Anti-gay attorney Gene Schaerr has claimed that marriage equality will lead to 900,000 abortions
As anti-gay activists continue to grasp at straws as the tide turns in favor of same-sex marriage, the Washington Post reports on a new last-ditch argument that marriage equality will lead to 900,000 abortions.
The claim was made by Gene Schaerr (above) who argued against gay marriage in Utah and Idaho.
In a post on the Heritage Foundation website last week, Schaerr acknowledged that although “abortion and same-sex marriage may seem unrelated…the two are closely linked in a short and simple causal chain.”
Using the bizarre argument that same-sex couples marrying will somehow devalue “traditional marriage,” he explained that there will be fewer heterosexual couples marrying, leading to an increase in the number of unmarried women, who have abortions at higher rates that married women, resulting in “nearly 900,000 more children of the next generation would be aborted as a result of their mothers never marrying.”
Heritage Foundation's Ryan Anderson (right) backed up Schaerr's claims, alleging that “every nation and every state that have redefined marriage have seen their marriage rates decline by at least 5 percent after that redefinition, even as the marriage rates in the rest of the states remain stable.”
However, the Washington Post points out that marriage rates have declined overall.
“The national marriage rate declined to 6.8 per 1,000 in 2012, from 8.0 in 2002, before Massachusetts became the first state to legalize gay marriage. The Massachusetts rate dropped from 5.9 in 2002 to 5.5 in 2011, while Connecticut went from 5.7 to 5.5 and Vermont went from 8.6 to 8.3. But Texas and Utah, free of same-sex marriage, dropped from 8.4 to 7.1, and from 10.4 to 8.6, respectively.”
Schaerr also speculated that an unemployed man who got his girlfriend pregnant in a state providing for same-sex marriage would be more likely to conclude that he has no obligations to the mother and child.
Watch Schaerr take part in a panel discussion on "religious freedom," AFTER THE JUMP…
