics would seem to indicate that there are one to two million couples who would like to adopt a child in the United States right now. So that works out to only maybe 2 to 5% of the couples who are willing to go down that route. Maybe if the cost was less, the process was easier, the insert optimistic thought here were true, that percentage would go up. But the reality is that raising someone else's child is definitely not people's first choice. The foster care system is overloaded already.
So what do these numbers mean? Assuming the numbers are reasonably accurate, then about 6 to 12% of the couples who want to adopt a child have a child available each year. Since the number of available children is so low, many couples or families have to wait for an extended period, especially if they don't have the money to help grease the skids. This is one reason why you hear the anti-abortionist tout adoption, because it is true that right now, there aren't enough kids to fill the need for all who want to adopt.
If we had no abortions, and everyone who was looking to adopt was able to do so, then in one year, that would change to 37 to 74% of the couples who supposedly want to adopt getting their child assuming an unrealistic match up of sex and race and everything else. In two years, 74% to 100% would have their child with potentially 480,000 kids who were homeless if the range is really one million couples. In three years, everyone would have a child that wanted one with potentially 1.2 million children left over (and a minimum of 220,000 children left over). We'd have to build more orphanages. Yes, in three years a few would like to adopt again, and there would be some more couples who would enter the mix. But any way you cut it, 740,000 people is a lot to expect adoption to absorb when only 2 to 5% of couples want to adopt. As great as it sounds, it's an unrealistic solution year after year after year.
You can argue my math all you want. 740,000 people is a lot to absorb into a population where only 2 to 5% of couples are looking to adopt.
Think of the Children
This is a phrase bandied about by many people. Politicians are frequent users as the powers that be want to snoop on everything going on, so they issue the cry to "think of the children..." as something that might be a palatable way to make that happen. The founding fathers could power the Eastern seaboard spinning in their graves over the willful ignorance of Bill of Rights.
But in the abortion realm, there really isn't anything else you can think of. We don't live in ideal world where there are no rapes, is no incest, birth control is always used and never fails, birth defects never happen, and mother's lives are never at risk. Would that that sort of ideal world were really here.
Every child born deserves at the very least to be wanted by their mother and hopefully by their mother and father. They deserve to be brought into a world where their parents can afford to raise them without sacrificing the care of their siblings, if any, or sacrificing the health and well being of the parents. For too many children, this is only a life dream, even now, with abortion a reality. How many children will fall into this category if state legislatures get their way and abortion becomes impossible to obtain for increasing numbers of women who can't afford to take time off work to go out of state or who are surrounded by other states where abortion is also restricted and can't afford air fare. Yes, air fare is cheaper by far than the cost of raising a child, but it is still out of reach for many young people.
So as abortion restrictions increase, so will the number of children who are really unwanted and as the numbers above show, may not be able to be adopted and won't have any room in a foster care system that is already overburdened in many or possibly most parts of the country. To grow up unloved and unwanted is a horrible burden to bear. If we think that the membership in gangs and a high suicide rate is bad now, just wait.
Some parents don't think they can handle kids, but find out that they can, and turn out to love them. This doesn't describe every parent or every family though, and it probably never will.
I know that we have lots of problems in this country. One of them is, in fact, a declining birth rate, with the country currently on the margin of not having either enough babies or immigrants - legal or otherwise - to replace our dying population. That has lots of impacts on supporting the older people with Social Security payments, running and staffing hospitals and nursing homes for that group, and just buying things in our retail driven economy. But the problem of no more abortions will, I fear, push us way too far in the other direction.
Any way you look at it, abortion is a thorny problem without really easy solutions, no matter what the anti-abortionists would like to believe. I hope this has given you something to think about. Whatever you end up feeling, I hope you can at the very least do a couple of things for me. Don't judge the single moms and dads. They need your help and support. And don't judge those who have elected to have an abortion. Whatever their reasons were, they are in fact their reasons and not any of your business. Christ said "Judge not, that ye be not judged." in the Sermon on the Mount. It's a good command to live by. And by all means before you criticize or picket or berate someone in the abortion industry, get your own life, your own house, your own church, and your own denomination in order. Christ also mentioned something about motes and beams in the same discourse.