Texas College Republicans’ Ignorant Abortion “Debate”

Democrat Youth vs. Republican Youth

I recently came across an interesting post by David Jennings offering an obviously biased comparison of a young Texas Democratic blogger versus a Republican one. Jennings concluded that politically conservative kids of my generation seem to be smarter and more moral after he hopped onto a pretty popular conservative bandwagon by picking on a viral article posted by UT Austin (Hook ‘em!) blogger Ben Sherman (Bro-Choice:How #HB2 Hurts Texas Men Who Like Women). Sherman argues against the controversial abortion bill’s provisions for stricter “regulations” saying that the bill (1) incentivizes black markets for unsafe abortions, (2) effectively intrudes on women’s legal choice, (3) increases chances for unwanted pregnancies, and (4) makes sex a generally riskier proposition both for men and women who are unprepared for parenthood. Of course, conservatives like Jennings are simply enraged by Sherman’s audacity: they’re choosing to ignore pretty much his entire article to just ask readers about that one last point — how dare this man even consider the interests of those evil liberals who engage in casual sex outside of marriage? Who cares if sex becomes a riskier proposition?

Texas College Republicans on the Abortion Debate

I was about halfway through this assignment, when I decided I didn’t want to really write a defense of Sherman’s article — it does a pretty good job of standing on its own. I became curious about the other article that Jennings had only barely mentioned in his so-called “clear contrast”. I figured that my political reading could use some healthy conservative influences and if that failed, maybe I could try performing some Jennings-style commentary bashing. And so I turned to this political commentary by Texas State University student Kristopher Infante: “TexasCollege Republicans on abortion debate – let’s make it safer for women”. The article is really well-written and I actually think that a few of the questions it raises are pretty though-provoking — is five months really not enough time to make an abortion decision? I personally made it a fully one-third of the way down this conservative article before I started laughing.

A Bit About the Texas Bestest Blogger...

If you’re reading this blog post, I think you should probably know two things about me, but if you think you’ll be fine without know those things, feel free to skip this section. Anyway, the first thing is a bit of a disclosure: I completely admit that I actually have yet to thoroughly study the conservatives’ so-called “make it safer for women” arguments. The second thing is that I come from a pretty medical family — though I am considered a bit of a disappointing outcast because I’m working on a business degree instead of going to med school — I’ve spent enough time around my uncles and aunts to develop some sense for judging new medical regulations that make headlines. When I read Infante’s rationale for holding abortion clinics to the same regulatory standards as ambulatory surgical centers (ASCs), I laughed but then immediately felt bad for it — maybe he simply did not have the time or resources to perform better research. Who am I to judge?

The Medical Case for Abortion Regulation?

Infante’s brief mention of ASCs essentially argues that ASCs meet regulatory standards for medical procedures like “colonoscopies, carpal tunnel surgeries, and ear tubes for children” the same way planes do (Huh?). Of course, Infante probably did a better job of connecting colonoscopies to plane crashes than I just did, but the basic idea seems to be that regulatory standards are necessary for safety, whether it is 30,000 feet above the ground, or a few inches into a colon. That almost sounds reasonable — except that colonoscopies are not exactly performed at ambulatory surgical centers (emphasis on the word “surgery”: by definition, those surgical centers usually take in patients who are at least slightly knocked out by some anesthesia over the course of the procedure). 

Acronym Soup: The ACOG, the AMA, and the THA on Abortion Risks

Of course, since I am just a business major, you don’t have to make my word for it. Science-based opinions from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), the American Medical Association (AMA), and even the Texas Hospital Association (THA) all concur that there is no medical case for the sort of regulation that Texas Republicans are calling for. Infante’s colonoscopy mention became doubly funny to me because a quote by the chair of the Texas district of ACOG specifically uses the example of colonoscopy to highlight the oddness of the new law: “The regulations are much more stringent than for other surgical procedures at similar risk, such as a colonoscopy.” Sorry district chair, your sarcastic statement is falling on deaf ears: it is abundantly obvious that members of your audience have no idea what the medical risks of an abortion or a colonoscopy are. In case anybody needs any clarification, the physicians agree that the risks are extremely low in both procedures — so is Texas just trying to eliminate an already-low risk through these regulations? Is Texas so concerned with its women’s health that it wants to eliminate even the tiniest risks to their health?

Cost-Benefit Analysis of Eliminating Abortion Risks

As a business major, I can at least talk about the idea of cost-benefit analysis of risk elimination with some degree of confidence: when the risks resulting from a highly beneficial procedure are extremely low, the costs of mitigating those risks usually outweigh the benefits of mitigating those risks. In other words, it’s not worth eliminating a beneficial procedure if its risks are extremely low while the costs of eliminating that procedure are high. Armed with these relationships between cost, risk, and benefit, we can analyze how much the so-called abortion safety provision is worth. For this analysis, we will have to plug in a few variables into the relationships described above: (1) we have to consider how beneficial abortions can be to the women seeking them, (2) we have to consider what costs the new provisions will incur and which parties will have to carry those costs, if there are any, and above all (3) we will have to keep the extreme lowness of the risks in mind: more than 99.97% of women who have legal abortions do so without any serious complications. 

