Abortion is the main cause of family breakdown, argues an economist.

The social and economic costs of legal abortion


by John D. Mueller


At the World Congresses of Families in Warsaw, Amsterdam, and Madrid, and the demographic summits in Moscow and Ulyanovsk, I presented and updated a country-by-country model of fertility, which has since been published in my book Redeeming Economics.

I’d like to extend that analysis. We often assume that abortion is a tragic by-product of our current culture of family breakdown. In fact, legal abortion is the main causeof family breakdown, including specifically the rise in rates of divorce, illegitimacy, and crime, and the entry of most developed nations—now including the United States—into “demographic winter”.

Fifteen years ago I published a paper on the “Socioeconomic Costs of Roe v. Wade.” In it, I estimated the impact of legal abortion in reducing the U.S. population (about 20% so far) and concluded: “taken in its entirety, legal abortion is perhaps the single largest American economic event of the past century, more significant than the Great Depression or the Second World War” (see Figure 1).





.................


Readmore: www.mercatornet.com