Penna Dexter

Two recent news stories converge to demonstrate how a fully functioning, vibrant economy depends upon a culture of life. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that job openings in the US climbed to 6.7 million in the three months ended in June, the highest level since 2001. The number of unfilled jobs is growing in nearly every industry. The Journal explains that an expanding economy that demands more labor combined with a historically low unemployment rate has resulted in a situation where there just aren't enough workers in fields such as transportation, warehousing, and utilities. Combine that with a story summarizing a paper published in 2016 in the Open Journal of Preventative Medicine. National Right to Life posted the piece on its news site last week under the headline "Abortion by far is the leading cause of death." A team of researchers from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte compared abortions from 2009 with other measured causes of death that year. Although abortions are not classified as deaths in US vital statistics, these researchers considered them so, stating that "the exclusion of abortion as a major cause of death...should be a major concern to the scientific community and society as a whole." They found that induced abortion caused nearly 1.2 million deaths, almost twice the deaths attributed to heart disease and more than twice those attributed to cancer. The National Right to Life story's author observed that "Abortion, unlike natural or accidental death, is intentional killing." So, when The Wall Street Journal reports that unfilled jobs are piling up, we have to conclude that we have taken the lives of workers we need in today's economy. Sure — some of these children, had they been born, would have ended up a net drain on the American economy. But most would have been contributors — and taxpayers. With over a million abortions per year, we're missing a lot of workers. Shouldn't policymakers want to know?