Abortion Hurts America’s Economy: Babies Would Have Contributed $6.9 Trillion Had They Not Been Killed

National   |   Steven Ertelt   |   Jun 21, 2022   |   8:04AM   |   Washington, DC

A child’s worth cannot be measured in dollars and cents.

But, with pro-abortion Democrats repeatedly tying abortion to financial success, pro-life Republicans set out to discover if this is actually true.

What the Joint Economic Committee Republicans found was that abortions actually cause a catastrophic economic loss. A new report from the U.S. Congressional committee estimated that loss at $6.9 trillion in 2019 alone.

“Abortion at its core is a moral issue rather than an economic one. But even in economic terms, the costs of abortion vastly outweigh any claimed benefits,” the pro-life lawmakers wrote in the report.

They came to the $6.9 trillion estimate based on standard methodologies that federal government agencies use to quantify the benefits of policies that affect mortality risks.

U.S. Sen. James Lankford, R-Oklahoma, shared the startling findings last week on Twitter.

“Abortion costs a baby his or her life. That’s painstakingly hard in & of itself, and now on top of that, we know the economic cost as well,” Lankford said.

Republican lawmakers said they felt compelled to research the matter after U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and other economists recently claimed that restricting or banning abortions would hurt the economy and women’s contributions to it.

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In May, Yellen defended abortion and Roe v. Wade during a U.S. Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee hearing. The treasury secretary said she believes banning abortion would be “very damaging” to the economy.

But, in the new report, Republican lawmakers said Yellen and other abortion supporters “overlook the far greater economic cost of abortion due to the loss of lives of the unborn.”

Based on the Centers for Disease Control abortion report for 2019, the lawmakers estimated that the loss of almost 630,000 unborn babies to abortions cost the economy at least $6.9 trillion, or 32 percent of the gross domestic product.

That estimated cost is 425 times greater than the earning losses of a mother who chooses life for her baby, according to their findings.

The report continues:

Earnings of the average mother fall by approximately $26,000 over the first six years of her first child’s life. If each abortion prevents maternal earnings from falling, all abortions in 2019 could save mothers $16.2 billion in earnings over the next six years. However, the JEC’s $6.9 trillion cost of abortion estimate far outweighs these projected earnings benefits.

The $6.9 trillion does not include additional losses to the labor force, Social Security, Medicare and innovation from aborted babies who otherwise could have lived, worked and contributed to a better society, they said.

The claim that abortion helps the economy is a common one, often made by abortion activists and political figures to justify the deaths of more than 63 million unborn babies to legalized abortion in the past 50 years. But it isn’t true. Quite the opposite, abortion hurts the economy by depriving society of future earners and innovators and individuals of children to care for them in their old age.

Others have produced similar estimates to that of the Republican lawmakers.

In 2018, Dennis Howard, the president of the pro-life group Movement for a Better America, estimated that the United States has a “cumulative GDP deficit of $62.6 trillion” as a result of the 61 million unborn babies who had been aborted up to that year. He estimated the deficit will reach $400 trillion by 2040 if unborn babies continue to be aborted at the same rate.

A few years earlier, Dr. Brian Clowes, director of education and research at Human Life International, calculated that the “direct cost of each abortion to society in terms of lost consumption and taxes paid amounts to, on average, $3,720,000.” Cumulatively, Clowes said that means trillions of dollars of economic loss due to the millions of unborn babies who have been aborted.