Roe Roe Roe your boat, Wading for Godot

First, nobody likes abortion. Necessary and inevitable evil, no matter what you'd like to believe.

Second, here's a list of things that don't stop when you make them illegal: abortion, alcohol, tobacco, drugs, prostitution, gay marriage, being transgender, and no doubt a host of other moral issues that only become crimes when we make them so, as opposed to robbery, arson, mugging, burglary, and so on.

That first list is also an excellent list of things that should not result in people going to jail. When we create crimes out of moral issues, we create criminals out of normal people. When we banned alcohol consumption and drug use, we created and enhanced organized crime. Can't wait for them to get involved in the illegal abortion industry that will inevitably spring up. They did such good work with fentanyl. The War on Terrorism was a marvelous success, too. The coming War on Abortion will be a fabulous sequel.

We also create, or rather perpetuate and enlarge the existing police state in America. 

It has been and in many ways continues to be a police state for the poor and homeless, for undocumented immigrants, black men, women, boys and girls. It is not quite the terrorist state that it used to be during slavery and Jim Crow for black families and communities, though our hyper-militarized police departments are open to suggestion.

It will now be a police state for pregnant women who seek abortions. Not, of course, for the men who got them pregnant.

Many of us are fine with arresting women who have had abortions and the providers of those abortions, Many of us are appalled.

What should we do about abortion? Look at the example of those nations which have seen a great decrease in abortions without banning it. In general, they teach their teens how to have responsible sexual relations via easily obtained and affordable contraception. Some in America think that encourages teens to have sex, apparently ignorant of the reality that teens are already having sex, as they always have been and will continue to do. The way to decrease abortions is to decrease unwanted and accidental pregnancies. 

Regardless, these are some of the consequences of ending Roe vs. Wade in America that we need to prepare for:

Witch hunts and roving bands of enforcers.

Spying and informing on our neighbors just like people in police states do. You know. Communist dictatorships.

Underground railroads and unqualified, dangerous abortion providers.

Since richer, whiter girls will be able to travel to get abortions in states and countries where it's legal, poorer, browner or blacker girls will be having a disproportionate number of poorer, browner, or blacker unwanted babies.

Increased poverty.

Increased crime, since poverty tends to produce higher crime as a result, especially since we have reduced the safety net to almost nothing.

More single, unwed mothers living in poverty, more kids living in poverty, more street kids, more graffiti, crime, garbage, encampments. Many more kids growing up in fatherless homes.

Higher welfare costs. Higher taxes. With a majority population increase among the poor, there will not be a commensurate rise in tax payers.

Increase in numbers of minority voters, in minority citizens, minority communities. The minorities will become the majority. Some will struggle with that.

Increased need for more schools, more prisons and jails, more police officers. More taxes.

Pressure on infrastructure - more traffic, more congestion, roads and bridges wear out quicker. More taxes.

Increased need for affordable housing, pressure on emergency rooms and medical care in general.

More unplanned marriages between young people caught by unplanned pregnancies, more bad marriages, more spousal and child abuse within bad marriages, more divorce, more single parent homes, more poverty.

Higher mortality rates among mothers and infants.

Explosion in children given up for adoption or abandoned, explosion in need for adoption, more foster care needs.

Increased pressure on food, water, energy resources at a time of food, water and energy crisis.

Kids without families tend to grow up to be adults without homes. Increase in homelessness when we are in crisis already.

Increase in suicides by pregnant women and by unwanted children. Increase in depression.

Increase in child prostitution and sex trafficking.

Increase in violent gang activity.

The women most likely to have unwanted pregnancies will be those least likely to be able to get an abortion and least likely to be able to care for the children that result. Child neglect. Need more social workers. Higher taxes.

Abortion tourism to states and countries that allow abortions. Police state tactics when those abortion tourists return home.

Headed towards Gilead? There will be no balm.

Further FYI - abortion is not in the Bible, where injunctions against divorce, adultery, idolatry, and mistreatment of aliens are often found.

Jeremiah 1:5? That's a verse about Jeremiah, not about the rest of humanity.

Psalms 139? Poetry that is lovely, but we cannot ignore the fact that many many of those in the womb were not "fearfully and wonderfully made." Stillborn, miscarried, born with hideous deformities or devastating mental and/or physical abnormalities. Poetry is not theological mandate.

Plus, in other passages, the life of an innocent fetus or actually living child is taken by God - Numbers 5:11-27 or so, 1 Kings 14:1-13, 2 Sam 12:13-19. God takes the lives of all the firstborn on the first passover. In Genesis 38:24, a pregnant woman is ordered to be burned, fetus and all. Hosea 16:13 says “The people of Samaria must bear their guilt, because they have rebelled against their God. They will fall by the sword; their little ones will be dashed to the ground, their pregnant women ripped open.”

And in Exodus:21:22-25 “If people are fighting with each other and happen to hurt a pregnant woman so badly that her unborn child dies, then, even if no other harm follows, he must be fined. He must pay the amount set by the woman’s husband and confirmed by judges. But if any harm follows, then you are to give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound and bruise for bruise." Loss of child, just pay a fine. Loss of wife, eye for an eye. 

From the Daily Kos: Back in 1979, writing in Billy Graham's magazine Christianity Today, a conservative professor from Dallas Theological Seminary wrote:

"God does not regard the fetus as a soul, no matter how far gestation has progressed. The Law plainly exacts: “If a man kills any human life he will be put to death” (Lev. 24:17). But according to Exodus 21:22-24, the destruction of the fetus is not a capital offense. … Clearly, then, in contrast to the mother, the fetus is not reckoned as a soul."

And if you start pointing to injunctions in the OT to set morality, then you quickly find yourself on a very slippery slope indeed.

Psa 137:9 Happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks. 

A charming verse indeed.

In another example, many would say that homosexuality is called an abomination in the OT, as indeed it is. But so is eating sacrificial food, eating any seafood without fins or scales, eating the eagle, and the ossifrage, and the ospray, or any bird that walks on four legs (?!), eating anything that creeps (yeah, I don’t even know what that means) or crawls on its belly (lizards? frogs? snakes?), sacrificing a flawed animal (now that’s a tough one all by itself), cross-dressing (there goes Halloween and costume parties), lying, pride, for kings to be wicked, justifying the wicked while condemning the righteous, and so on.

Nobody likes abortion. We all want there to be as few as possible. Making it illegal doesn’t work, won’t work, never has worked. Making it rare is the best way to go, and the way to do that is to educate people how not to get pregnant.