Congressman Slams Obamacare Architect for Saying Poor People Need Abortions to Save Money

National   |   Steven Ertelt   |   Dec 9, 2014   |   6:05PM   |   Washington, DC

A pro-life Republican congressman grilled the architect of Obamacare today and questioned him over statements he made essentially saying that poor people need abortions in order to save money. “What you inferred, I find chilling,” a Congressman told him.

gruber2Gruber once argued that abortion has helped improve our nation’s economy and social environment. In a paper he helped write in May 1997 for the National Bureau of Economic Research, Gruber and two fellow writers suggested that abortion has helped save the nation money and social woes. Here is one of their must infuriating excerpts:

We find evidence of sizeable positive selection: the average living circumstances of cohorts of children born immediately after abortion became legalized improved substantially relative to preceding cohorts, and relative to places where the legal status of abortion was not changing.

Our results suggest that the marginal children who were not born as a result of abortion legalization would have systematically been born into worse circumstances had the pregnancies not been terminated: they would have been 70% more likely to live in a single parent household, 40% more likely to live in poverty, 35% more likely to die during the first year of life, and 50% more likely to be in a household collecting welfare.

The last of these finding implies that the selection effects operating through the legalization of abortion saved the government over $14 billion in welfare payments through the year 1994.

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With that in mind, here’s Congressman Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, questioning Gruber:

“Does your philosophy on abortion – that it saves money and improve outcomes – have any effect on end-of-life care?” he asked.