1 August—This morning’s Republican-American has a letter to the editor from a former U.S. Senate economist now living in Watertown that addresses the consequences of abortion. An earlier letter from an abortion advocate had asserted that were it not for (legal) abortion, some 450,000 unwanted children would be born each year, costing $250,000 to be raised from birth through high school. (Presumably public high school, as a quarter million would barely cover four years at a private school these days.)

The anti-abortion economist cites what he calls a problem with that pro-abortion reasoning: it doesn’t account for the “lost human potential that results from abortion.” “How many of these so-called 450,000 unwanted children might go on to live productive lives and even flourish or thrive in American society?” he asks, rhetorically or otherwise.

Indeed he might, because the pro-life economist opines that many could grow up to do great things, including pay taxes. And he’s absolutely right.

So let’s play reductio ad absurdum. Since abortion deprives the world of all those potentially productive people, why not go the next step, as Clarence Thomas has hinted he’d like to do, and ban contraception? Just think of all of what the thoughtful economist calls the “medical doctors or scientists who could find a cure for cancer, among other things,” who are being denied even the joyful miracle of conception.

And why stop there? Why not encourage or even mandate conception—or at least giving it the good old college try? Our friends in Red China are doing something like that now because they know they can’t afford to pass up another opportunity to breed a scientist to breed a new virus or a potential dictator. (The right scientist could likely breed both.)

Think of all the benefactors of mankind who haven’t even been conceived and probably never will be just because selfish people haven’t been engaging in enough sexual intercourse . . .