"Personal responsibility" is not a solution to the financial imposition that would come from criminalizing abortion. Pro-lifers can preach "personal responsibility" until they're blue in the face and the number of unplanned pregnancies will never drop to zero. Whenever I lay out my case for why banning abortion would necessarily grow the tax burden of the very people pushing for the ban, I get clobbered over the head with the "personal responsibility" canard, which is nothing more than pale rhetoric thinly disguised as a strategy.

Birth rates are highest in parts of the country where abstinence is sold as the only real solution to pregnancy prevention, and where birth control is viewed as quasi-abortion. Essentially, these young people are being asked to suppress their natural sexual urges, a feat that has never been successfully accomplished by any civilization in history, try as they may to sell the peasants the premise that abstinence is achievable in sexual beings. So long as this is the case, unplanned pregnancies will continue and the demand for abortion will perpetuate even in the wake of a prohibition. And even for those who use birth control, the Pill has a 1% fail rate...and condoms break. Even those exercising "personal responsibility" will find themselves facing unplanned pregnancies...and often seeking to terminate them.

The strategy of preaching "personal responsibility" as the one-size-fits-all solution to the monstrous problems that would come from a prohibition against abortion reinforces my original position that our society is far too immature--and self-absorbed--to contend with a Roe v. Wade reversal.

On the other hand, I have to give cigar_no_baka points for originality with his "sterilize the children" solution. Somehow, I don't expect a groundswell of public support when the "party of less government" proposes to mandate that government employees slice up the genitalia of pre-teens.