A Boston Globe columnist slammed Chelsea Clinton’s “chillingly utilitarian” promotion of abortion-on-demand Wednesday, calling her arguments “twisted” and “grotesque.”
At a recent “Rise up for Roe” event in New York City, sponsored by NARAL and Planned Parenthood, Ms. Clinton argued that legal abortion has made America more prosperous and added “$3.5 trillion to our economy.”
In its efforts to thwart the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, event organizers enlisted Ms. Clinton—who recently floated the idea of a possible future bid for the White House—to kick off their New York rally.
“American women entering the labor force from 1973 to 2009 added three and a half trillion dollars to our economy,” said the daughter of former U.S. President Bill Clinton. “The net, new entrance of women — that is not disconnected from the fact that Roe became the law of the land in January of 1973.”
The idea that keeping abortion legal will help strengthen the U.S. economy is a “singularly wretched argument,” wrote Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby Wednesday, and completely misses the mark as a matter of history, economics, and morality.
The hard-hitting column, an anomaly for the reliably pro-choice Boston Globe, reveals a Chelsea Clinton who walks resolutely in the footsteps of her mother Hillary, who was arguably the most virulent pro-abortion candidate ever to run for the office of president.
And yet her arguments are fatally flawed, said Mr. Jacoby, since the mass entrance of women into the workforce over the past half century was “driven by changes more universal and deep-rooted than a shift in US abortion law,” such as changed perceptions about women and work, the displacement of jobs requiring physical strength by jobs depending on brainpower, and women’s increased access to higher education.
“The rise of women in the modern workplace wasn’t achieved by abortion,” Jacoby states.
Economically, the tens of millions of aborted babies “would have grown into tens of millions of additional productive adults,” Jacoby notes. “They would have generated an immensity of new value — more goods, more services, more innovations, more art, more entertainment, more businesses.”
As a result, the United States would be more prosperous, not less, he writes.
“What makes Clinton’s argument truly deplorable, though, isn’t history or economics, but morality,” Jacoby declares. “Her approach is chillingly utilitarian, treating the destruction of life in the womb as, ultimately, a question of dollars and cents.”
Clinton’s claims are reminiscent of the debunked hypothesis that legalizing abortion caused a historic drop in violent crime, he adds.
The idea that abortion should be embraced as a social good because it eliminates children before they can become criminals is “grotesque,” he states, and Clinton’s “Rise up for Roe” argument is equally grotesque.
“Sixty million abortions since 1973 is nothing to celebrate,” no matter what the perceived economic consequences, he writes.
Follow Thomas D. Williams on Twitter Follow @tdwilliamsrome
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