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Abortion advocates: Babies are too expensive, and abortion is the solution
One of the latest narratives disseminated widely by abortion advocates is the claim that induced abortion (intentionally killing human beings in the womb) is central to the idea of reproductive and economic 'justice' for women.
But killing humans should never be offered as a sort of 'solution' to financial hardship.
The Center for Reproductive Rights recently released a flawed, non-peer-reviewed study promoting the message that women need abortion because having children is too expensive.
Abortion advocate Jessica Valenti appeared on Vox Media's "America, Actually" podcast to discuss abortion, which she claims is an "affordability" issue.
Several commenters on X were horrified by this idea, noting that it isn't acceptable to kill anyone simply because they're deemed 'too expensive.'
"Abortion, Every Day" creator Jessica Valenti recently appeared on Vox Media's "America, Actually" podcast, where she argued it is a mistake for Democrats to ignore abortion while campaigning for the midterms in favor of economic issues.
According to Valenti, the ability to kill one's preborn children is an economic issue.
She stated (emphases added):
"It is an affordability issue, right?
Like, you'd be hard-pressed to find something more important to your financial life than whether or not to have a child, than whether or not that you're going to be forced into pregnancy or not even just forced into pregnancy, but forced into massive medical debt, because your pregnancy goes wrong and you can't get an abortion.
And then you're in real medical trouble, and you go septic, or you lose an organ, right? There's a million ways that that works, but I also think that this issue reaches so far beyond individual people."
While pregnancy and raising children can be expensive, the answer to this is not to advocate for killing people; after all, if a parent said it cost too much money to continue caring for their two-year-old, not many people (outside of the Netherlands, anyway) would argue that it is acceptable to kill that child. In addition, "forcing" a woman "into pregnancy" seems something more akin to "The Handmaid's Tale" than reality, so it's unclear what Valenti meant by this.
There are real systemic issues involved, as Valenti pointed out, which particularly affect Black women, and yet, the solution is to offer more support, not killing. Offering women death isn't a solution; it merely upholds the status quo and redistributes the injustice, ending the life of an innocent human being.
What incentive is there to invest the time and money necessary to truly support women when they can just be pushed toward abortion instead?
Valenti also mentioned maternity deserts, saying, "You're looking at states like Idaho, which has lost a third of its OB/GYNs. Maternity wards are shuttering. Some women have to travel hours and hours just to give birth."
Maternity care deserts (areas where there is little to no maternity care) are a legitimate problem, but killing one's preborn child certainly isn't a solution to this. If anything, the decrease in population (exacerbated by abortion) is making this problem worse.
A 2022 March of Dimes report found that 36% of all counties are considered maternity care deserts, and “access to maternity care is diminishing in places where it’s needed most, impacting nearly seven million American women of childbearing age and roughly 500,000 babies.”
Rural communities are most impacted, putting those women and children at most risk.
However, the solution is not abortion. And as a 2023 article published in the JAMA Health Forum explained, policy recommendations to address maternity care deserts do not involve abortion; instead, recommendations include investing in the workforce, building community-based services, and expanding health coverage for pregnancy and childbirth.
All of those things would help address the systemic issues noted by Valenti.
Many viewers were not convinced by her arguments, and found them disturbing, commenting on X.
One wrote, "Oh Vox… do we want to go down this road? If we want to justify eliminating people from the population because they’re financial burdens, you might not like where we end up."
Another followed the argument to its logical conclusion, writing, "Why not infanticide by this logic?"
Another person asked, "Did you just equate killing babies to affordability?"
Yet another commenter pointed out, "By that measure we should be killing the elderly, the handicapped, and anyone else who is a 'burden to a family."
Another stated, "I’m very pro choice but it’s weird to be this obsessed with abortion. Get a new shtick."
Another pointedly claimed, "'It's expensive out there, killing your kids is a simple and easy budget hack to keep your personal finances on track.' -Democrats"
A non-peer-reviewed University of Michigan study, funded by the pro-abortion Center for Reproductive Rights, claimed that women in pro-life states are more likely to pay increased health insurance costs. The researchers compared women ages 18–44 from 2019–2025 in states with pro-life laws versus states without them.
The group posited that pro-life laws led to higher medical costs, which researchers assumed would occur because more pregnancies are carried to term rather than aborted — and as prenatal care can be expensive, insurers may ultimately pass some of those costs along.
However, pro-life states didn't show higher direct hospital and doctors bills, which researchers suggested means insurers are spreading additional health care costs associated with pregnancy onto beneficiaries.
This study is not peer-reviewed, and the researchers don't seem to have directly observed this happening. They aren't matching insurance claims showing higher maternity-related costs to specific insurers, and then showing that those same insurers raised employee premium contributions in response. The abstract itself calls the evidence “suggestive.”
