Why don’t you buy the argument? Remember, economists don’t deal with averages, they deal primarily with margins. I agree with you that the ‘typical’ person may not think this way, but I don’t think it is hard to believe that the fact that abortion is an option, will lead to people on the margin, those people on the fence, to say, ‘hey, why not have sex with this girl, if i sleep with her and she gets pregnant i always have abortion to rely on’, or the female to say, ‘if the condom breaks, i could always get an abortion’, and therefore engage in riskier sex, which in turn, creates more abortions.

This reminds me of an interesting fact about abortion that used to confuse me, but made more sense the more I thought about it. It is universally the case that men always favor abortion rights much more than women do, not just in the United States, but in every country where abortion is legal. When I first found this out, I thought it odd, but upon further thought, it makes perfect sense. Abortion, in itself, benefits men much more than it benefits women. Think about all of the costs associated with abortion, and I don’t mean the financial costs, I mean the emotional costs. In an abortion, it is always going to be the women who bear the emotional costs much more than men do, if they do at all. But the benefits of not having a child, while it also benefits the women, also benefits the man, who may have to pay child support, or be morally obliged to be a father figure to a child he otherwise didn’t want. So the costs of abortion are almost none existent to males, while the benefits are clearly there, hence a stronger male support for abortion. Add to that that abortion increases riskier sex, a fact that also benefits men much more than women (after all, men have always engaged in, and enjoyed, higher levels of promiscuous sex than women), and it all makes sense.

I have a male friend of mine who bluntly admits this. When ever we discuss abortion, and I start talking about my pro-life views, he blurts out, “why do you care anyway, it is the girl who has to go through with it anyway, a ti no te duele nada, and without abortion you may be stuck with kids you don’t want with women you don’t want”, in other words, us men don’t bear the costs, only the benefits. I still disagree with his pro-choice views, but his logic in that statement is straightforward.