During a rally in Columbus for Janet Porter’s Heartbeat Bill, which would criminalize abortion in the vast majority of cases, Ohio Republican State Representative Jarrod Martin came up with an economic rationale to pass the legislation: to help the U.S. compete with China.
Martin argued that since there are far more Chinese students taking AP classes than American students, the U.S. needs to ban abortion so women will have more children in order to rival China’s academic dominance.
Martin: When you look at China and you look at their population, the population growth that China has and other Third World countries have compared to the population growth of the United States; China right now how more children in AP and gifted classes than the United States has in school. Think about that, they have more children in their gifted classes than we have in our entire school system. And we are killing thousands and tens of thousands of babies every year. How do we compete? We have to think about our future. That’s a little bit of economics behind this bill.
Martin was introduced by Porter, a radical dominionist and conspiracy theorist who had fetuses testify for the legislation. The Heartbeat bill, which is backed by leading Republicans like Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich and Michele Bachmann, passed out of committee but has not yet been scheduled for a vote by the full Ohio State House.
