Allowing Women To Determine Their Own Medical Care Is The REAL Holocaust

One of the more pervasive justifications on the theocon right for the failure of their economic policies is that they would all be eliminated if there were a million more people in the workforce as a result of making abortions illegal. This is a completely ridiculous argument; abortion rates in countries where the practice is illegal are virtually unchanged from countries where it's legal; all that criminalizing abortion does is cause the deaths of women who attempt to end an unwanted pregnancy. Furthermore, it's one of those theories that sounds right but can be easily made applicable to account for pretty much anything, good or bad.

Crime: "If it weren't for abortions, there'd be 50 million more potential murderers and rapists on the loose!"
Iraq: "If it weren't for abortions, we'd have 50 million more potential National Guard recruits! We wouldn't have this shortage!"
Tort Reform: "If it weren't for abortions, we wouldn't have 50 million more potential lawyers filing frivolous lawsuits!"
Abortion: "If it weren't for abortions, we would have 50 million more people in the world arguing against abortions!"
Abortion (the other way): "If it weren't for abortion, we would have 50 million more potential high-risk teenagers about, some of whom might want to get an abortion!"

So I never expected to see such a reductionist argument used in anything but the outer fringes of political debate. Except when the venue is the Values Voter Summit and the speaker is Mike Huckabee:

"Sometimes we talk about why we're importing so many people in our workforce," the former Arkansas governor said. "It might be for the last 35 years, we have aborted more than a million people who would have been in our workforce had we not had the holocaust of liberalized abortion under a flawed Supreme Court ruling in 1973."

Thus ending the Huck-mentum bandied about by media types trying to wring some excitement out of a depressing GOP race. First of all, the Anti-Defamation League and all sorts of other organizations should be up in arms about comparing a medical procedure to the death of 6 million Jews. Second, this idea that Huckabee would unify social and fiscal conservatives was always a phantom, considering that the Club for Growth calls him Tax Hike Mike, and that tax issues were two of the top four issues to voters at the Values Voters Summit. And by the way, Huckabee split the straw poll vote with Mitt Romney, whose speech there was much more well-received.

But really, I want to stress that this could be the most inane argument ever expressed by a serious Presidential candidate. Or at least for this week, anyway.