On Roe vs. Wade...Room for improvement?

Roe v. Wade had nothing to do with abortion. It never dealt with the central issue of abortion legality--is the fetus a living human baby or simply a clump of cells?

What Roe v. Wade was about was who had control over a woman's body, the woman or the government. Overturning Roe v. Wade would not actually outlaw abortion, it would simply give the government the choice of either keeping the fetus/baby or aborting it.

That is what Republicans are pressing for now because they know the government is willing to side with life. The government has a vested interest in growing our population, as we need more workers and we need more soldiers.

What Republicans aren't paying attention to is that we are also headed toward an overpopulation problem. It is expected to be here by 2050 at the absolute latest, well within most of our lifetimes.

And overpopulation may change the government's priorities. If the government starts believing that society can no longer maintain the population growth, they may decide to start trying to lower the population. One way they may choose to do that is to try to lower birth rates; in other words, go to forced abortions.

If Roe v. Wade is overturned, the government would be given the legal right to force a woman to abortion and the mother couldn't say jack about it. So we need to leave Roe v. Wade in place.

What we should be doing to lower abortion rates is to leave the choice up to the woman, but provide education to young girls and women on how to avoid pregnancies.

This would include abstinence education but also birth control methods and their effectiveness. That way a young girl is not doing something incredibly stupid like the highly ineffective methods of withdrawal or the rhythm method. She knows that condoms and diaphragms are only 97% effective. And she knows the higher danger of embolisms, ayneurisms, strokes, and heart attacks that are associated with birth control pills.

That way she knows what risks she is taking, and their effectiveness. We also want to teach young girls and women who have already made the mistake what options are available to her. Things like putting the baby up for adoption, or help programs like welfare and Medicaid should she choose to keep the baby.

We should also provide support groups to both the girl and her family so that we can enlist the support of her family whenever possible.

And finally, we should be expanding education for young men so that they don't do the stupid thing either. Teach them abstinence, birth control methods, and how to stand up and be a man if he gets a girl pregnant.

One must remember that no one aborts a wanted pregnancy; so we must lessen the number of unwanted pregnancies, and show girls why they should want the pregnancy even if it is a mistake. Hopefully that will lead to far fewer abortions and far more responsibility.