Many have talked about how abortion prohibition is dysgenic: abortion patients are disproportionately low-income, uneducated, and unmarried, conditions that correlate with low intelligence. Most just leave it at that: it's not like the pro-life side has any counterargument. But there's a more fundamental reason why abortion prohibition is dysgenic, rooted in the same principles conservatives intuitively understand when it comes to most of life, the principle that voluntary exchange produces better outcomes than coercion.
Businesses that must convince customers to buy their products work better than those that can sit back and collect government subsidies. Employees who fear being fired work harder than those who know that laws make it difficult to fire them. Renters who know landlords can easily evict them behave better than those who know eviction is difficult. Landlords not subject to rent control have an incentive to maintain their properties and thus compete with other landlords on quantity. Many public schools remained closed during the COVID lockdown; private schools, which relied on parents voluntarily forking over tuition, reopened as soon as they were legally permitted to.*
The same logic that applies to business applies to family life. Conservatives understand this, they'll tell you how the welfare state damaged the American family. In a world without welfare, women know they must choose a mate who will be responsible and willingly support their children, which means putting in the effort themselves to attract such a mate. Likewise, men know they must signal their own responsibility; women want a husband, not a sperm donor.
The corollary to this is that when you have a business nobody will shop at, a worker nobody will hire, a tenant nobody will rent to, a single person nobody will marry, you know that there's something wrong with the business/worker/tenant/single person.
Now apply this same logic to abortion. The mother does not want to voluntarily support the fetus, which tells you there's something wrong with the fetus. Maybe it has Down syndrome, maybe it was conceived as a result of rape. More likely, the woman doesn't want to have children or doesn't want any more children. In these cases, the man who conceived the child almost always agrees. You might be tempted to say this is a problem with the parents, not the fetus, but the fetus got its genes from the parents. The genes that made the parents not want to support a child or another child are likely present in the fetus. Forcing the child to be born is selecting for low-investment parenting. It is dysgenic.
Eugenics should be about more than just IQ. Proponents should also desire a world where more people have a loving and responsible attitude toward their families. This isn't something that can be measured in a two-hour standardized test, but it's vitally important and eugenicists should reject policies likely to undermine it, particularly when, like abortion bans, they're also offensive to human liberty.
It is at this point where pro-lifers usually accuse me of misunderstanding or strawmanning them. Their argument is about morality, they say. Baby murder! In effect, they say the eugenic implications are unimportant to them, so therefore they must be unimportant to me. That is not how political discussion works. And I think that even adopting their moral framework, their position is still unjustified. The fact that you're a human being does not entitle you to support at the expense of other unwilling humans. Conservatives understand this when it comes to the homeless man's "human right" to be fed and housed at government expense. I'm not opposed to using tax money to support the mentally ill and disabled, but even there, I wouldn't say the latter have an absolute right to receive the money. If 90% of society were disabled, there shouldn't be an obligation on the remaining 10% to work around the clock and live in hovels to keep as many of the former alive as possible.
Conservatives have ideas that are both good and appealing: the superiority of free enterprise, the value of liberty, the importance of responsibility and family values. But then they shoot themselves in the foot by embracing abortion banning, alienating potential allies (particularly among upper-class people) and undermining the ideological force of their ideas. It's hard to argue for limited government when you think government should be involved in people's most intimate decisions. It's hard to argue against a culture of freeloading if you think one class of "persons" has an absolute right to freeload off of another. Pro-lifers will tell you that abortion bans and right-wing politics are somehow intrinsically linked, but a simple look at other countries shows that's nonsense. In most Rights in most countries, abortion is a non-issue.
We should make it one in America, too.