It’s a year since the Dobbs decision, and, at the moment when pregnancy charities anticipate a spike in demand for their services, donations have collapsed.
Leaving morality entirely to one side, let’s examine cold hard fact. The average price tag for an abortion is $1500; the cost of giving birth ranges between $12-25,000, not counting the $10,600 per year that a child costs to raise. And nobody is stepping up to pay it.
Before we continue, I’d like to address the elephant in the room. The pachyderm in question has been objecting to my accounting thus: “The price tag for an abortion is $1500 plus a child’s life.” Even leaving morality aside, it must be acknowledged that this is a valid consideration.
“It’s not a child!” scream the pro-Choice advocates in unison, and the conversation threatens to derail before anything’s been said. This happens most of the time when people start talking sense on abortion; nobody wants to hear sense because most everyone’s position is fixed already. Which is why we’re ignoring morality for this discussion. Instead, concentrate on economics and social costs. Read and think.
Right now the American population is in decline. New births have fallen way below replacement rate. The workforce is decreasing, wages are staying low, and automation is taking over some industries while labor demand skyrockets. Over time, this means tax revenues are crashing at the same moment when end-of-life hospital costs are about to go through the roof. There aren’t nearly enough nurses to tend the old and the dying (much less the young!) and there’s no money left to pay them anyway.
This is what’s happening at the moment when there’s a massive increase in the number of teen pregnancies that, thanks to changes in the law, are no longer going to be terminated by abortions.
To put this in perspective: We’re already looking at an economic cliff where the only fiscally responsible solution appears to be the hiring of roving euthanasia squads. The time to start having kids was twenty years ago so they’d be entering the workforce right now. Instead, we’re having them now. At a time the labor supply is already in crisis, we’re increasing maternity leaves and hospital and daycare demand.
And charitable giving just stopped cold. It was bad in 2022; 2023 got worse, and 2024 has dried to almost nothing.
This isn’t unexpected when one considers ongoing inflation. It’s also not surprising that the birth rate has fallen drastically; who can afford a child when average rents are $1500 a month and minimum-wage takehome pay is… $1500 a month?
There’s a solution, and it’s a no-brainer. No, I’m not talking about overturning Dobbs and codifying Roe into law; frankly, that should have been done fifteen years ago when Obama promised to.† (Or not at all; again, leaving morality aside.)
Instead, let us consider Mexico, a nation of 130 million people with a sustained high birth rate. Let us consider the migrant crisis, where two million people a year are turned away annually at the border and hundreds of thousands make it through. These are not people who are afraid of a little hard work; most of them walked here from Guatemala or Venezuela. That’s not a short hike.
Yes, friends, I’m talking about two million hardworking potential taxpayers that we could be adding overnight to help bolster Social Security and a federal budget that’s miles in the hole. So we’re going to need daycare workers and nurses, are we? ¡Oye, abuela!
And yet who do we find blocking them? The same elephants as before, the people rightly insisting we count a child’s life as part of the price tag but who, now that they’ve enforced their opinions on the rest of us, aren’t willing to pay for it.
Again I hear a roaring from the Democrats: “Republicans are evil!” Let me stop you right there. They are not. They are no more evil than those Democrats who refused to codify Roe when they had a chance. They are, however, notoriously tight with a penny.
In 2022, just after Dobbs, rage giving from Democrats was off the charts — this in a year when donations were down overall. Today, the rage has faded and so has the giving. Meanwhile, Republicans aren’t interested in paying anything at all.
Put your money where your mouth is, people! If you’re pro-Life, that’s fine, but someone’s got to pay for that baby. If you’re pro-Choice, that’s fine too, but people still need help. Forget about the politics for a moment; forget about the issues. It’s not about those. It’s about real honest-to-goodness people who are suffering and need help.
This is about morality.
†In 2007, when Barack Obama was running for president, he said “the first thing I’d do as president is sign the Freedom of Choice Act,” which would have effectively codified Roe v. Wade. If you recall, the Democrats held a majority in both houses for two years.
You can send cash to PayPal in order to help support us, set up a subscription donation at Patreon, or buy us a coffee. Nobody else is giving, so it had better be you or, in a couple of months, The Not Fake News won’t be here.
Besides, you know if you don’t donate to us, you’d just end up piddling the money away on rent and groceries.
The Not Fake News 