Socializing Losses

Just yesterday in the UK, a sting operation revealed that National Health service doctors were approving abortions solely because of the child’s gender. Some ‘patients’ went up to a doctor and said, ‘I want this baby dropped because I don’t want a girl.’ Others said that they wanted the abortion of a boy because they already had one and wanted ‘family balancing’. The doctors said, no problem.

One consultant, Prabha Sivaraman, who works for both private clinics and NHS hospitals in Manchester, was filmed telling a pregnant woman who said she wanted to abort a female fetus: “I don’t ask questions. If you want a termination, you want a termination”.

But whose money was going to be used to provide the abortion? Why the government’s money of course. Or to be more precise, the taxpayers.

Leaving aside all other issues, we still have the question of private gain and socialized costs. Inevitably the children of those who have children are going to be taxed to provide for the couples who decide not to have children once they become too old or sick to work. The people who had children cannot privatize their gains. They cannot reserve the taxes paid by their children for themselves. That will be selfish. The ever caring government has decided that taxes are going to be used to socialize the costs of everybody, including those who had an abortion at taxpayer expense for whatever reason they might have.

Situations like this are bound to occur whenever public and private interests get mixed up. To keep these wholly separate is probably impossible unless man can learn to live without government. But the more government there is, the more conflicts of this nature will arise.

No individual raindrop considers itself responsible for the flood. And those few paragraphs have a few explicit and a few implicit raindrops that are adding up.