The Abortion Economy
Posted by Rebecca Teti in News on Monday, January 24, 2011 9:53 AM
Cheers to all those marching for life today.
While the usual arguments are churning, here’s one that’s a little different: Roe v. Wade is the biggest reason our economy is in dire straits.
“How Roe v. Wade aborted America” encapsulates an important part of the argument in Redeeming Economics: Rediscovering the Missing Element,
It’s not just that our social programs are in collapse because the people meant to be paying into them aren’t here.
It’s also, as Mueller persuasively shows, following St. Augustine, that love and accountability to people we love are what drives economic decision making. By systematically breaking down the natural family, we have been destroying our economy simultaneously.
the impact of Roe transcends fertility; it also gutted America’s exceptional marriage culture, which Adam Smith noted was vital to our economic prospects. As George Akerlof and Janet Yellen of the Brookings Institution quantified 15 years ago, the 1973 decision eroded the widely accepted custom whereby young men married young women they impregnated.
In the 1960s, for example, 60 percent of unmarried pregnant women gained a husband before giving birth. But by sanctioning a new “choice” for an unmarried pregnant woman, the Court also gave the unmarried father the choice to “op out” of the previously unavoidable consequences of his actions: marriage and child support. By the 1990s, only 23 percent of unmarried women who found themselves with child tied the knot before giving birth.
According to Mueller, these new “freedoms” translated into the aborting of 24 to 30 percent of baby boomers’ children and a 35 percent decline between 1968 and 1976 of the “net” marriage rate, which has also yet to recover to its late-1960s level.
Indeed, the nation has experienced no net increase, since the 1970s, in the type of household demonstrated to be the engine of enduring economic growth - married parents with dependent children.
Mueller’s argument is complex, but to give you just a taste of it, he denies that economic decision making can be reduced to merely utilitarian explanations. He uses the example of a mom distributing milk in her household. She needs it for the baby, the older kids, for cooking, for coffee and for the cat.
If milk is scarce, to whom will she give what little she has? To her neighbor’s baby (who needs milk too)? To the cat? Her answer won’t be based primarily on what’s good for her.
In economic theory, therefore, human love is essentially neither an emotion nor a weighing of utilities (though either or both may also be present) but rather a weighing of persons.
When we loosen the bonds of genuine love, loosen our sense of genuine personhood, we undermine the “law of the gift” that is the foundation of economic growth.
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