My grandmother was one of fifteen children; five boys, all of whom died as babies, and ten girls. This was not unusual. Theirs was a farm family, although a wealthy one, and as with all farm families, children became free laborers. In addition, and more importantly, birth control pills, condoms, and IUDs were unheard of. So, pregnancies occurred with regular frequency. Many women were literally worn to death having children, but my great grandmother was of hardy Scandinavian stock and survived the childbirth, the childrearing, and the feeding of all the children and farmhands.
Life is considerably different for women in 2022 than it was for my great grandmother. A wise woman can demand her sex partner (note, I do not say husband since that is more often than not no longer the case) use a condom before she has sex with him to prevent pregnancy and protect against sexually transmitted diseases. She should also, if she is wise and sexually active, have seen a doctor and gotten a prescription for birth control pills which she takes religiously, or use any one of the several other methods of birth control. If she cannot afford to pay for birth control pills, her insurance company will help as will Medicaid. Planned Parenthood and numerous clinics will provide free or low-cost birth control pills as often will the pharmaceutical companies themselves. While none of these methods is fool-proof, the risk of pregnancy is low, about 2% with condoms, less than .3% with birth control pills. If someone is not sexually active and thus not protected and is the victim of rape, or has consensual sex for the first time, there exists the “morning after pill” which provides about the same amount of protection.
Thus, in 2022, even in this climate of relatively free sex, there is little reason for a woman to find herself pregnant when she did not intend to be. Hence, the need for “abortions upon demand” doesn’t exist, and certainly not for “on demand” abortions into the second and third trimesters of pregnancy. But more than that, such abortions are unfair, immoral, and economically detrimental to the country.
When so-called “pro-choice” advocates argue about the need for abortions whenever a mother wants them, they usually parrot the phrase “My body, my choice!” However, that is both wrong and unfair. When they have unprotected sex with a man, they have in essence entered into an unspoken agreement with him knowing that the outcome of that encounter could be a child with HIS DNA as well as her DNA. Therefore, while the child may be growing inside of her body, it is not only her child, but his child as well, a part of him. For her to demand to end the life of that child without consulting him and gaining his consent (and this is almost never done!) is grossly wrong and unfair. Sadly, under Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court has held that the woman’s right to abort the child is sacrosanct and the father’s objections do not count. Thus, many a father has seen his child killed, unable to stop it from happening.
The morality of abortion is obvious and again belies the “my body, my choice” mantra. It is not only the body of the woman in question, but also that of her unborn child that figures into a woman’s “choice.” For years, the Left has carefully called what was growing inside a woman’s body “just a clump of cells” or “a fetus,” but recently, President Biden called it what it is when he talked about “aborting a baby.” Furthermore, we now know what science did not know when the Supreme Court made its Roe v. Wade decision. As early as six weeks after conception, a heartbeat can be detected in that tiny, growing baby. Since a beating heart is what determines whether or not a person is alive, this is why many states propose a heartbeat law which bans non-medically necessary abortions after six weeks. Obviously, to abort a human with a beating heart, thus ending its life, is to kill it. If not done to save the life of the mother but simply for her convenience, this constitutes murder as surely as if someone killed the baby a day after it was born.
Other states propose banning abortions beyond the end of the first trimester, that is to say, at the end of the 13th week. By this time, the baby has fingers, toes, ears, eyes, nose, mouth, teeth and bones, is peeing and forming its first poop, already has fingerprints, and if it is a girl, has ovaries filled with two million eggs. Most westernized countries ban abortions after week 12 or week 15. Is it any wonder? How can it be morally right to kill a living, breathing, tiny, and defenseless little human being? The answer is simple. It is not morally right. Many Democrats, becoming more and more radical in their abortion demands, would allow a woman to abort her child up to the very moment of delivery, and, if it survives the abortion, to allow it to lie in the clinic and die. Yet they march by the hundreds to burn, loot, and kill to supposedly avenge the death of a criminel killed while resisting arrest. Where is the morality here? The justice? The side of Good?
But beyond being unfair to the father and being morally wrong, both arguments that the Democrats would quickly wave aside as ridiculous, there remains the cost to the nation, a cost, brought up recently by Secretary Yellen as she spoke to the Senate Banking Committee. “I believe that eliminating the right of women to make decisions about when and whether to have children would have very damaging effects on the economy and would set women back decades,” she claimed, ignoring all the mothers who manage to utilize family members and child care facilities to care for their children while they go to work daily. Having abortions allowed women to finish school and then enter the workforce, she claimed, thereby boosting our economy. But her facts were wrong and Republicans would not let that inaccurate portrayal stand!
Rep. Burgess Owens and Sen. Tim Scott, Republicans on the Joint Economic Committee, compiled and released a report showing the economic DAMAGE done to the United States since Roe v. Wade. “Abortion at its core is a moral issue rather than an economic one,” they wrote, “But even in economic terms, the costs of abortion vastly outweigh any claimed benefits.” Using the value of a statistical life (VSL- the extra amount dangerous jobs must pay in order to get workers which adds to the GDP) which the Department of Transportation has at $10.9 million per person for 2019, for example, JEC Republicans calculated that the 630,000 abortions that were reported that year cost the country $6.9 trillion, 32% of the GDP for 2019.
The report confirmed that mothers earn about $26,000 less during the first six years of a child’s life due to child care costs, which would amount to $16.2million in lost earnings in 2019. The $6.9 trillion loss to the GDP, however, is 425 times larger than the mothers’ loss of earnings. In addition, the 63,459,781 babies who were aborted between 1973 and 2021 is a gross reduction in the population of the United States. Naturally some of them would not have survived infancy or would have died of disease or from accidents by now, but the vast majority of them would not and would instead be working Americans, paying into a quickly failing Social Security and Medicare System. By 2040, because of those abortions and because of young couples who are choosing to remain childless, 20.4% of the population will be 65 years old and older but there will be substantially fewer working young adults to care for them.
Sixty-three million, four hundred fifty-nine thousand, seven hundred and eighty-one babies killed between 1973 and 2021. What new businesses would they have started? What innovations would they have created? What scientific discoveries might they have made? What diseases might they have cured? We will never know. But the devastation to this country by the permissive and rabid encouragement of abortion for profit has not only divided this country, but has bankrupted many of us morally and all of us economically.