Why Banning Abortion is Terrible For Public Health
Dispelling myths and looking to science
Abortion is in the news again, because in the United States a leaked Supreme Court document appears to show that the landmark Roe v Wade decision will be overturned shortly. This will almost certainly have the practical impact of making abortion illegal across a number of American states, and highly restricted in others.
As a man who does not have a uterus, there’s not all that much I can say about abortion on a personal level. It’s unlikely in the extreme that I will ever personally have to have one, and from an ethical standpoint all I can say is that it’s been more than a decade since I did a degree in bioethics and my opinion probably isn’t very useful there either.
However, there is one thing that I’m quite good at — fact-checking scientific questions online. So, here are some of the things bound to come up in the abortion debate, and why in general banning abortion is, from a scientific standpoint, not a very good idea.