The researchers also excluded several states that expanded Medicaid during the period, which creates another problem. The pro-life states examined are disproportionately Southern, lower-income, more rural, and have very different labor markets, employers, insurance markets, and health systems from states like Massachusetts, New York, and Washington.
The study relies heavily on the idea that, absent pro-life laws, the trends would have continued moving similarly, despite the existing differences already present among these states.
For example, employer health insurance premiums rose 7% nationally in 2023, another 7% in 2024, and 6% in 2025. Employee premium contributions also substantially differ for things completely unrelated to abortion. In 2024, workers in the South paid an average 28% of family premiums versus 22% in the Northeast and 23% in the Midwest.
Employee contributions also vary hugely by employer size and industry. That also means that the differences found in the study could just as easily be explained by regional labor-market differences.
Both with the University of Michigan study and the Valenti interview, the message is the same: if people are too expensive, it's better to just kill them.
Surely we, as a society, can do better than this.
Live Action News is pro-life news and commentary from a pro-life perspective.
Our work is possible because of our donors. Please consider giving to further our work of changing hearts and minds on issues of life and human dignity.
Contact editor@liveaction.org for questions, corrections, or if you are seeking permission to reprint any Live Action News content.
Guest Articles: To submit a guest article to Live Action News, email editor@liveaction.org with an attached Word document of 800-1000 words. Please also attach any photos relevant to your submission if applicable. If your submission is accepted for publication, you will be notified within three weeks. Guest articles are not compensated (see our Open License Agreement). Thank you for your interest in Live Action News!
Cassy Cooke
·
Opinion
Cassy Cooke
·
Analysis
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International
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Analysis
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Issues
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International
Cassy Cooke
·Opinion
Cassy Cooke
·Analysis
Cassy Cooke
·
Abortion Pill
Cassy Cooke
·
Human Interest
Cassy Cooke
·Abortion advocates: Babies are too expensive, and abortion is the solution
One of the latest narratives disseminated widely by abortion advocates is the claim that induced abortion (intentionally killing human beings in the womb) is central to the idea of reproductive and economic 'justice' for women.
But killing humans should never be offered as a sort of 'solution' to financial hardship.
The Center for Reproductive Rights recently released a flawed, non-peer-reviewed study promoting the message that women need abortion because having children is too expensive.
Abortion advocate Jessica Valenti appeared on Vox Media's "America, Actually" podcast to discuss abortion, which she claims is an "affordability" issue.
Several commenters on X were horrified by this idea, noting that it isn't acceptable to kill anyone simply because they're deemed 'too expensive.'
"Abortion, Every Day" creator Jessica Valenti recently appeared on Vox Media's "America, Actually" podcast, where she argued it is a mistake for Democrats to ignore abortion while campaigning for the midterms in favor of economic issues.
According to Valenti, the ability to kill one's preborn children is an economic issue.
She stated (emphases added):
"It is an affordability issue, right?
Like, you'd be hard-pressed to find something more important to your financial life than whether or not to have a child, than whether or not that you're going to be forced into pregnancy or not even just forced into pregnancy, but forced into massive medical debt, because your pregnancy goes wrong and you can't get an abortion.
And then you're in real medical trouble, and you go septic, or you lose an organ, right? There's a million ways that that works, but I also think that this issue reaches so far beyond individual people."
While pregnancy and raising children can be expensive, the answer to this is not to advocate for killing people; after all, if a parent said it cost too much money to continue caring for their two-year-old, not many people (outside of the Netherlands, anyway) would argue that it is acceptable to kill that child. In addition, "forcing" a woman "into pregnancy" seems something more akin to "The Handmaid's Tale" than reality, so it's unclear what Valenti meant by this.
There are real systemic issues involved, as Valenti pointed out, which particularly affect Black women, and yet, the solution is to offer more support, not killing. Offering women death isn't a solution; it merely upholds the status quo and redistributes the injustice, ending the life of an innocent human being.
What incentive is there to invest the time and money necessary to truly support women when they can just be pushed toward abortion instead?
Valenti also mentioned maternity deserts, saying, "You're looking at states like Idaho, which has lost a third of its OB/GYNs. Maternity wards are shuttering. Some women have to travel hours and hours just to give birth."
Maternity care deserts (areas where there is little to no maternity care) are a legitimate problem, but killing one's preborn child certainly isn't a solution to this. If anything, the decrease in population (exacerbated by abortion) is making this problem worse.
A 2022 March of Dimes report found that 36% of all counties are considered maternity care deserts, and “access to maternity care is diminishing in places where it’s needed most, impacting nearly seven million American women of childbearing age and roughly 500,000 babies.”
