There has been a new (to me) pro-choice argument in the year of 2020. It goes something like this. If we ban abortions, we’ll be back to the 1970s when dozens of women died from illegal back-alley abortions.(1) Therefore, voting for Biden-Harris is actually the pro-life vote because pro-choice administrations support welfare policies that lead to fewer abortions.

Cute story, but it is not true. Abortions have steadily decreased under every president since H.W. Bush. This is due to a growing mobilization of the pro-life crowd to engage the culture. During the Clinton administration there is a huge drop, but it turns out that is because California decided to stop counting abortions.(2) Next in the data there is a reversal during W. Bush, which looks interesting until you realized that bump takes place during the housing crash, so again no real surprises there. So this idea is dumb and dead on its face.
But what if we ignore these facts and pretend the story was true? Would it be better to vote for legal abortions if it meant fewer babies were aborted.
No! because the pro-life argument is founded on principle not on a means-to-an-end.
For those who don’t know the principle: I believe the killing of innocent human life is murder. I believe murder is wrong (Exodus 20:13). I believe the fetus is a human life. Therefore, aborting the fetus is murder. It’s really that simple.
But what if we ignore the data on abortions and we also ignore the disconnect in principles. If the logic is sound then the proposed argument will work for other crimes. What if we could reduce the number of cases of burglaries, vehicular manslaughter, fraud, and lying under oath, just by legalizing them. Would we? No! Those are considered crimes because those acts harm or infringe on the rights of another person. These acts along with the act of murder are clear violations of the non-aggression principle ,“Don’t hurt people and don’t take their stuff.”
This brings me to the most interesting reason this argument is a load of bunk. And that is because I think libertarians have started to rub off on liberals. Now before anyone gets excited the argument manages to get the philosophy of libertarians completely backwards. That being said, I do find it interesting that this argument is presented in a very similar fashion to how libertarians push for the legalization of marijuana.(3) There’s only one small difference. Marijuana legalization is built on the idea that the majority of drug offenses are "victimless crimes.”(4)
This is kind of an important point (one might even call it THE point) since the only reason any pro-life individual cares about abortion is because they believe abortion is NOT. VICTIMLESS.
So to summarize, the data disproves the story. If one accepts the premise that abortion is murder then abortion is also not victimless and it should be illegal regardless of the statistics. So to be clear, there are zero pro-life reasons to vote for Biden-Harris.

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