June  2019 

After several states, including Alabama, Georgia and Missouri, passed legislation tightening restrictions on abortion, “Business leaders” at 180 companies signed an open letter Monday calling the legislation “bad for business.”

The letter, which is posted on the website “don’t ban equality.com” and appeared as a full-page advertisement in the Monday edition of The New York Times, called on companies to “stand up for reproductive health care.” CEOs from media, fashion, beauty, food and tech companies (most of whom you’ve never heard of) were among those listed as signatories.

The letter is full of the usual grotesque, Orwellian evasions. Abortion is not “comprehensive reproductive care” or “reproductive healthcare.” Access to elective abortion is not access to healthcare, for the mother or the baby. Abortion is killing a baby in the womb, thereby terminating the process of reproduction. It is not good for the baby’s health (although it does obviate future obstetric and pediatric care), nor the mother’s reproductive health (repeated surgical abortions can cause scarring on the uterus and infertility), nor the mother’s emotional health (should she ever be given the chance to contemplate what she’s done).

The theme “don’t ban equality” is propaganda, but what does it mean? It certainly is not a reference to abortion, because there is nothing equal about abortion. Women can have abortions, whereas men cannot have abortions because men cannot bear children. Although it takes both a man and a woman to make a baby, the decision whether to kill the baby in the womb can be made by the woman alone; she need not consult the man on whether to abort, nor even tell him of the existence of his child in her womb. It is also the woman alone who bears the physical and psychological health risks of abortion. Abortion is a very unequal thing, from start to finish.

The “equality” under discussion must refer to the fact that the phenomenon of human sexual reproduction makes men and women unequal from the point of view of their employers or potential employers. The way God designed for sexual reproduction to work, is that when a wife gets pregnant, she decreases her participation in the money economy to concentrate on child-bearing and child-rearing, whereas the husband increases his participation to support not only himself but his wife and child(ren). That means that a wife in her child-bearing years is liable to drop out of the workforce at any time to bear and raise children, whereas the husband is liable at any time to take on more responsibilities.

If you are a certain type of “business leader” who has a hole where your heart should be, and you want to keep your female employees in your workforce, you want abortion to be readily available to them. More to the point, you want your female employees, instead of leaving the workforce to have and raise their babies, to kill their babies and continue as productive worker bees for you. As the “business leaders” say in their letter, women carrying their babies to term “goes against our values and is bad for business. It impairs our ability to build diverse and inclusive workforce pipelines, recruit top talent across the states, and protect the well-being of all the people who keep our businesses thriving day in and out.”

So the “business leaders” are clearly correct that in order to have a “diverse and inclusive workforce” that is, a workforce exactly equal as between men and women, pregnant women must kill their babies so that they are worker drones indistinguishable from the male worker drones. If, along with these “business leaders,” you believe that “equality in the workplace is one of the most important business issues of our time,” then you must agree that access to abortion is absolutely critical.

I’ll go out on a limb and guess that most women are not all that enthused about the interests of “business leaders” who tell them they must kill their babies in order to have “equality in the work place.” That’s too high a price to pay for the equal opportunity to drudge away at jobs that often are not all that fascinating, and not as fulfilling to the typical woman as having and raising her children.

As the inimitable Tucker Carlson says, without Roe v. Wade,

“women might understand that they have the right to be mothers rather than just dutiful worker bees toiling for for some company that doesn’t care about them. They might start to understand that they could put their families first, if they wanted, before the interests of shareholders. Can’t have that; might hurt markets. So our corporate taste-makers push the lie that abortion is liberation. Only in faraway, remote places like Alabama do people miss that message and continue to believe that children are more important than market caps and stock prices. But everywhere else their propaganda is working as intended. According to a new report by the CDC, America’s fertility rate is the lowest it has ever been in the history of the country. . . . Our leaders tell us, ‘that’s fine, it’s totally okay, its normal, you don’t need children, here’s a new iphone, we’ll pay for your abortion, work harder, stop complaining, don’t listen to those people in Alabama, we will make them be quiet, get back to work, you’re liberated now. ‘“