It never ceases to amaze me how abortion advocates will pull out all the stops to paint abortion as this grand venture that makes the world a better place. Proponents have made it sound as if in the event abortion were made illegal, then women would be put into chains, sold into slavery, and treated like third class citizens.

In other words, it would be like an Islamic state, but they can’t bring themselves to say that.

The whole point of the wailing and gnashing of the teeth is that if women lost access to abortion, then women aren’t truly free. They consider it control over their bodies. The pattern is that it completely focuses on them, and not the baby they’re murdering. Ya know, the other body they’re asserting control over without any sense of irony.

But now they’ve gone a step further. Recently Planned Parenthood, the abortion goliath, promoted from this from their Twitter account.

The Hyde Amendment punishes poor women, pushes abortion out of reach, and is bad for the economy. https://t.co/Ah7oEZL2IS #BeBoldEndHyde pic.twitter.com/BD2LhsbCxR — Planned Parenthood (@PPact) October 3, 2016



This links to an article which The Nation released, written by Kate Bahn and Jamila Taylor, two women who work for the Center of American progress. In this article, Bahn and Taylor assert that the Hyde Amendment is restricting access to abortion, and thus, the Hyde Amendment is bad for the economy.

Hyde is often siloed as a “women’s issue.” But when women cannot control their bodies and their reproductive futures, it is more difficult for them to advance economically. And since women make up more than half of the US population, it matters when something holds women back.

Good lawd. First off, in order for this phrase to be accurate, it has to assume that women do not have control over their bodies. They very much do. While rapes do occur, less than 1% of abortions happen as the result of a rape. So the vast majority of these women are in this situation because they chose to have sex with a man. Perhaps their birth control failed, or they just weren’t careful. Either way, the risk was undertaken with their full consent, and as a consequence, nature happened.

Secondly, this paragraph ropes in all women in the US a statistic that isn’t free because abortions aren’t occurring right then, right now, and with funding from the government. 58% of women don’t even agree with the concept of abortion, and think it wrong. These women don’t believe they’re not free, they just believe that murder is bad.

It is, by the way. Murder is bad.

But the article continues with more lunacy, stating the costs of getting an abortion range from too high, to way too high. Including having to stay in a hotel room because of waiting periods, and child care for any children they leave at home. They lament that women have to pay all of this out of pocket if they want to get the procedure done.

Women who want an abortion but can’t afford the out-of-pocket costs inflicted by Hyde face major consequences over the course of their lifetimes. Studies show that women who wanted an abortion but were not able to obtain one faced worse economic outcomes, were more likely to live in poverty, and often carried unwanted pregnancies to term.

Having to carry your child to term, give birth, and care for it? The horror. How have women survived all this time?

What bugs me is that all of this is set to the backdrop that other people need to pay for these women to do an elective surgery that terminates a life, so that they can go on doing whatever they want. Be it a job, a lifestyle, or more sex with which to get pregnant so that others can pay for another abortion.

The argument is that if we just paid for these abortions, then these women can go on to contribute more fully to the economy, creating growth and prosperity for everybody. In other words, more dead babies equals more money for everyone.

The states that have the most open access to abortion are often the states that have a general climate of greater opportunity for women. In Massachusetts, where the only restriction on abortion access is parental notification, legislators recently banned employers from asking prospective hires about previous salaries as part of their effort to close the pay gap. At the other end of the spectrum, states that have the most restrictions on abortions oftentimes have lower economic opportunity for women. Alabama and Mississippi are tied for the worst economies for women, and these are also two states with significant abortion restrictions.

So the article isn’t stating that it’s creating more opportunity, just that it could, and then it throws up the example of Massachusetts closing a pay gap – which doesn’t exist – as if it somehow correlates to economic boosts as a result of abortion being easy to access.

The brutal fact is that most people getting abortions aren’t contributing much to the economy. They’re typically lower class workers, if they work at all. Now balance that with the fact that during the years between the passage of Roe v. Wade (1973) and the Hyde Amendment (1977), the American taxpayers were shelling out $50 million a year to pay for abortions.

The next argument is that abortions prevent more people from going on welfare, and that terminating children before they can become dependent saves us money. LifeSite has blown this myth clear out of the water.

The Federal, state and local taxes paid by a child and his or her employers during 30 years in the work force amount to about $955,900. Pro-abortionists consider only the short-term benefits to the State, which is the difference between the cost of caring for a child and the cost of an abortion, which is ($22,300 – $515), or $21,785; but the long-term benefit to the State of paying for the child’s delivery and care is ($955,900 – $22,300), or $933,600. In other words, the State pays on average $22,300 and gets $955,900 back, a benefit-cost ratio of 43.8 dollars received for every one dollar spent, which is a very good deal indeed. But this is not the only part of the equation. We must also consider that each person continuously generates wealth during his working career and consumes goods and services that help support the livelihoods of many other people. At current levels, this sum amounts to an average of about $2,764,000 per person. Therefore, we see that every person aborted costs society at large a total of about $3,720,000. So, for every single dollar spent on a Medicaid-funded abortion, society loses($3,720,000/$515) = more than $7,200.

So Bahn and Taylor are wholly incorrect. It is not at all good for the economy when we kill babies in the womb. What this article – promoted by Planned Parenthood – is doing is attempting to further secure the funding abortion organizations get from taxpayer money by painting abortion as a fiscally good idea, something many conservatives and moderates have a problem with.

But I have a better idea. Why not defund Planned Parenthood? The organization receives around $500 million a year from taxpayers. We could save billions by allowing the abortion giant to go the way of the dodo, and allowing the many other clinics in America to take over the job PP was already doing, and more.

But that won’t happen, because fiscal responsibility isn’t what abortion advocates actually care about.