Did that headline grab your attention?

I’ll admit, I’m feeling cheeky this week, but there’s a particular strand of election rhetoric that has all but made my brain fall out.

While Jonathan Swift delivered his modest proposal for the Rich to eat the children of the Poor in a showcase of sustained satirical irony, there has been an uptick of straight faced and serious statements made by politicians and pundits that has a blatant Malthusian lilt to it.

The Dobb’s ruling earlier this year rekindled the fire behind the Dem’s midterm hopes. However, as the rubber hits the road and reality sets in, some are finding their confidence in the emphasis they’ve put toward the issue is beginning to wane.

Polling around the country indicates a majority of voters are more concerned about the state of the economy, rampant inflation, and the near certainty of a recession, leaving the national media and the White House reeling. Why is it more people aren’t driven by concerns over abortion access, but are instead up in arms over the price of gas, heat, eggs, and the state of their 401K?

I wish I had a button that would cause a giant hologram of James Carville to appear in the sky over the United States, screeching his immortal quip about the primacy of the economy into the Aether. I’m afraid his brand of pragmatic realism has long ago been abandoned by his party, who have spent the final days before the vote abandoning self-reflection in favor of cranking the gaslighting up to 11.

During a recent appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Oct. 19, Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams offered abortion as her solution for voters concerned about inflation and the spikes in cost of living, saying, “having children is why you’re worried about your price for gas, it’s why you’re concerned about how much food costs,” as though those concerns only affect the child rearing.

I hold nothing against an individual making an informed and considered choice on their own regarding their own ability to provide and care for a child. But for those already neck deep in parenthood and drowning due to the spike in the cost of living, how exactly is an abortion someday in the future going to solve their issues today?

This would seem like an odd tilt to make to anyone even if they support abortion access, especially when the common ground most find on the issue is in the notion of abortions being “safe, legal, and rare.” That is a far cry from the answer to the “economic burden” that Abrams frames children as, essentially boiling the entire problem down to the fact a child could be born into a world her own party is actively working to make untenable to its existence in the first place.

It’s not as though their pitch about fewer births alleviating the cost of living really holds up when her party is calling for economic migrants to flood into our country through the southern border. As we are told, these are the people that harvest our food, and do all the work Nancy Pelosi says no one else is willing to do. It’s not like the millions of people who have crossed in the last two years don’t have mouths or stomachs, right Nancy?

This particular thread has brought Dennis Kelly’s controversial conspiracy thriller “Utopia” back to the forefront of my mind. The definition of a cult hit for the UK-based Channel 4; the series is pretty obscure unless you stumbled upon the Amazon Prime remake starring John Cusack while you were stuck at home during quarantine in 2020.

In both versions, a band of comic book fans stumble upon a conspiracy of global elites, businessmen, assassins and government bureaucrats. The villains of the series are cold, calculated, and utterly righteous in their intentions to save not only the planet but also the human race by reducing fertility in 95% of the global population through a manufactured “Russian Flu” scare to motivate the masses to receive a “vaccination.” There’s a reason the Amazon version from 2020 ran with a disclaimer.

While the stuffy Brits behind the conspiracy in this fiction view their methods as less ethically challenged than say the genocidal tactics of Nazi Germany, they also rationalize the wonton murder of any man, woman or child in their path no matter how innocent or uninvolved they may be. They believe their cause is just, and the trail of dead they leave behind a gift to Mother Earth to spare her from useless eaters in their quest to “ethically” decrease the surplus population.

In a blood chilling scene from the second season, one of the Network’s true believers has an encounter with a mother and her young son in a bus station. Their conversation starts out benign, but after she expresses the generally acceptable belief that everyone should do their part to protect the environment, by say taking a bus instead of a plane to holiday in France, his tone and demeanor takes a turn. The believer shames her for having a child, and lists all of the damage a first world birth can have on the environment.

“Why did you have him then? His birth was a selfish act. It was brutal. You have condemned others to suffering. In fact, if you really cared, what you’d do is cut his throat open now. You would have done more than your bit for the future of humanity,” the believer concludes before walking away leaving the woman terrified and confused.

This kind of environmental anti-natalist rhetoric is hardly new, and is actually quite fashionable amongst the jet setting ghouls who meet at Davos and the World Economic Forum, which directly inspired a scene in the show’s second season where the plan is hatched. When I hear Abrams and others articulate this cynical insertion of abortion into the inflation debate, it’s hard not to see the throughline between the fiction and the real. There’s not exactly much slope separating them.