A new commentary in American Thinker by Eric Utter argues that abortion and the euthanizing of the elderly are not separate moral questions but two branches of a single socialist logic — one that treats human beings as entries on a ledger and eliminates those who drain resources from the collective.
Utter’s piece, published October 4, 2026, under the headline “Killing babies and killing grannies: two sides of the same socialist coin,” traces what he describes as a historical throughline beginning with Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger. He characterizes Sanger as a eugenicist who sold socialism to an American public that had long resisted it, and who argued that there were already too many mouths to feed. In Utter’s telling, Sanger’s answer was central planning of birth itself: a technocrat would limit the number of babies born so that resources might stretch further into an uncertain future.
That idea, Utter writes, has been tried repeatedly and failed every time. He points to China’s one-child policy, which he says led to the butchering, drowning, and abandoning of female infants, as well as sex-selective abortion that produced a severe demographic imbalance. He cites the ratio of 115 males for every 100 females among Chinese children aged 15 to 19 as evidence of the policy’s consequences, noting that the imbalance undermines the potential for family formation.
He also singles out Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, describing it as dystopian fiction masquerading as science that predicted mass famine in the 1970s, when the global population was half of what it is today. Intellectuals, Utter argues, accepted the premise wholesale and sold it to a political class eager to buy — and the sustainability argument, in his view, went on to drive much of the pro-abortion movement across the United States and the Western world.
The economic argument against abortion
Utter’s case is not solely moral. He writes that any social policy incentivizing the killing of babies — inside the womb or outside it — is “downright evil,” but he spends much of the piece insisting it has also been economically self-defeating.
His reasoning runs like this: free-market innovation produced prosperity and technological advances that extended lifespans, meaning the elderly now live far longer than before. Those retirees, along with the disabled and those he describes as simply not feeling like working, frequently live off a debt-laden, redistributive welfare state. The problem, as Utter frames it, is that killing tens of millions of American babies over the past fifty years eliminated the future workers and taxpayers who would have funded that state. In response, Western governments have frantically sought to import tens of millions of workers from the developing world — an effort Utter calls too little, too late, and undermined by the fact that many of those arrivals are themselves eligible for the welfare benefits and, in his account, came for exactly that reason.
He sums up the sequence as a chain of socialist logic: first, preventing children from being born to preserve resources for an unknown future; then, killing babies in the womb by the millions; then, lamenting that there aren’t enough people earning the money to pay the taxes that fulfill the welfare state’s redistributive promises.
From suggestions to coercion
The piece then turns to what Utter considers the next stage. He points to the Netherlands, where he says the government now legally permits the killing of a child up to age 12 if that child has what health authorities deem a terminal illness. He references what he calls the widely reported horror of a two-year-old disabled child being euthanized, and warns there is no reason to think such policies will stay across the Atlantic.
But his central warning is about the elderly. Once retired workers stop earning income and stop paying into Social Security and Medicare, Utter writes, a bureaucrat somewhere in Washington will tally their contributions against their distributions and see only red ink. When government’s job is resource management, he argues, it becomes less likely that available resources will be spent on those still draining them — and more likely they will be reserved for the producing members of the collective, allocated by unelected officials.
Canada, in Utter’s view, offers America a preview. He describes a progression there that began with a suggestion: if you’re old, if you have cancer and only months to live, the government will graciously help you die. The pitches, he writes, then grew more aggressive and broader in target.
He cites the case of Joanie Cowie, a 52-year-old Canadian with epilepsy who reportedly struggled to make ends meet on government disability payments. According to Utter, she was told, “They can have me dead in 90 days.” In the same news report, he writes, a Canadian military veteran with a brain injury who called his country’s veterans affairs office seeking help for PTSD was told he should consider a medically assisted death. The veteran said he felt pressured and was eventually told that letting a Canadian doctor kill him was better than blowing his brains out or driving his car into something.
Utter notes that these suggestions are no longer private. Canada, he writes, has long advertised to its citizens that dying is preferable to living, with one promotional video featuring a woman identified as Jennyfer speaking over soft music and nature imagery: “When I imagine my final days, I see bubbles, I see the ocean… you just have to be brave enough to see it.” Utter writes that Jennyfer was killed by her government in October 2022, her words preserved posthumously so that the act appears voluntary.
The next stage, he argues, is already underway: the killing of the unwilling under the banner of medical assistance in dying. He points to the case of an 83-year-old Christian grandmother with dementia whom he says was recently executed by the Canadian government — stabbed with needles as she cried and prayed. The government maintained she had consented, Utter writes, while her family and her own actions suggest otherwise.
His conclusion is sweeping. Socialism, he writes, has no other form. It is the killing of babies because those with power worry there won’t be enough resources for themselves, and the killing of the old because their deaths leave more for the same people. Whether one accepts that framework or not, Utter’s argument is a reminder that the debates over abortion, assisted dying, and welfare-state sustainability are increasingly being fought on a single battlefield — and that both sides of the euthanasia debate are watching Canada to see what comes next.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/10/killing-babies-and-killing-grannies-two-sides-of-the-same-socialist-coin/