According to new data from the University of Pennsylvania, if the United States were to totally reopen now, 233,300 more people would die than if we continued locking down. That's a whole lot of people! According to that same model, another effect of reopening right now would be that the GDP would increase by 1.5 percent and almost all net job loss would be eliminated. Fully locking down, their model says, would result in the loss of 18.6 million jobs in May and June.

It's certainly not a great choice we're faced with right now. It's really not. It feels horrible to even be discussing this. But given the choice between losing their job and losing their life, most people would pick the former. You can always get another job, but once you're dead, you're dead and you can't really do much about that.

In these "uncertain times," there has been no shortage of ardently "pro-life" polemicists sharing their thoughts on why we should be willing to sacrifice lives in order to save the economy, no shortage of anti-choice covidiots carrying signs proclaiming "My body, my choice!" This is not to say any of them are actually willing to die to save the economy, they just see that as the kind of thing that will happen to other people.

One such person is actress Sam Sorbo, who you may have correctly guessed is the wife of Kevin Sorbo, star of "Hercules" and God's Not Dead. She was apparently also on "Hercules," but I wouldn't know as I only ever watched "Xena." On a recent episode of "Fox & Friends," Ms. Sorbo suggested that people start doing "civil disobedience" against social distancing — maybe walking up to people and coughing on them, for freedom — and attempted to apply the "My Body My Choice" rhetoric to her decision to not wear a mask.

Putting aside the fact that wearing a mask is actually not a big deal, no one is asking Sam Sorbo or anyone else to wear the mask for their own protection. If that were the case, if she were the only person whose life she risked by not wearing a mask, that would be one thing. But the reason people are being asked to wear masks is because many of the people carrying COVID-19 are asymptomatic and until we have really widespread testing, we can't know who those people are. Asymptomatic carriers can spread it to other people who could then die from it. Like Typhoid Mary.

It's not hard.

Now, some of us might say that being all "Ew, why am I supposed to care if other people die?" is not a particularly pro-life position, but it's certainly been the default one for much longer than COVID-19 has been around. However, in an op-ed in The Federalist titled "It's Hard To Take The Left's Abortion Arguments Seriously When They Betray Them For COVID-19," future "Fox & Friends" co-host Kylee Zemple argues that it is actually pro-choicers who are being the real hypocrites here — for refusing to accept the Right's arguments in favor of letting people die to save the economy.

While people in the pro-abortion camp have largely given up on trying to persuade anyone that a baby in utero is nothing more than a clump of cells — which is debunked with even a cursory look at a sonogram — they continue to justify the barbarism with half-baked notions of choice and "reproductive freedom."

Perhaps their most noble and frequent defense, though, is one of economics. We've all heard it in its various forms.

"A baby born into poverty will have a horrible life."

"You can't be pro-life if you aren't willing to adopt all the poor children."

"You don't know what it's like to be a single mom with an unplanned pregnancy and no money."

In any case, the argument boils down simply to this: Death is better than life with economic ruin

Well, first of all, it's a fetus. It's not a baby. And the sonograms and "aborted baby" pictures distributed by anti-choicers are almost never actually what they claim to be. Also no, that is not what the argument boils down to at all, for any reason. No one is claiming that. People do often cite not being able to afford having a baby as one of the main reasons they've had an abortion, but any reason is acceptable. There is no "unacceptable" reason to have a legal abortion if that is what one wants.

But let's see where she's going with this:

Now the left is tripping over its own rhetoric, arguing that we must do whatever it takes to save lives, up to and including kneecapping the entire economy and destroying the financial future of countless Americans. While not all will say it explicitly, the foolish policies of these "little tyrants" gives them away.

Ohhhh.

"No one can know a particular person's circumstances or the factors that go into their decision-making if they are not walking in her shoes," [Gretchen] Whitmer said of Michigan's Reproductive Health Act in October 2019. "But we do know that these decisions right now should be left to each individual … based on her own personal values, based on what she knows to be best for herself and for her family."

A female making the same argument now for her small business would be crushed under Whitmer's pandemic-fueled order. Any healthy, single mom in rural Michigan right now could be trying to do "what she knows to be best for herself and for her family" — go to work while practicing social distancing — but is being told she must stay home to "save lives." Where is her choice, governor? Where is her financial consideration?

So here's the thing, Kylee. There isn't a single pro-choice person out there going around arguing that anyone should be allowed to abort other people's pregnancies against their will. What you and those like you are arguing for is the right to kill other people for economic reasons. This is bad for the same reason robbing people at gunpoint and then killing them is bad. Sure! You may benefit economically, but you also murdered a person. There is a difference between doing that and having an abortion, just like there is a difference between having an abortion and letting people die horrible deaths from a contagious virus because it would be better for the economy.

Someday, when the coronavirus is old news, pro-choicers should not be surprised when the right doesn't take their bleeding-heart economic arguments seriously. When COVID-19 came knocking, the left didn't take them seriously either.

Oh please, like they took them seriously anyway.

The real issue here is that anti-choicers care more about the lives of fetuses than they do about born humans, and we care about born humans more than we care about fetuses. From our perspective, born humans have lives, thoughts, relationships and killing them would be bad. From theirs (for many of them anyway), those born humans have already had a chance to accept or not accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior and get baptized, and the sinless fetuses have not.

Oddly enough, we're all actually being ideologically consistent in this regard, with the exception of forced birth enthusiasts declaring themselves "pro-life" when they're only pro-forced birth. When they actually give a crap about some born humans, then we can talk.

[The Federalist]

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