Today, you’re the debate judge! Again the NRO (very graciously, and without the usual acrimony that accompanies these conversations) has responded to my blog in defense of reducing abortion by offering a universal child allowance. Here are the points that remain unaddressed. If you’re a debatey type, you can extend these arguments right across your flow as they say:
I. All the harms attached to a child allowance are attached to a child tax credit. You can’t oppose one and not the other by this metric of harms. We must conclude that the NRO opposes the reformocon child tax credit.
II. Many of the harms attached to a child allowance are also attached to private charity for mothers. The NRO concedes this:
First in both of her responses to me, Bruenig states that by providing assistance to pregnant women, pregnancy resource centers are, in effect, increasing the population of single mothers and undermining norms against pre-marital sex. To put it another way, if single mothers are carrying their children to term because of either a child allowance or because of assistance from a pregnancy resource center, the effect is the same. I see Bruenig’s point, but I disagree with her. When one receives assistance from a charity there is a greater norm of reciprocity and less of a chance of repeat behavior. That is why I was concerned about a child allowance providing additional income for each additional child that was born.
In other words, private charity very well might have identical impacts, meaning that it would be best not to support it. If it even caused a marginal increase, which by this author’s logic it would, it has caused an incredible moral harm. Therefore we must, by this author’s thought, view a child tax credit and child allowance as extreme immorality-increasers, and private charity as mild immorality-increasers. But why would we allow any immorality increase? Never has a calculus been delivered by which we can measure what amount of immorality is acceptable to reduce what amount of abortions. You, the judge, should therefore acknowledge that the NRO’s own plan (private charity) will result in their own harms.
More intriguing here is that the argument has changed from its first iteration. Originally we were to oppose a child allowance because it would create more single moms and therefore normalize pre-marital sex. But now the argument has shifted to repeat pregnancies–surely a single mom of one is no less harmful on normalization grounds than a single mom of two or three. The singleness is the problem, not the number of kids, or so the NRO argument would logically proceed. So I am not sure the repeat pregnancies issue relates to the original point whatsoever; it appears to rather be a new and discrete point, the significance of which is unclear.
III. A child allowance is a step toward a more humane policy on abortion. 61% of women who seek abortions have other children. By throwing women in jail for seeking abortion, we would be breaking up families; this is not pro-life. The NRO never shares their plan for how to reduce abortion; by their own lights, private charity would probably increase it to a degree. They only say this:
Bruenig concludes her most recent post by saying that “It is worth it to me to reduce abortion on the margins.” I agree. I would certainly support a policy that would reduce abortion at the margins. In fact, I would like to go beyond that and see all unborn children legally protected. I just disagree that a child allowance would help pro-lifers achieve that goal.
Tantalizing, and we are in agreement here! But this is not a policy plan. You, the judge, must therefore presume what policy lurks beneath this shell argument. Mine is on the table.
IV. Nudge theory makes my case, as I wrote in my original TAC piece. This author says:
However, both the 2005 Guttmacher study and the 2013 study that appeared in BMC Women’s Health allowed women to offer multiple reasons as to why they sought an abortion. Both studies did find that economic pressure certainly played a role in a significant percentage of women’s decisions to obtain an abortion. That said, since many women cited multiple reasons for having an abortion, both studies are less clear about how often economic pressures were the most important factor. Economics may not play as large a role as Bruenig surmises.
If we can knock out the most common reason, being too poor, we can also impact a variety of other cited reasons: lacking shelter, healthcare, unstable relationships, career worries, etc. We can also probably even push on relationship instability with regard to marriage, as I have written previously. What nudge theory teaches is that behavior is usually multivalent and that small nudges can push folks in directions opposite their original course. One famous example from the UK involves reducing suicide by making bottles of pills slightly smaller; we could very likely do the same for at least some abortions by making the financial burden of childbearing less extreme. This has always been my argument: that a child allowance would reduce abortion on the margins. It remains my argument. I hope you have found it at least a little promising, and that you’ve enjoyed this great debate!