What If Abortion Was Illegal Worldwide?

Imagine a world, where no woman could ask for an abortion. Even if she’d been sexually assaulted. Even if not having an abortion means her own life would be at risk.

You may argue that life begins at conception and it’s wrong to kill anyone even a fetus. After all, a fetus is a potential human being and by 18 weeks is developed enough to feel pain.

But is abortion always wrong? Picture this – dealers selling abortion drugs on the streets.

Hospitals overflowing with women dying from having tried to induce an abortion on their own. And millions of unwanted kids born into a horrible quality of life.

Even if you disagree with abortion, placing a global ban on it would affect everything from a woman’s basic right to decide what to do with her body; to the well-being of our planet.

Yep, even the Earth would face more human-caused struggles. But we’ll get to that in a moment. Governments might ban abortions, but that wouldn’t mean there wouldn’t be any.

Every day, 125,000 women around the world get an abortion. If the procedure was no longer available to them, they may choose to have a clandestine abortion. It’d be dangerous, and might even kill them. But if they didn’t take that risk, they’d have to go through with a pregnancy they didn’t want —knowing that they might not be able to care for or financially support their child.

Some women would take pills to induce an abortion at home. In a worst-case scenario, they’d abandon their newborn babies.

Many of those trapped in a motherhood they didn’t want would suffer from anxiety and low self-esteem. They might end up staying tethered to abusive partners or be left all alone in their pregnancy. You decide what’s worse.

And what about those who had an abortion and got caught? That depends on how strict the abortion laws would be.

Today, women in countries like El Salvador can be prosecuted and sentenced to up to eight years in prison if the authorities suspect she might have harmed her fetus. If a punishment like that was adopted worldwide, prisons would be overwhelmed.

If the doctors performing the abortions and the partners supporting a woman’s decision were imprisoned as well, we’d need to build more prisons and a better-organized prison system.

The only industry to cash in on the abortion ban would be birth control. With strict laws and punishments in place for getting an abortion, people who otherwise may not have considered using birth control would have to think things over very carefully. A number of people in developed countries would opt for sterilization.

Banning abortions would have a lot of implications on a social level, and it wouldn’t be so great for our planet either. At our current population growth rate, we’ll need three Earths by 2100 to maintain the standards of how people are living today. And that’s with abortions legally performed in most countries.

With a worldwide abortion ban, there’d be at least 1.5 billion more people being born in the next 40 years. At that rate, by 2060 we’d hit the breaking point — the point at which there’d be too many humans for our planet to support.

The poorest countries would see the most population growth. For them, adding a lot of extra people would mean increased demands for drinking water and proper sanitation – things that over 2 billion people already lack access to.

Let’s face it – being forced to have a child benefits no one – not the mother, not the planet, and most certainly, not the baby.