I’ve Moved!
November 20, 2008
So I’m sure that most people have noticed that the site has been offline for a few days. There’s a reason for that, which I will get to shortly. But first, let me just say this:
In fact, I am blogging at a new site I have just finished setting up: kennethhynek.net. A full explanation for the reasons behind the move can be found here
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That said, this is not the end of Time Immortal. My wife Grace has expressed interest in taking over blogging at this domain, and I am working to make sure that she gets set up here as soon as possible.
Also, my profound apologies for the modification to the site face; the move was not as seamless as I would have hoped, and many of the image files for this theme, and in the gallery, were corrupted during the course of their evacuation from my previous web host’s servers. Until such time as I have repaired them, I’ve put a clean-looking template in place of the previous one.
Update: for the purposes of further traffic shaping, new posts from kennethhynek.net will be excerpted below. Full articles can be read at the new blog.
The economic cost of abortion
October 22, 2008
Not surprising at all: kill off 40 or 50 million potential citizens, and you just might suffer a trillion-dollar hit to your GDP.
Researcher Dennis M. Howard, president of the pro-life group Movement for a Better America, who has been tracking the economic impact of abortion since 1995, has shown that the 50.5 million surgical abortions since 1970 have cost the U.S. $35 trillion dollars in lost Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
If the number of missing children includes those aborted by IUDs, RU-486, sterilization and abortifacients, the figure climbs to over $70 trillion.
Originally calculating losses in “downstream tax revenues as an index of the cost of abortion,” which showed only government revenue loss, Howard then turned to using lost GDP (GDP per capita per year times the cumulative number of abortions since 1970) as a measure of total economic cost.
“No matter how you slice it, aggressive ‘population control’ exacts a huge price in future economic growth that can never be recovered. Indeed, it is a loss that reverberates through all future generations. Without an enormous new Baby Boom lasting another 40 or 50 years, that growth is lost forever. We don’t have a debt crisis. We have a death crisis,” wrote Howard.
Howard mentions the collapse of the former Soviet Union as an example of a nation whose demographic implosion has contributed to its economic breakdown.
“The main reason for their collapse was internal — 300 abortions for every 100 live births for decades. Their future is still grim. Right now, there are not enough younger women to reverse their population decline. Indeed, they are expected to lose another 40 million people between now and 2050.”
This was, I think, utterly predictable. Abortion, like all sins, is not victimless, and in fact the scope of whom it victimizes is not limited to only the unborn child that is killed. The impact of abortion is felt also at a societal level, and for obvious reasons: society depends on humanity to produce more human beings. And in cultures where abortion and birth control have been de-stigmatized and/or legitimized, that is exactly what increasing numbers of human beings are either failing to do, or choosing not to do.
And it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the result is nothing other than flirtation with societal collapse, whether at a governmental level (as in the Soviet example) or at a fiscal level (as in the American example).
