“THEY THINK HUMAN RIGHTS BEGIN AT CONCEPTION AND END AT BIRTH”: Ampersand has a cartoon and post making basically that claim about pro-lifers. It’s based on a study that found that “states with strong antiabortion laws provide less funding per child for foster care, stipends for parents who adopt children with special needs, and payments for poor women with dependent children than do states with strong abortion rights laws.” I have a hard time taking this seriously as more than an attempt to score cheap points, for three main reasons:

1) Why is “caring for people” equated with state action? To take a huge, obvious example, there are between three and four thousand crisis pregnancy centers in this country. They generally receive zero government funding. As far as I can tell, the vast majority offer significant services for women raising children. My own center offers: parenting classes, maternity clothes, kids’ clothes, childbirth classes, diapers, toys, kids’ books, car seats, bassinets, cribs, “shop for free days” (basically like a thrift store where everything’s free), formula, and referrals for practically any social service you can think of–employment aid, health care, ex-offender ministries, housing, etc. etc. And that’s just the standard-issue stuff; if a client has more intense needs we’ll make calls on her behalf (uh, after asking her, of course, in case you’re working with stereotypes of the Evil Pregnancy Center) and try to make sure she gets the help she needs. We have contacts who are willing to do all kinds of stuff for women in desperate situations. We also do follow-up counseling and really try to make sure that people don’t get left out in the cold once they make the decision for life. I mean, honestly, think about it: Our center gets a lot of its clients through friends’ recommendations, and we see a lot of clients more than once. If we jerked people around, they’d stop coming.

Similarly, if you look through any guide to local services for the poor–here’s one for DC–you’ll find that a big chunk of them are religious groups. Many, many of these groups are staffed by pro-life people. Pro-life people work at homeless shelters, they work with abused children, they work with church soup kitchens, the whole megillah.

**Highly speculative: To look at things from a different angle, this study doesn’t even seem to address the question (I could be wrong about this–am going on the excerpt on Ampersand’s blog) of whether more funding = better services. For example, New York’s abortion laws are very permissive, and I would guess that its foster care system is, at least, not among the lowest-funded; but that system is also somewhat notorious, no? I really don’t know enough about the foster systems in different states to make this point especially strong, but I thought I’d throw it out there.**

It is, of course, still possible to argue that more pro-life people should vote to increase state funding for services for the poor. In other words, you might argue that pro-lifers who work in private charities but don’t vote for increased state funding are missing out on a good strategy for helping poor children. But to say or imply that pro-lifers don’t care about children after they’re born is a totally different claim, and one that I really don’t see supported by the facts.

2) This is a kind of boring point, but statewide comparisons of this sort are wildly broad. Do we even know what proportion of people who call themselves “pro-life” support increased state poverty programs? Do we know what proportion of people vote based on abortion as vs. on welfare (or foster-care funding)? Do we know how many of the people who vote based on abortion would rather vote for a candidate who supports both abortion and increased state poverty programs, but, in the absence of such a candidate, vote for the pro-life candidate because abortion is objectively a more important issue? (It shouldn’t be hard to see why someone would make that choice if she believes that abortion is a mother’s decision to take her own child’s life.) I’ve run across people who consider themselves “Democrats for Life” who voted for Bush in 2000–holding their noses–because of his and Gore’s positions on abortion. Similarly, I’ve run across people who argue that the “net gain” in child welfare is greater if you vote Democrat (or Green), so they vote for the abortion-rights candidate–again, holding their noses. So I’m not sure what the heck these numbers are supposed to tell us. Why not ask pro-life people a) what they do for poor women raising children, and b) whether they support increased state poverty programs, and, if so, what they do about it, e.g. do they write to their representatives, do they rally, etc.?

3) Our old friends, correlation and causation. As I understand it–I could be wrong here, I’m working from memory–poorer states spend less on poverty programs and are more pro-life. There are all kinds of possible correlations and interlocking causes here–tradition-minded rural culture, lesser degrees of cosmopolitanism, stronger religious beliefs, states have less cash to spend, you can probably come up with your own. Again, you need a much more targeted investigation in order to answer the question, How much do pro-lifers care about children?, or, Are people pro-life because they hate women?, or whatever.