Obamacare Architect Says Abortion is a Social Good

Over the last three weeks, MIT professor and Affordable Care Act (ACA) architect Jonathan Gruber has gone from being an academic, known mostly in policy circles, to the face of political dishonesty and manipulation. Gruber, who helped create and sell the ACA to the American people, has been caught on tape admitting—on multiple occasions—that the law was written to mislead the public.

But that’s not all that he’s done. As originally reported by Jerome Corsi, Gruber is the author of at least two separate reports arguing that legalized abortion has tremendous social benefit. His work also provided some of the foundation for the 2005 book, Freakonomics, which promoted the idea of abortion as a means of improving society’s children.

In a 1997 working paper, Gruber and two co-authors argued that “children born immediately after” the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision saw “improved” lives. From the paper:

“The average living circumstances of cohorts of children born immediately after abortion became legalized improved substantially relative to preceding cohorts, and relative to places where the legal status of abortion was not changing,” wrote the three co-authors, who compared the five states that had legalized abortion prior to Roe to those who had not. “Our results suggest that the marginal children who were not born as a result of abortion legalization would have systematically been born into less favorable circumstances if the pregnancies had not been terminated: they would have been 60 percent more likely to live in a single-parent household, 50 percent more likely to live in poverty, 45 percent more likely to be in a household collecting welfare, and 40 percent more likely to die during the first year of life.”

As such, wrote Gruber and his co-authors, the data “impl[ies] that the legalization of abortion saved the government over $14 billion in welfare expenditures through 1994.”

A 2009 version of the paper, also co-authored by Gruber, concluded that “marginal children” saw improved lives, including an “increased likelihood of college graduation, lower rates of welfare use, and lower odds of being a single parent.”

Gruber’s work wasn’t just seen by academics. The 2005 book Freakonomics—co-authored by another supporter of abortion as a social good, Steven Levitt—took its abortion section from Levitt’s 2001 paper, “The Impact of Abortion on Crime,” which argued that legalized abortion was responsible for a lower crime rate in the 1990s. And Gruber’s work greatly influenced that paper.

In the 2001 paper, Levitt and co-author John Donohue cited Gruber’s work on at least three occasions, calling the final 1999 paper “most similar to ours, [which] document[s] that the early life circumstances of those children on the margin of abortion are difficult along many dimensions: infant mortality, growing up in a single-parent family, and experiencing poverty.” They also note that “previous research has found that an adverse family environment is strongly linked to future criminality”—and Gruber’s paper was all about “adverse family environments.”

Levitt’s argument was, of course, found to have significant flaws in several areas, including its historical analysis and the impact of growing prisons on crime. But both Levitt and Gruber have provided an intellectual and academic foundation for the liberal idea that society benefits from the slaughter of the unborn—because, allegedly, taxpayers benefit, as do the would-be peers of aborted children.

However, in addition to being morally abhorrent, both men’s arguments fail to account for two political decisions made by the party of abortion that prove the inconsistency of their arguments.

First, Newsbusters found a strong link tying Gruber to the current effort to provide ACA health benefits to illegal immigrants—analysis and data provided by Gruber that could lead to Congressman Joe Wilson’s “You lie” cry in 2009 being totally and completely justified.

How is this relevant to Gruber’s pro-abortion argument? Nearly half of illegal immigrants have not graduated from high school, and their median income is 28 percent lower than that of native-born Americans, according to this brief from 2012.

In other words, it seems that Gruber—and President Obama, and HHS Secretary Sylvia Burwell, who previously headed worldwide population control efforts for the Gates Foundation—think that babies born to poor American mothers aren’t worth the alleged “cost” because they tend to be less educated and poorer. But if you’re born somewhere else, come on in!

Additionally, a report released last week by Heritage Foundation senior research fellow Robert Rector showed that the concerns expressed by Gruber about single families and poverty are exacerbated by the type of government policies enacted by the ACA.

According to Rector, issues like single motherhood are made worse by federal welfare programs, including Medicaid—which has been enlarged in many states through the ACA. Rector highlighted how “the overwhelming majority of assistance to families with children goes to single-parent households,” and two ways this hurts families.

First, said Rector, welfare reduces “the financial need for marriage.” In other words, the government takes the place of working fathers.

Second, said Rector, because welfare programs are designed to lower benefits as household income goes up, the programs are “actively penaliz[ing] low-income parents who do marry.” Again, the allegedly helpful programs incentivize single mothers to not marry because marriage brings in more income—and thus, reduces welfare benefits.

It is right and just that Gruber is under so much pressure for his comments about the “stupidity” of the American voter and the Obama administration’s lies about the ACA. It’s unfortunate that his ideology hasn’t just been limited to health care, but also to the destruction of the unborn.

Teaching people that it is okay to kill other people for reasons of convenience, laziness, etc., cannot possibly have a good effect on society. When the only value placed on human life is whether it contributes in a utilitarian fashion to “society”, society cannot help but become ugly and base as a result.

When children are raised by mothers who killed their siblings, those children allowed to live suffer a lot of emotional damage. Women who abort must suppress their maternal instincts to kill their children—those instincts do not suddenly pop back up intact just because they decide to let a child live. Their ability to mother is impaired.

Abortion has the effect and purpose of fundamentally teaching women that they are worthless. If those who claim to be for women’s rights really believed in them, they would encourage women to use whatever means necessary to avoid pregnancy, instead of encouraging irresponsibility. It isn’t like there are no options for avoiding pregnancy—there are many, and more are being developed all the time. Regardless of what those who promote abortion claim, a woman *does* have the right to control her own body—and when she uses abortions for birth control, she is *not* exercising that right.

In one of Gruber's more infamous numbers crunching operations for the Clinton administration---Gruber equated the legalization of abortion w/ lower crime rates and economic progress.

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Bill Clinton was gleefully touting Gruber's mathematical sleight of hand only recently...laying the groundwork for 2016 Hillary:

CLINTON: "We had 100 times as many people move from poverty into the middle class," Bill Clinton told an appreciative audience during a cocktail hour hosted by POLITICO, marking the 10th anniversary of the Clinton Presidential Center.

"This shows the importance of policy. We can do this again”....Clinton said w/ a nod to Hillary.

Clinton 's Grubering is nauseating. Billy "forgot to mention" MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber crunched those numbers for the ever-ambitious Clintons....basing the numbers on the Clintons' knee-bending abortion worship. Read on.

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World Net Daily reported November 14, 2014
BY Jerome R. Corsi / FR Posted by Cincinatus' Wife

NEW YORK – Obamacare architect, Jonathan Gruber, (exposed for his frank admissions that passing Obama's signature legislation required lying to "stupid" Americans)......published a paper during the Clinton administration observing that legalizing abortion saved the government $14B in assistance to economically disadvantaged mothers, including African Americans.....and lowered crime.

MIT economics professor Jonathan Gruber argued in his Clinton paper that without the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, “marginal children” would have been born to many poor mothers. Gruber said statistics show these aborted children would have been 70 percent more likely to live in a single-parent family, 40 percent more likely to live in poverty, 50 percent more likely to receive welfare and 35 percent more likely to die as an infant.

Economist Steven D. Levitt and journalist Stephen J. Dubner in their bestselling 2005 book, “Freakonomics,” relied on MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber’s work to argue that legalizing abortion was responsible for an approximately 50 percent reduction of crime in major urban centers in the early 1990s. more at wnd.com

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