The only good thing that can be said of today’s pro-choice movement is that they have at least stopped trying to hide behind vague scientific explanations about when life begins and have instead decided to admit that it doesn’t really matter to them anyway. Who cares if an unborn child is alive if the mother doesn’t want it to be? And who cares if abortion is the taking of human life when that life was going to be one riddled with poverty and crime?
That’s the argument made by abortion advocate and Texas A&M economics professor Jason Lindo in a recent court filing. The case in question is Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. FDA, in which medical practitioners are arguing the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of chemical abortion drugs was reckless and illegal. Lindo argued in defense of the FDA’s abortion pills, citing his research on the “economic effects of abortion and contraceptive policies.”
At the heart of Lindo’s argument is the utilitarian suggestion that some lives are more valuable than others. For example, he said unwanted children “are expected to do worse in school, to have more behavioral and social issues, and ultimately to attain lower levels of completed education.” Likewise, they “are also expected to have lower earnings as adults, poorer health, and an increased likelihood of criminal involvement.”
“Many of these issues clearly concern the broader public,” Lindo wrote. “In the event medication abortion were to become unavailable, the broader public is expected to face: increased health care costs due to increased health care utilization; increased taxes due to increased reliance on public assistance and social safety net programs; and general exposure to poverty, which is pervasive, hard to escape, and often persists from one generation to the next.”
Make no mistake: Lindo is articulating the openly eugenic idea that society would be better off if we preemptively got rid of “lesser” persons — the poor, criminal, and uneducated, who might someday need government assistance.
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Though few abortion advocates will admit as much, this idea is at the core of the pro-abortion rights movement and has been for years. Ron Weddington, co-counsel in Roe v. Wade, told former President Bill Clinton that he should make abortifacients widely available because “you can start immediately to eliminate the barely educated, unhealthy, and poor segment of our country. It’s what we all know is true, but we only whisper it.” And, of course, let’s not forget Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, who said in 1921 that “the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the overfertility of the mentally and physically defective.”
Moreover, the statistics speak for themselves. In Iceland, officials have bragged about eliminating Down syndrome — by which they really mean that nearly all unborn children diagnosed with Down syndrome are aborted. In the United States, that number is much lower, but still, at least 30% of the women whose unborn children are diagnosed with the genetic disorder choose to end their pregnancies.
One woman who made this choice described it this way: “The thing is I could not, in good conscience, from the get-go, know that my child has these setbacks in life.” Another said: “There is no part of caring for an infant or school-aged child with Down syndrome that we didn’t think we could handle. We chose to terminate mostly on the basis of our understanding of the challenges and quality of life he and our family would face if/when he lived to be over age 21: his middle age and end of life.”
The moment we begin to think we have the right and responsibility to assign value to a person’s life — before they’ve even had a chance to live it, no less — is the moment we’ve lost our humanity. Every person’s life is precious because life itself is precious. It is a fundamental right. Being poor, uneducated, disabled, or criminal does not change that. To suggest otherwise, as Lindo does in his court filing, is to join ranks with the tyrannical eugenicists of the past.
LifeNews Note: Kaylee McGhee White is the Restoring America editor for the Washington Examiner, focusing on religion, politics, and culture, and a visiting fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum. She graduated from Hillsdale College with degrees in politics and journalism.
