GUEST POST: Abortion activists like to present abortion organizations as charities concerned with women’s health. Given that we know how damaging abortion is to women’s health, claims that the abortion industry cares about health are clearly false. What about the claim that abortion businesses are not concerned with money? Do they help mothers economically? Short answer: no. 

People assume that mothers are better off ending the life of a child in an abortion. From every level of society, women receive the message that abortion allows them to pursue their education and career and that living children stand in the way. In other words, our culture has fixated on the message that women’s success depends on the death of their preborn babies. 

A closer look at who really benefits economically from abortion shows why this narrative that successful women have to kill their babies is false.  

It is undeniable that mothers seek elective abortion for economic reasons. According to the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute, one of the number one reasons women cite for undergoing abortion is an inability to afford another child (cited by 73% of women surveyed). That does not, however, indicate that abortion actually helps women’s financial situation but that there is little to no support for vulnerable mothers in unplanned pregnancies.  

After the abortion, mothers still have the older children they did not abort, they are still in relationships with abusive boyfriends who may have coerced them to have the abortion, they still have the jobs in which they may have been pressured to abort instead of having a baby. While Hollywood actresses may claim that killing a baby is the reason for their success, for many women abortion is additional trauma and loss that does not address the underlying reasons for poverty and lack of opportunity. 

Additionally, many mothers who chose not to abort their babies say that their children were the motivation to complete an education, advance in a career, or leave an abusive relationship. Destroying families is not a path out of poverty as the abortion industry claims but oftentimes a contributing factor to continued intergenerational dysfunction. 

Pro-abortion researchers have tried to claim otherwise, but evidence does not support these claims. For example, the infamous Turnaway Study suggests that women denied abortion suffer social and economic harm, but commentators have pointed out the methodological flaws in the study and explained why the study does not reflect the real-world experience of most women. The evidence is clear: abortion does not economically benefit mothers. 

If mothers do not benefit economically from abortion, who does? 

People forget how sprawling the abortion industrial complex is and how lucrative. Abortion businesses like Planned Parenthood are not just charities handing out free birth control: They are multi-national organizations raking in government funding and profiting from the killing of preborn babies. In the United States and through affiliated non-governmental organizations in other countries, Planned Parenthood has a broad and successful marketing efforts to ensure a steady stream of government grants and an increasing market share of the nearly one million abortions that occur each year. 

Planned Parenthood does not meet mothers at the time of an abortion decision, but instead is part of grooming children and teens long before an unexpected pregnancy. The abortion giant gains access to teens and young adults through so-called sexual education classes, in which children and teens are introduced to risky sexual behavior that encourages the unplanned pregnancies on which the abortion industry profits. 

In addition to the abortion industrial complex, many corporations benefit from abortion. When businesses offer abortion travel benefits and publicly advocate for abortion, what many people fail to realize is how much abortion can benefit the bottom line. Employees with fewer or no children are less expensive (lower cost of health insurance, fewer interruptions, more flexible work hours). When a company pays for a woman to travel to undergo an abortion, they are foregoing weeks or months of maternity leave if that same mother were to give birth to her child. For big business, abortion contributes to the bottom line. 

As in many areas of life, following the money tells you a lot about who actually benefits from abortion. Mothers who end the lives of their preborn babies are not in a better economic position. At the same time the abortion industry and abortion-loving corporations stand to gain much from the legal killing of the preborn.  

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