NRO’s Robert VerBruggen writes about abortion being little more than birth control (every year 2% of women of child-bearing age have an abortion and half of them are not having their first!) and the article has numerous important and interesting facts that are not widely known but which go a long way to raise doubts about the abortion license. However, VerBruggen raises a disturbing solution to the problem of abortion:
I have made the case (in The American Spectator), as has my colleague Kevin D. Williamson (in National Review), that we should simply pay them to give their kids up for adoption. The specifics are debatable — I envision a program (funded by donations, fees from adoptive parents, and possibly the government) that offers a payment of a fixed amount for a healthy infant; Williamson essentially proposes a free market in babies. But the basic premise is the same: If a woman doesn’t value her child, and if the Supreme Court forbids us to pass a law protecting that child, perhaps a little cash will do the trick.
I am an economist by training and am as free market as they come, but turning children into commodities is hardly pro-life; buying and selling babies does not respect the inherent dignity of the human being. My training as an economist teaches me that if you pay for unwanted children, you will get more unwanted children (technically they would be wanted for being unwanted). Free market economics answers many public policy problems, but it does not answer the problem of murderous evil.
