Chelsea Clinton put a price tag on abortion

I never saw “Soylent Green.” But I did see Phil Hartman do a “Saturday Night Live” sketch as Charlton Heston shouting, “Soylent Green is made out of people! It’s people!” That was enough to get the idea.

The dystopian premise is not merely that human bodies become useful material. It is that people can be trained to think about human worth in purely utilitarian and economic terms. Human beings become valuable because of what they produce — or expendable when they get in the way of production.

The frightening thing about a darkened mind is not that it wakes every morning plotting evil while twirling a theatrical mustache. It is that evil begins to look reasonable.

A 2018 comment by Chelsea Clinton about abortion has been making the pro-life social media rounds again this week. The viral version says Clinton claimed abortion saved America trillions of dollars.

That sounds grotesque because it is grotesque. But fairness requires us to look at what Clinton actually said.

I checked Snopes. Its defense is that Clinton did not literally say abortion itself saved the country trillions. She said women’s increased participation in the workforce — which she connected to abortion rights after the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade — added trillions of dollars to the economy.

That distinction is real. It also does not solve the moral problem.

Speaking at a 2018 “Rise Up for Roe” event, Clinton observed that women entering the American labor force between 1973 and 2009 added $3.5 trillion to the economy.

Then came the crucial sentence: “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.”

Clinton went on to suggest that people who were unmoved by arguments about abortion rights or dignity could connect their concerns to abortion through economics.

When critics translated that into less decorous English — abortion helped produce trillions in economic growth — Clinton objected. She said her point was that women’s greater workforce participation was connected to their ability to make “reproductive health care choices, including post-Roe.”

Very well. Grant her correction in full. It doesn’t solve the problem, though. It underscores it.

Clinton was not claiming that every abortion deposited money into the Treasury. Her argument was that legal abortion was among the conditions that allowed more women to enter or remain in the workforce; that greater workforce participation generated enormous economic value; and that this economic value was one consideration in favor of abortion rights.

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Notice what has happened. A human life has entered an economic equation.

The calculation is straightforward: Pregnancy may cause a woman to leave the workforce, reduce her hours, interrupt her career, or forgo income. Abortion may prevent those consequences. Therefore abortion can contribute to economic productivity.

Once stated plainly, the moral ugliness is hard to miss.

Good people instinctively know some calculations should never govern the value of a human life. Imagine announcing that America would be several trillion dollars richer if some identifiable class of people had simply ceased to exist.

Most liberals would recoil, because there is something more fundamental than the calculation. The people being calculated are human beings.

And that is precisely the question abortion advocates try to place outside the ledger.

The decisive question is not whether abortion makes it easier for somebody else to earn money. The decisive question is: Who is the unborn child?

The unborn child is not the mother and not the father. It is a distinct living human organism. The moral question is what is owed to that human being.

We recognize the principle everywhere else: One may not deliberately kill an innocent human being because his continued existence imposes economic costs on somebody else. We do not balance an innocent person’s right to live against another person’s earning potential and ask which column produces the larger number.

Yet abortion is often granted precisely this moral exemption.

Clinton’s argument does not logically require the conclusion that more abortions are always better for the economy, nor did she say that. The problem is subtler and more serious: Once economic productivity is offered as a reason favoring abortion access, the unborn child’s life has been made one variable in a cost-benefit calculation.

Money was not an incidental statistic wandering into the speech. It was offered as an argument. There is an old name for the god invoked by arguments of this sort: Mammon.

Ancient peoples sacrificed human beings to their gods and persuaded themselves that the bargain was reasonable. Prosperity might follow. Crops might flourish. Armies might triumph. The gods demanded something terrible, certainly, but one had to consider the benefits.

Modern man regards such practices with horror, congratulating himself on having escaped primitive superstition.

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Then he describes the unborn child as a reproductive impediment, calculates the economic benefit of removing that impediment, and calls himself enlightened. The deity has changed names, but the temptation is distressingly familiar.

Scripture gives us a category for understanding how intelligent and educated people can reason themselves into such conclusions. Divine judgment is not merely something awaiting mankind at the end of history. Judgment can also operate within history: God gives rebellious people over to the consequences of their rebellion. Their thinking becomes futile. Their hearts are darkened. Professing themselves wise, they become fools.

That is an especially terrifying form of judgment because the person experiencing it may regard her condition as enlightenment.

The punishment for rejecting what is good is eventually losing the ability to recognize the evil of one’s own reasoning.

The frightening thing about a darkened mind is not that it wakes every morning plotting evil while twirling a theatrical mustache. It is that evil begins to look reasonable. Categories become inverted. Killing becomes health care, and economic productivity becomes part of the case for it.

An argument that should horrify us begins to sound like respectable public policy.