Has it not occurred to these business leaders that unborn children will grow up to buy their products or work for their companies?

Clarity of thought and expression about moral issues is not a core competency of CEOs.

If anyone had any doubt, look no further than the “historic” pro-abortion statement by nearly 200 CEOs that ran in a full-page ad in the New York Times. It is a festival of absurdity and euphemism, an exercise in perverse virtue-signaling to a progressive audience that believes that maintaining one of the most permissive pro-abortion regimes in the developed world is a virtue.

The implication is that these CEOs prefer that their employees and customers not become mothers, or if they are mothers, not have more children. It apparently hasn’t occurred to them that unborn children will grow up to buy their products or perhaps work for their firms one day, and indeed all the employees they claim to be protecting were themselves, once, vulnerable in the womb.

At the end of the day, their argument isn’t really about restrictions being “bad for business.” What they care about most is that such policies, as they say, go “against our values.”

The CEO ad is another sign that the debate over abortion has entered a new phase. It isn’t enough to say that abortion should be safe, legal and rare, the old Bill Clinton formulation, because that implies a moral disapproval. Now, abortion is a positive good. A stance that used to be limited to the fringes is mainstream enough that CEOs are willing to sign up for it.

Pro-life laws will have to prevail against this inflamed pro-abortion sentiment — and the swath of big business that shares it.

Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review, the American conservative magazine of news and opinion. Email comments.lowry@nationalreview.com.


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