Rural communities are most impacted, putting those women and children at most risk.
However, the solution is not abortion. And as a 2023 article published in the JAMA Health Forum explained, policy recommendations to address maternity care deserts do not involve abortion; instead, recommendations include investing in the workforce, building community-based services, and expanding health coverage for pregnancy and childbirth.
All of those things would help address the systemic issues noted by Valenti.
Many viewers were not convinced by her arguments, and found them disturbing, commenting on X.
One wrote, "Oh Vox… do we want to go down this road? If we want to justify eliminating people from the population because they’re financial burdens, you might not like where we end up."
Another followed the argument to its logical conclusion, writing, "Why not infanticide by this logic?"
Another person asked, "Did you just equate killing babies to affordability?"
Yet another commenter pointed out, "By that measure we should be killing the elderly, the handicapped, and anyone else who is a 'burden to a family."
Another stated, "I’m very pro choice but it’s weird to be this obsessed with abortion. Get a new shtick."
Another pointedly claimed, "'It's expensive out there, killing your kids is a simple and easy budget hack to keep your personal finances on track.' -Democrats"
A non-peer-reviewed University of Michigan study, funded by the pro-abortion Center for Reproductive Rights, claimed that women in pro-life states are more likely to pay increased health insurance costs. The researchers compared women ages 18–44 from 2019–2025 in states with pro-life laws versus states without them.
The group posited that pro-life laws led to higher medical costs, which researchers assumed would occur because more pregnancies are carried to term rather than aborted — and as prenatal care can be expensive, insurers may ultimately pass some of those costs along.
However, pro-life states didn't show higher direct hospital and doctors bills, which researchers suggested means insurers are spreading additional health care costs associated with pregnancy onto beneficiaries.
This study is not peer-reviewed, and the researchers don't seem to have directly observed this happening. They aren't matching insurance claims showing higher maternity-related costs to specific insurers, and then showing that those same insurers raised employee premium contributions in response. The abstract itself calls the evidence “suggestive.”
The researchers also excluded several states that expanded Medicaid during the period, which creates another problem. The pro-life states examined are disproportionately Southern, lower-income, more rural, and have very different labor markets, employers, insurance markets, and health systems from states like Massachusetts, New York, and Washington.
The study relies heavily on the idea that, absent pro-life laws, the trends would have continued moving similarly, despite the existing differences already present among these states.
For example, employer health insurance premiums rose 7% nationally in 2023, another 7% in 2024, and 6% in 2025. Employee premium contributions also substantially differ for things completely unrelated to abortion. In 2024, workers in the South paid an average 28% of family premiums versus 22% in the Northeast and 23% in the Midwest.
Employee contributions also vary hugely by employer size and industry. That also means that the differences found in the study could just as easily be explained by regional labor-market differences.
Both with the University of Michigan study and the Valenti interview, the message is the same: if people are too expensive, it's better to just kill them.
Surely we, as a society, can do better than this.
Live Action News is pro-life news and commentary from a pro-life perspective.
Our work is possible because of our donors. Please consider giving to further our work of changing hearts and minds on issues of life and human dignity.
Contact editor@liveaction.org for questions, corrections, or if you are seeking permission to reprint any Live Action News content.
Guest Articles: To submit a guest article to Live Action News, email editor@liveaction.org with an attached Word document of 800-1000 words. Please also attach any photos relevant to your submission if applicable. If your submission is accepted for publication, you will be notified within three weeks. Guest articles are not compensated (see our Open License Agreement). Thank you for your interest in Live Action News!
Cassy Cooke
·Opinion
Cassy Cooke
·Analysis
Cassy Cooke
·International
Nancy Flanders
·Analysis
Cassy Cooke
·Issues
Nancy Flanders
·International
Cassy Cooke
·Opinion
Cassy Cooke
·Analysis
Cassy Cooke
·Abortion Pill
Cassy Cooke
·Human Interest
Cassy Cooke
·Did you just equate killing babies to affordability?
By that measure we should be killing the elderly, the handicapped, and anyone else who is a “burden” to a family.
Oh Vox… do we want to go down this road? If we want to justify eliminating people from the population because they’re financial burdens, you might not like where we end up.
Why not infanticide by this logic?
"It's expensive out there, killing your kids is a simple and easy budget hack to keep your personal finances on track." -Democrats
I’m very pro choice but it’s weird to be this obsessed with abortion. Get a new shtick.
The decision to carry and raise a child can shape every part of a person’s financial life. @JessicaValenti joins Vox’s @AsteadWH to explain why abortion belongs in Democrats’ affordability message and what the party misses when it treats reproductive rights as a social issue.
