The ideas people can talk themselves into when trapped in an echo chamber truly boggle the mind. On a left-wing podcast published Tuesday, abortion activist Jessica Valenti claimed, with complete seriousness, that abortion “is an affordability issue,” and therefore reluctant Democrats should feature it more prominently in their campaign messaging. Such a heartless priority on expedience would make Machiavelli proud.

Valenti made the comments on a Vox Media podcast, “America, Actually,” in answer to host Astead Herndon. “We’ve had a bunch of Democrats on the show, and they all basically argue that the party in 2024 was too focused on kind of social/cultural issues, and they had to reposition themselves to economic issues,” Herdon said. “In the affordability framework that they’re presenting, it does seem as if abortion is outside of that prism. Tell me why that’s wrong.”

In answer to this, Valenti boldly responded that abortion “is an affordability issue.”

“You’d be hard pressed to find something more important to your financial life than whether or not to have a child, than whether or not that you’re going to be forced into pregnancy,” she declared, flaunting her pro-abortion bias (the descriptor “forced into pregnancy” only applies in cases of rape-induced pregnancy, which comprise a small percentage of total abortions).

From there, Valenti veered into fearmongering fantasy. “Or not even just forced into pregnancy, but forced into massive medical debt,” she continued, “because your pregnancy goes wrong and you can’t get an abortion. And then you’re in real medical trouble, and you go septic, or you lose an organ. Like, there’s a million ways that that works.”

Wow, that escalated quickly. While there are many ways that a pregnancy can go wrong, it can also go right. Modern medicine has achieved wonders in dropping the maternal mortality rate. Maternity care is also covered by health insurance, something which nearly every American who wants it already has — especially with Obamacare plan options. Life-threatening complications can occur in pregnancy, but rarely do they result in death or massive medical bills.

It’s worth pointing out what Valenti omits. Both surgical and chemical abortion can also cause life-threatening conditions, such as sepsis, and they do so far more frequently than abortion activists like to admit. In fact, an April 2025 report showed the abortion drug had complications 22 times more common than the cases on which the FDA relied in approving it. A survey published in June 2026 showed that more than half of women surveyed said they were not adequately informed about at least one abortion side effect they experienced. If pregnancy complications bring financial challenges, so does abortion.

But such inconvenient facts do not help to sell the practice of abortion, and that is the morbid business in which Valenti is engaged. The title of her Substack explains her entire mission: “Abortion, Every Day.” Such a singular focus sounds both exhausting and unsatisfying. But Valenti’s conduct seems to confirm the accuracy of the saying, “when you have a hammer, everything is a nail.”

“I don’t see how this is not a kitchen table issue,” Valenti continued. “When you talk about it, voters understand it — when you are actually talking about it.” It’s good to know that pro-lifers are not the only ones who wish the politicians on their side would raise their issue more.

But nothing can whitewash the moral horror of Valenti’s central claim, that abortion is an “affordability issue.” The claim is based on the argument that having and raising children costs more money than remaining childless. In a limited, isolated sense, it is true that children add extra mouths to feed, backs to clothe, and car seats to transport — all things that cost money.

But families have managed these adjustments for all of human history. They work more productively to make more money. Or they do without extra luxuries, such as fancy vacations to Hawaii or the Mediterranean. Thus, for Valenti’s argument to work, she must assume another unstated proposition: that the life of an unborn child has less value than an adult (or an adult couple) maintaining her (or their) standard of living.

That is not just selfish. It is horrific! How could a mother look her unborn child in the eye and say, “I wasn’t ready to give up vacations to Paris, so I chose to snuff out your life”? How could such a mother answer the agonized question of her future children, “if you ended my sister’s life for your own convenience, then how can I know that you really love me?”

It’s not just women. Numerous publicized anecdotes illustrate that many irresponsible men also see abortion as a coercive way to snuff out the new lives that threaten to upset their own convenience. Does Valenti seriously contend that pro-abortion politicians should endorse the coercive acts of these abusers in the name of “affordability”?

In one sense, the logic of abortion inescapably leads to this point. It always prioritizes the convenience and preferences of adults over the unborn child’s basic right to life. Fundamentally, abortion is an anti-life calculus built on pure expedience. This is not how healthy societies are built, because it is not how healthy families are built.

What marks a “kitchen table issue” is one that helps the people sitting around the kitchen table. Abortion aims to keep those people from ever learning to sit in the first place. Its cruelty is too costly to be affordable.