Poverty as an argument for abortion?
Quite a bit of interesting discussion on Rob’s post decrying (rightly) Planned Infanticide’s tax subsidies, and one of the “arguments” offered is that poverty is a reason for abortion.
Let’s take a look at that. For starters, I’ve learned that an engineer in Malaysia earns about what we’d consider minimum wage here. Lots of people make do on far lower income without ripping their babies limb from limb.
Moreover, here are the poverty levels for families of various size; that for a family of two is $14000.
Calculate it out. If a man and his wife both have jobs at minimum wage jobs, they are, by government statistics, no longer poor. And yet the official poverty rates have been at about 10% since 1965 or so. What’s going on?
What’s going on is an awful lot of people have figured out that Uncle Sam is paying for their babies whether they work or not, and whether they get married or not. You can’t fix that problem by killing the babies. You fix that problem by removing the disincentives to marriage and work.
