Shallow Reasons For Abortions?

Clearly I can’t stop talking about abortion this week. The resident conservative blogger at Balkinization wrote an article saying that Gonzales v. Carhart was right for the wrong (legal) reasoning. But then he adds this to his post:

"A late abortion may still be obtained for essentially any reason the woman chooses, including economics, social convenience, spite of a boy friend, and (probably) sex selection of children."

Which got me thinking, since there’s no license to have children, a woman might also have a child for any reason. To keep or spite a boyfriend, for economics (say a better inheritance or better divorce settlement), social acceptance, and yes, even sex selection. How many families had two children of the same sex and decided to have a third (or a fourth or a fifth) because they wanted at least one child of the opposite sex?

If you can abort a pregnancy for shallow reasons—which is supposedly a horrible thing—why isn’t the same moral outrage applied to those getting pregnant for “shallow” reasons?

Yes I’m only bringing this up because the frame of “the shallow-minded abortion” is stupid. Arguably it’s a worse crime to have a child for the wrong reasons than to abort a pregnancy for the wrong reasons. That’s because your fucked up kid might become my business—if they are abused, if they grow up to become criminals or just bad human beings. Ultimately your kid is going to have an impact on my universe by their very existence. That doesn’t give mean I get veto power over everyone’s reproductive rights but it means your decision to have a kid effects me a hell of a lot more than your aborted pregnancy does.