Responding to Economic Arguments for Abortion What Do 40 Million Lost Lives Mean?

In its controversial 1998 feature on the cost of a child, U.S. News & World Report declared unequivocally: "A child, financially speaking, looks more like a high-priced consumer item with no warranty. It's the decision to remain childless that offers the real investment opportunity."

This short-sighted commentary is symbolic of and relies on a particularly pernicious myth: that children are essentially unproductive cost centers, which implies that abortion economically "benefits" society because by choosing abortion parents have decided on a better "investment opportunity."

Even if pro-abortionists today do not put the argument quite so harshly as they did back in the 1970s, they still count on people tacitly accepting the assumption that children are an economic drain. Rarely do we hear that abortion has a cost to America beyond the "procedure's" price tag, or that a child may actually produce social and economic benefits.

In fact, as this article will show, the ethical argument (that all human beings are created equal) and the economic impact (harshly negative) speak with one voice. Abortion is bad both morally and economically.

This article does not intend to forward an argument against abortion that relies solely on economics. Such an argument would miss the true message of the pro-life movement, that abortion is wrong no matter what the economic consequences are. Certainly we would never place a monetary value on an individual human life.

But the hope is that this discussion will help pro-life advocates rebut popular economic arguments for abortion that do have a surface appeal for people who are not necessarily pro- or anti-life.

The pro-abortion economic argument tells us that children are expensive enough to justify abortion. Pro-abortionists claim that the cost of raising children burdens their parents, and it also burdens the public with additional welfare spending when poor mothers bear children. Further, they say abortion is necessary to check population growth and costs associated with this growth.