Is This What We Had In Mind?

Abortion has been legal in America since 1973. For those Americans under forty, it was an established fact of life before they were born. Abortion is one of the most financially lucrative industries in the United States because of the lack of regulation (something that is changing in many states) and because the government subsidizes Planned Parenthood,  one of the largest providers of abortions. So what is abortion about?

On Wednesday, National Review posted an article titled, “We Only Whisper It.” The article deals with some recent statements by Ruth Bader Ginsburg in a recent interview.

The article reports:

Speaking about such modest restrictions on abortion as have been enacted over the past several years, Justice Ginsburg lamented that “the impact of all these restrictions is on poor women.” Then she added: “It makes no sense as a national policy to promote birth only among poor people.”

…In an earlier interview, she described the Roe v. Wade decision as being intended to control population growth, “particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.” She was correct in her assessment of Roe; the co-counsel in that case, Ron Weddington, would later advise President Bill Clinton: “You can start immediately to eliminate the barely educated, unhealthy, and poor segment of our country,” by making abortifacients cheap and universally available. “It’s what we all know is true, but we only whisper it.”

I thought America was the land of opportunity–not the land of killing children because they were born into poor households. Some of our greatest leaders were born into poverty. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas grew up in poverty and now sits on the bench with Ms. Ginsburg.

The article points out a basic philosophical difference between those who encourage abortion and those who oppose it:

There are two ways to account for humans beings: as assets, or as liabilities. For those who see the world the way Justice Ginsburg does — which is also the way Barack Obama does, along with most of his party — human beings are a liability. That is why they fundamentally misunderstand challenges such as employment; if you see people as a liability, then you see labor in terms of “creating jobs,” i.e. neutralizing that liability with a check every two weeks. It does not matter whether that labor produces anything valuable; if the liability is being met with a sufficient paycheck, problem solved. It should go without saying that Barack Obama et al. do not see themselves as liabilities. They see themselves as assets, which is how left-wing activists and Democratic functionaries justify their own enormous paychecks.

And they don’t see their own children as liabilities, either — just your kids, loser.

The alternative is to view human beings as having inherent value. In economics, that means thinking of every worker as having something potentially valuable to contribute. In broader terms, that means thinking of every person as a full member of the human family, no matter if they are healthy or sick, running marathons or profoundly disabled, Bill Gates rich or Bangladesh poor.

We need to elect leaders who value human beings. It is frightening to think that a Supreme Court Justice feels that babies born into poverty have less value than babies born into wealth. That is the kind of thinking that leads to genocide.