| Skubick's last paragraph today. The point is, using the economy to justify not having abortions can work both ways and moves the issue from morality to include dollars and cents. No one is saying that is either right or wrong, but it does represent a shift in strategy by the RTL contingency.
He's talking about Right to Life's assertion that the economy would be fine if we didn't have abortions. Skubick skips out on whether it's smart or stupid. Here's the thing. It's stupid. It's mind boggingly stupid. It's, "We didn't plant crops this last summer because the Mayan calendar says the world is going to end" stupid. It's like trying to make a political argument based on what the world might look like if a robot had traveled through history and assassinated Hitler and World War II been prevented. That's being generous. This is the sort of thing said by the people who sit around and argue what the United States would look like if Lee had pressed harder at Little Round Top. Or, whether the comic book Batman could take the movie Batman in a fistfight. Just in case anyone is feeling generous, the idea that more people would have led naturally to greater economic prosperity runs counter basically every piece of historical evidence about recessions, depressions, and banking scares. We might all be riding around in jetpacks powered by the energy of our own self-satisfaction, or the weight of a bunch of additional unwanted low-income children might have instead created additional demand for social services (instead of churning out more people to contribute into a national health care pool, which by the way if things worked out as Right to Life would want you to believe demands that those persons would pay into a national pool ... as if they were mandated to buy health insurance when young and healthy). |
