If I had a dollar for every time I heard the economic abortion argument from a leftist or so-called pro-choicer, I could bail out all the small businesses Nancy Pelosi has refused to help. I’ve come to expect it. What I didn’t expect was that the left would destroy its favorite abortion argument during a pandemic to own the cons — or, more specifically, President Donald Trump.
I’ve many times been on the receiving end of a pro-choicer’s social media wrath in response to my mainstream take that abortion is always the taking of innocent human life. While people in the pro-abortion camp have largely given up on trying to persuade anyone that a baby in utero is nothing more than a clump of cells — which is debunked with even a cursory look at a sonogram — they continue to justify the barbarism with half-baked notions of choice and “reproductive freedom.”
Perhaps their most noble and frequent defense, though, is one of economics. We’ve all heard it in its various forms.
“A baby born into poverty will have a horrible life.”
“You can’t be pro-life if you aren’t willing to adopt all the poor children.”
“You don’t know what it’s like to be a single mom with an unplanned pregnancy and no money.”
In any case, the argument boils down simply to this: Death is better than life with economic ruin.
Now the left is tripping over its own rhetoric, arguing that we must do whatever it takes to save lives, up to and including kneecapping the entire economy and destroying the financial future of countless Americans. While not all will say it explicitly, the foolish policies of these “little tyrants” gives them away.
Pro-Choicers Are Betraying Their Economic Arguments
Look no further than Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s attempts to “save lives” through an overreaching order, including asinine rules for grocery stores, in which she determined even which items the businesses could or could not sell. For instance, in a blow to certain industries, she banned the sale of fruit and vegetable plants and seeds, car seats, and clothes.
The message was clear: Economic security is irrelevant when people are dying. We must do whatever it takes to save lives, even if it thrusts otherwise-healthy people into potential poverty.
Right now, despite having the 10th largest population, we have the 3rd highest COVID-19 deaths in the nation. I’m using every tool at my disposal to save lives, and it’s working. The curve is flattening.
Remember: COVID-19 is the enemy, not each other. https://t.co/HozSuMXqjZ
— Governor Gretchen Whitmer (@GovWhitmer) April 18, 2020
But Whitmer — who recently referred to abortion as “life-sustaining” and has a track record of supporting partial-birth abortion, which abortionists euphemistically call “intact dilation and extraction,” having voted against a ban on the inhuman practice as a state senator in 2008 — would make the opposite argument for abortion: If a woman knows she can’t support a child economically, that child’s life isn’t worth saving.
“No one can know a particular person’s circumstances or the factors that go into their decision-making if they are not walking in her shoes,” Whitmer said of Michigan’s Reproductive Health Act in October 2019. “But we do know that these decisions right now should be left to each individual … based on her own personal values, based on what she knows to be best for herself and for her family.”
A female making the same argument now for her small business would be crushed under Whitmer’s pandemic-fueled order. Any healthy, single mom in rural Michigan right now could be trying to do “what she knows to be best for herself and for her family” — go to work while practicing social distancing — but is being told she must stay home to “save lives.” Where is her choice, governor? Where is her financial consideration?
Or take Andrew Cuomo, the governor of the U.S. hotspot in New York, who once celebrated the legalization of abortion until birth by ordering the spire of the One World Trade Center to be lit up pink and whose administration conflates abortion access with economic security. Thanks to coronavirus, however, Cuomo has betrayed his economic considerations.
“No American is going to say, accelerate the economy at the cost of human life, because no American is going to say how much a life is worth. Job one has to be save lives. That has to be the priority,” Cuomo said. “We are going to fight every way we can to save every life that we can. I’m not going to leave any stone unturned until we can make sure everyone is protected.”
We are going to fight every way we can to save every life that we can.
That’s what it means to be an American and that’s what it means to be a New Yorker. pic.twitter.com/1cREWGx9t9
— Archive: Governor Andrew Cuomo (@NYGovCuomo) March 25, 2020
The Left Doesn’t Take Its Abortion Arguments Seriously
The Wuhan coronavirus isn’t inherently a partisan issue, of course, but it has become increasingly so as some governors and local authorities double down on draconian measures, and many Democratic lawmakers and journalists spend their days railing against the president. When Republicans talk of reopening the economy, the usually-“pro-choice” left fires back with “party of life” and “party of death” talking points. How dare the president consider the economy when life is on the line?
The fact is, the coronavirus response is a balancing act. Different parts of the country are encountering vastly different experiences. No magic formula can calculate that X number of businesses shuttered equals Y number of lives saved.
Are we holding out for a vaccine? Are we waiting until the curve is flattened? What exactly does flattening the curve accomplish in areas with empty hospitals equipped to handle a wave of patients? This isn’t to say life should carry on, business as usual, but the “do whatever it takes to save lives” argument just doesn’t hold up as the economy crumbles, the cost-benefit analysis is unclear, and so many of our questions remain unanswered.
Abortion, while still complicated, is a much more straightforward formula: The number of abortions performed is directly proportional to the number of lives lost. No amount of financial empathy changes that. Many pro-life people are equally concerned about poverty and the lives of children — foster care, adoption, crisis pregnancy centers, food banks, churches — the list goes on, and these endeavors could always use more support from people who claim to care about both life and the economy.
Abortion supporters should certainly abandon the heinous practice to save lives — more than 600,000 each year in the United States, in fact. But at the very least, they should stop feigning concern for poverty.
Someday, when the coronavirus is old news, pro-choicers should not be surprised when the right doesn’t take their bleeding-heart economic arguments seriously. When COVID-19 came knocking, the left didn’t take them seriously either.
