| Researcher Says Abortion is $35 Trillion Drag on Economy MT. FREEDOM, NJ, October 17 /Christian Newswire/ -- The 50.5 million surgical abortions since 1970 have cost the U.S. an astonishing $35 trillion in lost GDP," a leading pro-life population researcher declared here. However, he added, "If you include all the babies lost to IUDs, RU-486, sterilization, and abortifacients, the number climbs to $70 trillion! " Dennis Howard, President of the Movement for a Better America, has been researching the economic impact of abortion since 1995. The estimates are based on GDP per capita per year times the cumulative number of abortions since 1970. Howard has been warning since 1997 that the US faced a major financial crisis based on ongoing demographic trends. He may be the only writer to correctly predict today's crisis. In 1997, he wrote: "I see little hope that we can avoid an eventual crash on Wall Street that will make the 1930's looking like cashing in your cards after a bad game of Monopoly®." He even gave percentages as to when a crash would happen. He wrote then: "I'd give it a 50% chance of happening by the year 2000, an 80% chance by the year 2010, and a 100% chance of happening by 2020." He also predicted: "It will last longer than the Great Depression, and if it takes a war to get out of it - as happened with World War II - America as we know it may not survive." That was three years before the market top in 2000. Even Alan Greenspan, who coined the term "irrational exuberance," only raised it as a question - not a warning or a prediction. Howard concedes his forecasts are controversial. "Far too many people look on abortion as some kind of free lunch. You pay your money and the deed is done. Out of sight, out of mind." He indicated that his is a much more conservative approach than used by government agencies like the EPA. That agency uses an "estimated statistical life" as a benchmark for its cost/benefit analysis of new regulations. A typical ESL averages about $7.8 million per life. Using that standard, Howard said, the cost for all abortions to date would be more than $390 trillion dollars - or 11 times higher than his estimates. |
