More Surprising Jonathan Gruber Comments Surface...and This Time They Have to Do With Abortion

Jonathan Gruber, the MIT economist who gained unwelcome fame for talking about the “stupidity of the American voter,” previously wrote that legalized abortion reduces welfare costs and means more children are likely to graduate college.

MIT professor of economics, Jonathan Gruber at his home in Lexington, Massachusetts. (Boston Globe via Getty Images)

The paper published in 1997 and later updated in 2009, was written with Gruber of MIT; Douglass Staiger of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and Phillip Levine of Wellesley College, 25 years after the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision.

“[T]he average living circumstances of cohorts of children born immediately after abortion became legalized improved substantially relative to preceding cohorts, and relative to places where the legal status of abortion was not changing,” the 1997 paper co-written by Gruber said.

The paper, first reported on by CNSNews.com, goes on to say that children who were aborted would have had a poorer quality of life had they lived.

“Our results suggest that the marginal children who were not born as a result of abortion legalization would have systematically been born into worse circumstances had the pregnancies not been terminated: they would have been 70 percent more likely to live in a single parent household, 40 percent more likely to live in poverty, 35 percent more likely to die during the first year of life, and 50 percent more likely to be in a household collecting welfare,” the paper says.

The paper continues, “The last of these finding implies that the selection effects operating through the legalization of abortion saved the government over $14 billion in welfare payments through the year 1994.”

The paper was updated in 2009 to look at the progress of the sampling.

“In particular, it increased likelihood of college graduation, lower rates of welfare use, and lower odds of being a single parent,” the 2009 paper said.

Gruber is scheduled to testify in front of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Dec. 9 regarding his role with administration official in withholding certain information from the public about Obamacare.

(H/T: Fox Nation)