For what Dr. Gruber called “positive selection” is simply a euphemism for eugenics: the deliberate elimination of those parts of the population most likely to have difficulty coping with our post-industrial, information-driven society. That a lot of secular progressives are fierce supporters of the abortion license because they’re eugenicists at heart shouldn’t come as a surprise; one current member of the Supreme Court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, had a Gruberian moment some years ago when she admitted in an interview that legal activists promoting the abortion license prior to 1973 did so in part because they thought it would cut down the “growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”

Dr. Jonathan Gruber, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is best known these days for an imprudent lecture in which he suggested that the Obamacare bill (of which he was an intellectual architect) was deliberately crafted to be so complex that the stupid American people couldn’t possibly understand it. Gruber’s lecture opened a window into the arrogance of the secular clerisy: those enlightened members of the professoriate who know best and who, as a matter of duty, are going to give the dimwitted people what’s best for them—and give it to us good and hard. Yet many who found Dr. Gruber’s condescension akin to fingernails scraping down a blackboard were even more appalled by a paper Gruber wrote in 1997, which came under scrutiny during a recent congressional hearing at which the MIT professor was a witness.

The language of that paper was not lilting—economists rarely are—but its meaning was clear and its implications were chilling. Here’s what Dr. Gruber wrote, describing his research into the economic effects of the abortion license imposed on the United States in the 1973 Supreme Court decision, Roe v. Wade:

By 1993, all cohorts under the age 18 were born under legalized abortion and we estimate steady state savings of $1.6 billion per year from positive selection.

In plain English: The abortion license saved the taxpayers $1.6 billion a year because those terminated before birth were from social classes most likely to be welfare clients.

In even plainer English: Disposing of all those poor kids before they’re born is a winner.

Gruber’s paper, and his grilling by Kentucky congressman Thomas Massie, was a reminder that eugenics is the dirty little secret of the secular progressive.

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