A child’s worth cannot be measured in dollars and cents.
But while pro-abortion Democrats have repeatedly linked abortion to financial success, pro-life Republicans seek to find out if this is true.
What the Republicans of the Joint Economic Committee discovered was that abortions cause a catastrophic economic loss. A new report from the US Congressional Committee estimated that loss at $6.9 trillion in 2019 alone.
“Abortion is at its core a moral issue rather than an economic one. But even in economic terms, the costs of abortion far outweigh the purported benefits,” the pro-life lawmakers wrote in the report.
They arrived at the $6.9 trillion estimate based on standard methodologies that federal government agencies use to quantify the benefits of policies that affect mortality risk.
US Senator James Lankford, R-Oklahoma, shared the surprising findings on Twitter last week.
““Abortion costs a baby their life. That in itself is very difficult, and we also know the economic costs,” Lankford said.
Republican lawmakers said they felt compelled to investigate the matter after US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and other economists recently claimed restricting or banning abortion would hurt the economy and women’s contributions to it.
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In May, Yellen defended abortion and Roe v. Wade at a United States Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs hearing. The finance minister said she believes banning abortion would be “very damaging” to the economy.
But in the new report, Republican lawmakers said Yellen and other abortion advocates “overlook the much higher economic costs of abortion due to the loss of life of unborn babies.””
Based on the Centers for Disease Control’s 2019 abortion report, lawmakers estimate that the loss of nearly 630,000 unborn babies through abortion will cost the economy at least $6.9 trillion, or 32 percent of the gross domestic product.
According to their findings, those estimated costs are 425 times higher than the earnings of a mother who chooses to live for her baby.
The report continues:
The average mother’s income drops by about $26,000 in the first six years of her first child’s life. If every abortion keeps the mother’s income from falling, all abortions in 2019 could save mothers $16.2 billion in revenue over the next six years. However, the JEC’s $6.9 trillion abortion costs far outweigh these projected profit benefits.
They said that the $6.9 trillion excludes additional losses to the workforce, Social Security, health care, and innovation of aborted babies who could have otherwise lived worked, and contributed to a better society.
The claim that abortion helps the economy is common, often made by abortion activists and political figures to justify the death of more than 63 million unborn babies for legalized abortion in the past 50 years. But it’s not true. Rather, abortion harms the economy by robbing society of future earners, innovators, and individuals of children to care for them in old age.
Others have made similar estimates to those of Republican lawmakers.
In 2018, Dennis Howard, the chairman of the pro-life group Movement for a Better America, estimated that the United States has a “cumulative GDP deficit of $62.6 trillion” due to the 61 million unborn babies born to date. Had been aborted. That year. He estimated the deficit will reach $400 trillion by 2040 if unborn babies are aborted at the same rate.
A few years earlier, Dr. Brian Clowes, director of education and research at Human Life International, said the “direct cost to society of any abortion in terms of lost consumption and taxes paid averages $3,720,000.” Cumulatively, Clowes said this represents trillions of dollars in economic loss from the millions of unborn babies aborted.