The Benefits of Making Legal Abortion Readily Available
In our analysis of the “benefits” of abortion, we have to remember that the safety regulations are purportedly intended to protect abortion patients, and not to prevent the “murder” of a fetus (but the 20-week time limit is there for that, right?). Keeping this consideration in mind, we can simply list some of the possible benefits of abortions for the mother and father of a fetus. 

Couples with a family history of severe or fatal genetic disorders can terminate unwanted pregnancies. Women who are too young or too old to carry an unplanned pregnancy can terminate the pregnancy and slash possible health risks to themselves and the unborn child. Women who do go through with unintended childbearing have higher rates of depression while their children have lower quality relationships with their parents — abortion eliminates all that. I won’t even detail societal benefits: more manageable population growth, decreased societal healthcare expenditures, possibly fewer welfare children, possibly fewer women unwillingly forced out of the workforce, and so on — I mean, how consequential can such benefits really be?

The Costs of Making Legal Abortion Unavailable
Moving on, let’s see a great example of how economic incentives are passed down economic chains the same way that costs are passed down supply chains. We obviously consider the fact that the new regulations would massively increase costs for doctors performing abortions in Texas because they literally call for doctors to spend money to upgrade their facilities in a way that the doctors know is not necessary. That is, the regulations will create an economic incentive for many doctors to quit offering abortion services rather than take on the additional costs. The safety regulations effectively eliminate the availability of a beneficial clinical procedure.

In turn, this will create a cost for Texas women: fewer places will offer abortion services in Texas. Of course, places that do remain in business will face less competition and will easily pass on their additional costs to their patients. These additional costs will create an economic incentive for many prospective patients to quit seeking legal abortion services. Some women will seek illegal abortions while others will go through with unwanted pregnancies. The neat thing about studying the costs and benefits of abortions is that they flip very easily: the costs will include more unwanted children suffering from severe disorders, more irresponsible parents made parents too soon, more depressed mothers and children, less manageable population growth, increased healthcare costs, and so on. 

The Cost-Benefit Verdict: The Regulations Make No Sense
Finally, we now return to the relationships between risk, cost, and benefit. My casual economic logic suggests this: the regulations seriously raise many types of costs for medical professionals, their patients, and Texas society as a whole, but maybe they do manage to reduce the risk of serious complication that about 0.03% of abortion patients face (actually, the physicians agree: the new regulations do little to affect the already tiny risks). From a strictly cost-benefit point of view, the “let’s make it safe for women” agenda makes no sense even if it reduces the tiny percentage of risk involved in abortion. As a matter of fact, the regulations probably make it more dangerous for women, couples, and society as a whole. When complications associated with actually giving birth are way more frequent and serious than complications resulting from legal abortions, perhaps Texas would be better off regulating childbirth. Let’s make it safe for women, right? Of course not. Messrs. Infante and Jennings, could you possibly have a nonscientific reason for supporting the abortion safety regulations? Hmm...

The Real Reason for the “Women’s Safety” Regulation

I think that when the abortion regulation provision ends up in courts, as it inevitably will, the debate may bear striking resemblances to the Texas voter ID case: courts consensually established that a voter ID law that allegedly lowered Texas voter fraud really just disenfranchised minority voters. Similarly, so-called safety regulations are really just there to place an unbearable economic pressure on small clinics around the state to either upgrade or shut down their services for the sake of pseudoscience. Infante’s article is probably one of the better written conservative blog posts on the subject, but it still serves the same audience — an audience that passively looks for others to merely reconfirm its preexisting convictions, and not one that would look here, and here, and here to read about physicians’ recent statements on the safety of medical abortions, and most definitely not one that would read up on real medical research produced by established medical professionals. Nevertheless, maybe it really is wrong to blame and laugh at Texas Republicans who grow up to confuse surgeries that require ASC regulations with one of the safest medical procedures possible — after all, Texas is the home-state of an education board that openly dislikes scientists, historians, and any other “experts”.

How the Abortion Debate Should Be Held

All joking aside, I honestly do not think laughing at and bashing other Texans’ political opinions offers any productivity or meaningfulness to policy debates. However, I also do not think that the most divisive political issue for members of my generation can be handled productively when one side is pretending to “make it safer for women.” We all know that the debate is really about the rights, or lack thereof, of a fetus that is not viable outside a mother’s womb, and the definitions of terms like murder, citizenship, and rape, and the duty of the government to act for the greater good of the public. We also know that the other side of the debate is about the Constitutional rights of a mother to choice and privacy, possibly tremendous economic benefits to society, and the duty of the government to only act for the greater good of the American public. It is about time that Americans began arguing more honestly and more productively when it comes to such serious and contentious issues.