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On 11 August 2018, Chelsea Clinton was a featured speaker at the New York City stop on the Rise Up for Roe tour, a moveable rally promoting reproductive rights activism organized by Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice America, and the Demand Justice Initiative. Given the ideological chasm between supporters of the Supreme Court's landmark 1973 decision guaranteeing women's access to abortion and those who would reverse it, the subject matter was bound to be controversial. But one thing Clinton said in particular was singled out for condemnation in the conservative press and on social media. This is how the Media Research Center's CNSNews.com opened its report on her remarks: LifeNews.com, a website devoted to pro-life news, ran a headline stating Chelsea Clinton Claims Aborting 60 Million Babies Since Roe 'Added $3.5 Trillion to Our Economy.' A commentary on TruthFeedNews.com said, Clinton is now trotting around the country trying to convince people that abortion is 'great' for the economy. On social media, a critic went so far as to compare what Clinton said with defending slavery as a boon to the economy. The most vituperative reaction was surely that of Christian evangelist Franklin Graham, who issued a tweet equating Clinton with Hitler: However, a careful examination of Clinton's remarks reveals they were not always accurately paraphrased by her critics. This is a transcript of her exchange with Rise Up for Roe's moderator, Lauren Duca: Note that at no point did Clinton literally say that Roe v. Wade (much less tens of millions of abortions) added $3.5 trillion to the economy. She said that women entering the labor force in the decades after the 1973 decision added $3.5 trillion to the economy, and that these developments were connected. (Although Clinton didn't cite a source for the statistic, it likely came from a 2011 report by the McKinsey Global Institute noting the macroeconomic benefits of some 38 million women joining the labor force between 1970 and 2009.) Moreover, to suggest that Roe v. Wade made it possible for more women to join the workforce is not the same as saying that it was because they all had abortions. The mere fact that abortion services were accessible and provided women with an alternative to dropping out of the labor force if they became pregnant could have served as an encouragement to them, even if they never availed themselves of those services. For that matter, not all of the increase in women's participation in the workforce since 1970 can be attributed to Roe v. Wade (nor did Clinton suggest that it should be). Other social and economic changes took place at the same time that affected how women perceived their roles and the life choices available to them. It's accurate to say that Chelsea Clinton asserted a connection between Roe v. Wade and an influx of women into the labor force that added three-and-a-half trillion dollars to the U.S. economy between 1970 and 2009. It is not accurate to say that she credited that economic growth wholly to abortion.
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