June 6, 2022

US Treasury Secretary Testifies that Abortion Boosts the Economy

US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told a US Senate committee last month that legal abortion is justified. She argued that benefited the economy by allowing more women to enter the workforce.

Yellen testified during the Financial Stability Oversight Council’s report to the Senate Banking Committee. During that report, pro-abortion politicians took the opportunity to turn the discussion away from economic topics and toward the issue of abortion.

When Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) asked Yellen what impact the overturn of Roe v. Wade would have on the economy, she responded:

“I believe that eliminating the right of women to make decisions about when and whether to have children would have very damaging effects on the economy and would set women back decades. Roe v. Wade and access to reproductive health care, including abortion, helped lead to increased labor force participation. It enabled many women to finish school that increased their earning potential. It allowed women to plan and balance their families and careers, and research also shows it had a favorable impact on the well-being and earnings of children.”

She continued by arguing that young, low-income, black women will be unable to get the education necessary to participate in the workforce unless they have abortions. She further argued that the children of these mothers will grow up in poverty themselves (implying that they would be better off aborted).

Killing the children of poor mothers, black or otherwise, is not an ethical solution to the issue of poverty. It should go without saying that children's lives have value regardless of their parents' financial positions.

Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), who was born to a single-parent black household, pushed back against Yellen's arguments both during the hearing and afterward in an op-ed for the Washington Post.

“There are voices today who would tell you that our lives were hopeless,” he wrote. “That a life like the one we had as a family was not a life worth living, and that the United States would be better off if people like us didn’t exist at all.”

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