“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.

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.

The paper published in 1997and 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.

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