Quote:
Originally Posted by Aufschlitzer
If abortion were largely done away with, would the overflow problem become more significant?
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Unfortunately, that's really hard to prove or disprove, as we have not been in that situation, so there are no statistics to work off of. But I can attempt to extrapolate from the data that we already have.
In 2005 1,210,000 abortions were performed in the US. And since then, they've gone down, so these numbers are going to be generous. So lets assume that all of these babies who were aborted are now alive and in the foster care system. (It is important to remember that this would definitely NOT be the case! In many cases, although of course not all, the mother would end up keeping the baby. If she could not, family members would take these babies and raise them as their own. I've seen cases where this happened in the orphanage where I was before I got adopted.)
1/4 (25%) of these abortions were performed due to serious medical risk to the mother. According to all of the posters on this thread, this is an acceptable reason to have an abortion, so if abortion were to be restricted, these abortions would still take place.
That would bring the number of hypothetically non-aborted babies down to 907,500.
In which case, using my previous foster care statistics, IF all of these were in the foster care system there would now be approximately 1,407,500 in the foster care system.
And remember that 49% of all of the rest of the children in the foster care system are there for LESS THAN 1 YEAR. Its not a case of children being stuck in the foster care system.
Only 7% of children stay in for 5 or more years. Including ALL of the babies who are now being aborted, that would be approximately 98,525 children across the whole US. (This includes all of the children who are now in the foster care system for 5 or more years as well)
I'd like to say again that not ALL of the children who would not be aborted due to restrictions on abortion would end up in the foster care system, and they DEFINITELY WOULD NOT ALL STAY in the the foster care system for 5 or more years, so the numbers which I have generated are much higher than they actually should be. However, even if my hypothetical scenario were to happen, it does not seem to me that the overflow problem would increase that significantly.
Here is my source for the number of abortions in 2005 in the US. This page also has a lot more unbiased information and statistics on abortion that you might find interesting.
http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/fb_induced_abortion.html