Small Government and Abortion

At the launching of my “small government odyssey,” I provided only a set of characters and a single strategic principle. The set of characters were three sectors present in every societal system.[1] I called them the polity, the economy, and the society. When I get that far, I always remember a very useful acronym from undergraduate days. It is PERSIA. It functions to remind me that a societal system can be profitably considered by looking at its political, economic, religious, social, intellectual, and aesthetic components. In practice, I simply stuff R, I, and A into S and call it good enough.

The strategic principle was that people would continue to transact their business within the sector they were taught was appropriate. Things like buying and selling and producing and consuming goods and services “belong in” the economy. Things like expressing a religious faith, holding any view at all about anything at all, and producing something you think is beautiful all “belong in” society. We are all taught, more by example than by precept, what belongs where and by and large, we pay no more attention to it than that.

There are exceptions, of course. People who value society resent invasion by the economic sector. Social values and relationships can be “commodified,” i.e., turned into a commodity, and thereafter may be bought and sold. Both social practices and economic practices may be “juridified,” i.e., turned into political issues, especially through the courts.[2] The availability of wombs for rent is thought by many to be an outrageous commodification of conception and delivery. Making it a crime to smoke pot is thought by many to be an outrageous juridification of normal market processes.

In any case, keeping relationships and practices in the sectors “where they belong” is the very heart of the case for small government. A government that is not asked to do a great deal will not require a great deal of authority or resources—what we call today, “tax dollars.”[3] In order to keep issues in the sectors where they belong, people will have to believe that they are being treated fairly or that, fairly or not, there is no alternative.

With no more background than that, I thought that I would apply this logic to the question of abortion. By now, this is a full-blown sectoral conflict. Liberals, by and large, think that governments should not interfere with practices that are essentially “social” (doctor and patient) or essentially economic (professional and client). Conservatives, by and large, think that murder, which is how you get rid of unwanted fetuses, is against the law and that it is the natural and appropriate task of government to prevent these murders where possible or to punish the perpetrators, if necessary. It is, as I said, a sectoral conflict.

Let me grant you that this issue has been complicated in many ways. Conservatives are conflicted, for instance, about whether they want to prevent sexual promiscuity or to prevent pregnancies. But let’s just consider the implications for the three sectors under consideration. Everyone agrees that preventing the need for abortions is better than outlawing them and criminalizing the clients and the providers. Bill Clinton’s summary of his views on abortion remains a model of clarity: “safe, legal, and rare.” We are concerned about the “rare,” part.

At some point, a woman is going to be confronted by the prospect that she will deliver a baby she does not want. Let’s back the process up from that point and think of some reasons why she might not want to deliver this child. The child may be born deformed. The more we know about fetal diagnostics, the more we catch those possibilities. Small government advocates would be expected to be in favor of any non-governmental means of reducing these possibilities. If they are caused by inadequate medical attention to women who are pregnant or who may become pregnant, then making sure this attention is available is a superb way to reduce the number of deformed fetuses and the consequent demand for aborting those fetuses.

If the fetus is going to be “one child too many” for a single woman with other children, a small government advocate might want to look at why there are so many single women. The relationship of “jobs that will sustain a marriage” to the number of two-parent families comes immediately to mind. In urban areas, the number of single-parent families skyrocketed when the businesses left to cities for more expansive and less taxed environs. The jobs go away, the marriages go away, the babies keep coming. Some of these fetuses are aborted, who would not have been aborted had they been affordable and they would have been affordable had the marrige-sustaining jobs stayed put.

Or, consider adoption. If adoption were considered early (rather than, as is sometimes the case, abortion being considered late), it would cut down drastically on the number of abortions. For adoption to be reasonably considered early, a robust system of adoption services would have to be available and advertised. There would be adoption counseling. There would be a substantial number of adoptive families. Outcomes for adopted children would have to be comparatively attractive, and so on.

These are all means—starting way back with “adequate prenatal care”—that would reduce the demand for abortions. The process of not delivering an unwanted child would be “bought back” from the economy, where it is an economic transaction featuring willing buyers and willing sellers. It would be “bought back” from government, where it has been incessantly juridified since Roe v. Wade and it would be bought back not by blocking access to the courts, but by rendering the judgment of the courts superfluous.

When will “big government” happen with reference to this question? It will happen when there are a lot of people who feel they are losers and who feel that their needs would be better met by the intervention of government. Women will feel that they have the right to the professional services of a doctor and doctors will feel that three in the consulting room, where government is the third presence, is one too many. Legislatures will attempt to criminalize these professional services, but women will continue to seek them and providers will continue to provide them. The only reasonable way to keep government small is to keep it from juridifying the abortion question. The most efficient way of dealing with the abortion question is to prevent it. Preventing it will require substantial social change, all in support of women who through intension or inadvertence, find themselves unhappily with child.

So the task of the sector guardians—the people who want social issues to stay in the social sector and not be highjacked by the political sector—is to prevent these urgently felt needs from occurring. If they do occur, they ought to be met and I would expect advocates of small government to agree to the government’s meeting all the needs that can’t be prevented.

It seems only reasonable.

[1] My apologies for “societal system.” I’m saving “society” as the name of one of the sectors and using it both ways would run me into a tautonomy. We don’t want that.
[2] Left to my own devices, I would probably have chosen “politicized,” rather than the narrower “juridified,” but I am following the usage of Frank Hearn in Moral Order and Social Disorder. Hearn is a communitarian, so having pejorative names for the processes by which his favorite values are highjacked is very important.
[3] Or, if you are conservative, “hard-earned tax dollars.”