Missouri legislators say abortion leads to illegal immigration

[cryptique]

from Salon.com's "Broadsheet" column today...

 

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Fetal labor

 

Holy crazy Republican legislators from Missouri, Batman!

 

Sit down, this one's going to blow your mind: According to the Associated Press, a sixteen-member Missouri legislative panel has submitted a report asserting that the U.S has created a market for illegal immigrants by aborting all the Americans who would otherwise have held their jobs.

 

The report, from the state's House Special Committee on Immigration Reform, is so embarrassing that none of the six Democrats on the panel would sign their name to it, though all ten Republicans did.

 

The report also includes the claim that "liberal social welfare policies" keep government aid recipients living so high on the hog that they are unmotivated to get jobs, again creating a vacuum that pulls illegal immigrants across the border to work in terrible conditions for pennies an hour in their place.

 

The abortion-and-welfare stuff was written into the report by Rep. Ed Emery, the committee chairman. "The lack of traditional work ethic, combined with the effects of 30 years of abortion and expanding liberal social welfare policies have produced a shortage of workers and a lack of incentive for those who can work," is how the report reads.

 

And Emery helpfully expanded on this for the AP, telling them, "We hear a lot of arguments today that the reason that we can't get serious about our borders is that we are desperate for all these workers...You don't have to think too long. If you kill 44 million of your potential workers [the National Right to Life statistic on how many abortions have been performed since the passage of Roe v. Wade in 1973], it's not too surprising we would be desperate for workers."

 

But maybe Emery should try thinking a little longer. One problem we're not facing in the United States? A population decline. On October 17, the population hit 300,000,001. The fertility rate in the United States is 2.13 babies per mother, higher than the stable population replacement rate of 2.1 babies. Of course, many of those 2.13 babies are born to illegal immigrant mothers, but at least as of now, they still count as Americans -- and by Emery's calculations, potential future laborers.

 

But here are some problems we do face: Energy and environmental crises brought on by the astronomically high use by Americans of fossil fuels, forests, water, fisheries, and other natural resources. Education and health-care systems that are not exactly well-equipped to care for the 300 million we've got right now, let alone the other "44 million" who -- had they not been terminated as fetuses -- would no doubt be chomping at the bit to do manual labor in crappy conditions for criminally low salaries.

 

Broadsheet contributor Farhad Manjoo also points out that the U.S. infant mortality rate is around 6 deaths per thousand, while in Mexico it's about 20 per thousand, so that "by coming to America, immigrants vastly increase the likelihood that their future 'unborn' children will survive infancy. If [Emery] really cared about the unborn, he wouldn't doom them to getting born in Mexico or other foreign lands. They'd be much better off being born here in the U.S."

 

As Missouri Democratic Rep. Trent Skaggs told the AP, "To be honest, I think [the report] is a little delusional." Yeah, maybe a little around the edges.

 

These clowns should grab dinner with Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt, authors of Freakonomics, who observed in their book that crime began to fall in the United States about eighteen years after the Supreme Court passed Roe v. Wade, and that furthermore, it fell three years earlier in the five states that legalized abortion three years before Roe. Basing their hypothesis on this pattern, Levitt and Dubner asserted that the legalization of abortion was behind the precipitous drop in crime in the early 1990's.

 

So all those unintended, unwanted pregnancies might have produced underpaid laborers, sure. Or maybe a bunch of workforce-age adults sitting in the slammer. Or maybe it doesn't matter. Because we have puh-lenty of Americans as it is, women should be able to control what goes on in their own bodies, and if nothing else, reports like this offer an opportunity to remember that every child in this country should be a wanted one.

 

-- Rebecca Traister

[MattZ]

You really cant make this stuff up.

[anodyne]

dear missouri -

please secede again. thanks.

[napoleon]

this is almost as bad as the minnesota senator who said a couple of weeks ago we should give teachers guns to protect the students. i wish there was a blank stare smiley.

[Basil II]

blank stare smiley.

 

 

 

 

 

-robert.

[street spirit]

You really cant make this stuff up.

 

and if you did everyone would tell you how it was so far-fetched that it wasn't a very good story.

 

ironic.

[bjorn_skurj]

dear missouri -

please secede again. thanks.

They didn't secede the first time! Miss that day of social studies class?

[Duck-Billed Catechist]

He is the social studies class.

[bjorn_skurj]

Someone who doesn't know a border state from a Confederate one? Oy.

[anodyne]

i'm lazy - here's a cutnpaste. they were officially a border state, that's totally right on. i was kinda kidding about their fringe government as this minority fringe is out there (like the prior goons). since we're talking about the wingnuts, my post was for those same wingnuts. i'll be in the failed joke lounge with sen. kerry for a while.

 

the cutnpaste:

 

The Missouri Secession controversy refers to the disputed status of the state of Missouri during the American Civil War. During the war, Missouri was claimed by both the Union and the Confederacy, had two competing state governments, and sent representatives to the governments of both sides. This unusual situation, which also existed to some degree in the border state of Kentucky, was the result of events in early 1861.

 

At the beginning of the war, Missouri's governor was Claiborne Fox Jackson, a southern sympathizer who favored secession. Before the war started at Fort Sumter, Jackson unsuccessfully argued for Missouri's secession to a State Convention convened under the leadership of former governor Sterling Price to debate the issue that February. Most of Missouri held moderate Unionist beliefs at this point and did not favor secession, but they did not support going to war with the Southern states either.

 

more here - http://www.answers.com/topic/missouri-secession

[bjorn_skurj]

Sorry, man. I am rarely happy on a Tuesday.

[anodyne]

dude, it's my bad. the reference was lame.

[bjorn_skurj]

I could have been more tactful, though.

[Guest tandylacker]

dude, it's my bad. the reference was lame.

 

 

I could have been more tactful, though.

 

 

Looks like it might work out between you two after all.

 

[anodyne]

we're picking out drapes and a china pattern as i post this. i think it's true love!

 

 

in all seriousness, i dig bjorn's posts.

[Atticus]

I am pro-choice, but I kind of wonder why the article seems to take a shot at the freakonomics authors. Those guys weren't making any moral or idealogical claims, just looking at the data and establishing a hypothesis. I'm not sure it's fair lumping them in with these other morons...