A Texas senator wants to pay women $500 if they change their mind about an abortion after showing up at the clinic. Steven Levitt thinks about this:
Honestly, though, is it really such a bad idea? What if he left out the part about visiting an abortion clinic? Does it make sense to subsidize women who were going to give up babies for adoption? I think maybe it does. There are large numbers of parents who want to adopt, and a shortage of mothers willing to put healthy babies up for adoption. There are laws restricting what prospective adoptive parents can pay the birth mother. Providing a subsidy to birth mothers (perhaps conditioned on testing negative for drugs and doing a full set of prenatal hospital visits) sounds like a pretty sensible thing to do.
