Er … what?

Just how desperate are Democrats to sell abortion in this midterm cycle dominated by inflation and crime? Stacey Abrams demonstrates here in an exchange with Mike Barnicle this morning on Morning Joe. Barnicle points out that Democrats’ attempts to use abortion to distract from the issues that matter most to voters in the cycle have flopped.

Abrams responds by claiming that abortion is a solution to inflation. And I’m not kidding:

Stacey Abrams suggests killing your unborn babies is the solution to inflation. pic.twitter.com/WXKPdFNk2j

— David Hookstead (@dhookstead) October 19, 2022

BARNICLE: You’re running for governor of Georgia. I would assume, maybe incorrectly, but while abortion is an issue, it nowhere reaches the level of interest of the voters in terms of the cost of gas, food, bread, milk, things like that. What can a governor — what could you do as governor to alleviate the concerns of Georgia voters about those livability, daily, hourly issues that they’re confronted with?

ABRAMS:  But let’s be clear. Having children is why you’re worried about your price for gas. It’s why you’re concerned about how much food costs. For women, this is not a reductive issue — you can’t divorce being forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy from the economic realities of having a child. And so these are — it’s important for us to have both/and conversations. We don’t have the luxury of reducing it or separating it out.

Exactly how does an abortion lower inflation? I’m curious about this, as an amateur economist. It might lower demand on a micro level, but it doesn’t do anything on a macro level to buying power or prices. In the long run and at the scale practiced in the US, it might depress demand a bit, but it will also depress production at the same time if it has that kind of impact — which makes it a wash.

As for concern over prices and the erosion of buying power, Abrams is also wrong. Everyone’s worried about those rising costs and diminishing real wages, of course, whether they have children or not. However, younger families have more options for scaling up their buying power. Inflation hammers hardest on people with fixed incomes and savings — retirees and others similarly situated who are unlikely in the extreme to reproduce. What will an abortion do for them, economically speaking?

And on a moral plane, this is just disgusting. People who don’t want to get pregnant should adjust their procreative activities rationally for that outcome. Once they have reproduced, however, the child should not have to pay for the parents’ irresponsibility in lacking the will to prevent that unwanted outcome. As a human being, the child has a right to life that transcends its economic cost. Abrams takes the utilitarianism that drives abortion (as well as euthanasia) and makes it even more grotesque in her attempt to stay relevant.

This is nothing but desperation on the part of Abrams, whose main claim to fame was election denialism until November 2020 made it out of fashion. She’s a radical extremist who couldn’t get elected in a Democrat wave election in 2018, and this is a great example of why.