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So a brief blog post today on one of the more utilitarian reasons that I have heard for abortion/contraception – it saves money….

This sounds to me like something I heard from a colleague last year that the reason that New York’s prison population was down… because of Roe v Wade – since then, thousands of poor people have had abortions and a large number of those aborted babies would’ve committed crime and ended up in jail.

I should have suggested to him that an even better way of reducing prison population would be to kill everyone inside, but that would’ve made things awkward and I had only half-finished my drink at the time (and so no quick escape from the awkwardness).

Surely these sorts of arguments are completely beside the point when it comes to abortion. Either abortion is killing of the most innocent, in which case utilitarian arguments like this are sickening and deeply perverse, or abortion is nothing more than a medical procedure, in which case how much money it may save the state is neither here nor there… unless the state is thinking of using it as an argument for compulsory abortion as a cost saving device, a la China?

So, as with most abortion arguments, they are a smokescreen which obscure the real argument: are we killing a human being or not?

~ Marcus Roberts, Mercator Net, March 28

[Graphic via chillertv.com]

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