MIT professor Jonathan Gruber has become well-known because of his candid remarks about Obamacare. He suggested that the Affordable Care Act was drafted to be so complex that the average citizen would not understand it. In his comments he showed the arrogance of the intellectual elite and demonstrated their distain for most Americans.

We get an even better picture of his mindset if we read a paper he wrote about abortion. This paper came under scrutiny in a congressional hearing last year. George Weigel talks about the implications of Jonathan’s Gruber’s perspective in an article in First Things.

As an economist, Jonathan Gruber explained his view on the economic effects of the liberal U.S. abortion laws. He wrote: “By 1993, all cohorts under the age 18 were born under legalized abortion and we estimate steady state savings of $1.6 billion per year from positive selection.” George Weigel translates this into plain English: abortion “saved the taxpayers $1.6 billion a year because those terminated before birth were from social classes most likely to be welfare clients.”

Jonathan Gruber is getting a reputation for being blunt. He has bluntly told us what eugenics looks like in the modern world. Let’s abort as many kids in the lower classes and minority classes as possible so we can keep the costs of welfare low.

He isn’t the only person to be so blunt. A number of years ago, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg admitted in an interview that legal activists who were promoting abortion prior to 1973 did so in part because they wanted to decrease the “growth of populations that we don’t want to have too many of.” Her comment reminds me of another Supreme Court Justice. Oliver Wendell Holmes in Buck v. Bell, concluded that: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

These comments should remind us that abortion has been a tool of the modern eugenics movement. Some promote legal abortion as an efficient way to eliminate the poor and keep welfare costs down.