A little while ago I wrote a piece for The American Conservative arguing that, based on what women who have abortions tell us about their reasons and what their income tells us about their means, it’s likely that a child allowance program would reduce the number of abortions taking place. This approach wasn’t so popular with people who tend to be opposed to welfare in general, though I was happy to see quite a lot of self-identified conservatives express some warmth to the idea. But I still found some of the critiques credible, and wanted to address one in particular here. It’s from the National Review Online, very courteous, and consists of two basic arguments:
However, high welfare benefits might also either encourage or enable more single-parent families, and a large number single parent families would further reduce the stigma toward premarital or extramarital sex. This might create a more permissive sexual culture, and one where abortions would happen more often.
That critique I’ll address as argument #1. Here’s argument #2:
Most importantly, there is not one peer-reviewed study which shows that greater spending on welfare or other social programs reduces the abortion rate. Some analysts point to lower abortion rates in European countries which tend to have more generous public benefits for low-income earners. However, the abortion rate in many of these countries is rising, while the abortion rate in the United States has been falling. Pro-lifers should certainly advertise the excellent work pregnancy resource centers are doing in meeting the needs of many women facing unplanned pregnancies. That said, expanding welfare benefits is a strategy that probably will be less successful than advertised.
Let me get this out of the way: this program is no different than taking Mike Lee’s reformocon child tax credit, making it refundable, and making it monthly rather than annual. All harms that would come with a refundable tax credit come with this; there is no distinction there. Similarly, as I’ll expand on below, this is a universal program, not a means-tested welfare program just for poor people.
Argument #1 presumes two outcomes: firstly, that the poor women who have abortions would elect not to get married if they had greater means from welfare; secondly, that the proliferation of single-parent families leads to to tolerance of pre-marital and/or extra-marital sex. I’ll treat each of these in turn.
When we talk about welfare interfering with marriage, we are usually talking about means-tested programs that terminate when a couple combines resources. This is the only condition in which a welfare program could actively discourage marriage: if the couple, by getting married, would be facing a net reduction in income. (A phenomenon sometimes called “hustling backwards”, or the paradox by which a person winds up worse off due to small gains in life situation/income — it’s a failure of the welfare system’s structure.) But the program I suggest is a universal program. It would not be means-tested. If anything, a man would be tempted to marry the woman because she would have by nature of the child’s custody a kind of guaranteed income. Since the child allowance is cash and not in-kind benefits (like food or clothes) a mother would be using it very wisely to, say, pay rent, and a man who might otherwise be on the fence about marriage would likely see a decent incentive for sticking around, i.e. stability.
Romantic? Not really, but with policy we can’t inculcate goodness into people. All we can hope to do is encourage or discourage behaviors, and the child allowance would not discourage marriage. This brings me to the second portion of his argument: that more single-parent families would encourage pre-marital and/or extra-marital sex. I’m not sure this would be true. If we look at polls among the poor, we see that a nearly identical (within the margin of error) low percentage of people say they never want to get married. This is true of all income brackets. 8% of poor, 8% of mid-income, and 6% of high-income people say they never want to get married, with a +/- 3 pt margin of error. The rest are either previously married, already married, or want to get married. But the wealthiest have the biggest chunk of already-married people at 51%; this is because, as many studies have shown, poverty is very hard on marriage.
Thus: even though pre-marital sex is hardly looked askance at these days, most people still want to get married. It’s just that there are stressors on the lowest income bracket that make the prospect challenging, which is why marriage promotion programs have not been beneficial to poor women. Instability and stress make marriage an unattractive option for poor women and poor men. My guess would be that a child allowance would make marriage more attractive precisely because it would relieve poverty and provide some stability. But even if it didn’t encourage marriage, it does not appear it could discourage it.
A more permissive sex culture? I doubt it — as I pointed out, the reality of extra-marital and pre-marital sex is something we now live with, and a state endorsing strong family values by offering a child allowance doesn’t appear to be the sort of thing that would induce a whole lot of libertinism. But even if it would, I’ll also posit that a fully refundable child tax credit, the darling of many reformocons, would do the same thing. (Some reformocons, to be fair, would keep the credit nonrefundable; others believe it already is refundable and like that about it.) Conversely, according to this author, if every unwanted baby were aborted and we saw next to no single moms, we’d theoretically have a less permissive sex culture. Presented with those odds, I’ll take the reduction in abortion over the potential spread of a ‘permissive’ sex culture.
Now, on to argument #2. This argument states that we have no proof this will result in a reduction; I submit that. But based on what women say and where their incomes are located, it seems inevitable that there would be at least a marginal reduction in abortion. It is also true that some Scandinavian nations have seen abortion rise — as they have liberalized their economies, like Sweden. Since 1997, Sweden has increased its abortion rate from 18.4 per 1,000 women to 20.9 per 1,000 women. This rise is concomitant with the country’s march toward freer markets and decreased welfare regimes. Make of that what you will.
It is also the case that, if more single moms mean a more liberal sex culture, Crisis Pregnancy Centers are doing a bad thing. Yet the author praises them here. It appears he is caught, as we all are, in a challenging catch-22. I feel the best way out is to bite the bullet on a couple of issues: a child allowance wouldn’t end all abortion, and it isn’t the type of policy that punishes extra-marital sexual activity. But if it can reduce abortion at the margins, that is, allow the women who are pressured into abortion by their financial circumstances to make another choice, then I am willing to accept the blame for both of those things. That’s how strongly I feel about children being born.
Lastly, I want to make a distinct point here that I feel I under-made in my TAC piece. A child allowance to reduce abortions is in part an argument for particular means. I think these means are morally superior to punitive ones involving penalties, invasive or humiliating procedures, or fines. I think a child allowance program is more supportive of a total culture of life, for mom and baby, than the threat of jail or a transvaginal ultrasound or a whomping ticket. Since those who object to it regardless of its potential to reduce abortion usually don’t provide an alternative that would actually obviate their concerns (e.g. this author still supporting CPCs and reformocon tax credit regimes) I suspect that we’re really arguing about welfare itself. But in the event that we aren’t, I’d headline the question of truly moral means that are going to get us the society we want.
I’m grateful for this critique and found the article very nice to read. Hopefully this clears up my position on a few matters.