Abortion Denies Upward Mobility to the Poor, Doesn’t Combat Poverty

Opinion   |   Katie McCann   |   Aug 20, 2013   |   11:39AM   |   Washington, DC

By cutting life short in the womb, abortion denies upward mobility to all human life, regardless of income level. However, the pro-choice movement has been sustained by an elitism and classism that repeatedly and disproportionately victimizes some of the poorest women in America.

Frequently, the pro-choice side argues that it’s better to abort a baby than for that baby to be raised in poverty. Of course, this argument denies agency to both the woman and her child and, horrifically (as well as lazily), proposes the extermination of people rather than the problem itself.

The argument that unplanned children should be aborted on the basis that they are a social burden was popularized as the eugenics movement grew during the last half of the 19th century. Planned Parenthood’s founder, Margaret Sanger, joined the eugenics debate, aiming to lessen the “social threats” that an exploding black underclass posed to the economy and the American taxpayer by means of the Negro Project, a birth control movement targeted at black communities.

Today, according to the Guttmacher Institute, women with family incomes below the federal poverty level have more than 40% of all abortions—even though they make up 14.5% of America’s women.

These women also have one of the country’s highest abortion rates: 52 abortions per 1,000 women. On the other hand, higher-income women with family incomes at or above 200% of the poverty line have a rate of nine abortions per 1,000 women, which is about half the national rate.

Undoubtedly, some of America’s most vulnerable women and children—the poor—are disproportionately victimized by Big Abortion, a billion-dollar abortion industry lead by Planned Parenthood, the elitist, political giant that makes more than half of its income off of abortions and spreads the myth that it is the only source of health care for poor women.

The willingness to write children off for social and economic reasons only goes to show that the “pro-choice” mentality does not stand for the progress, upward mobility, or potential of the human mind to choose to live beyond the circumstances it is born into. Writing children off for social and economic reasons means writing off the choice to improve their lives. Undoubtedly, “pro-choice” is an unfit title for the movement.

Recently, a Columbus Dispatch cover-story explained a study in which Columbus was found to be among the “least-promising places in the nation for low-income children to climb the financial ladder.” The Dispatch asked whether the American dream is beyond reach for Columbus’s low-income children.

My answer is simply: No. As long as we protect and encourage the capacity of every human mind to reach its potential, the American dream does not have to be beyond the reach of our children.

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However, America’s abortion culture introduces an important catch to that answer: In a society where the elitism and classism of the abortion culture holds a significant amount of influence, the American dream is forever beyond reach for thousands of poor babies.

The Dispatch story indicates that upward mobility has more to do with whether or not children have a stable and values-based foundation than it does with the economic climate.

So what happens to a child’s upward mobility when a culture of death pervades the community she grows up in? What happens to a child’s upward mobility when pro-choice politics undermine the very values that keep us alive?

We simply cannot help poor women and their children climb out of poverty without life-affirming foundations that combat the classism and elitism of the abortion industry.

LifeNews Note: Katie McCann writes for Ohio Right to Life. This originally appeared at the Ohio Right to Life blog.