Lawyer claims gay marriage will lead to 900,000 abortions

In a truly bizarre argument, a group of “marriage scholars” and their lawyer have warned the US Supreme Court that it risks increasing the abortion rate if it legalises gay and lesbian marriage.

The court is expected to hear arguments on the issue next week which could see the expansion of marriage equality across the nation.

In response, “100 academic marriage scholars” have submitted an amicus brief to the court arguing that same-sex marriage would result in hundreds of thousands of children being aborted.

Gene Schaerr, the lawyer who filed the brief, admitted in The Daily Signal that “on the surface, abortion and same-sex marriage may seem unrelated.”

However, he and the scholars believe that legalising same-sex marriage “would send the message that society no longer needs men to bond to women to form well-functioning families or to raise happy, well-adjusted children.”

This, they argue, will lead to a decrease in heterosexual marriage and in turn an increase in unmarried mothers, unwanted pregnancies and abortions.

The scholars claim that this is proven in countries that have legalised same-sex marriage, such as the Netherlands, which has seen a decrease in heterosexual marriage rates.

They further calculate that marriage equality in the US will result in 1.275 million additional women not getting married.

“…Nearly 900,000 more children of the next generation would be aborted as a result of their mothers never marrying. This is equal to the entire population of the cities of Sacramento and Atlanta combined,” Schaerr exclaimed.

“In short, forcing states to convert the traditional gendered marriage institution into a genderless institution will very likely reduce man-woman marriages by undermining some of the norms that encourage heterosexual couples to marry, which will in turn increase the number of unmarried women and, hence, the number of children aborted,” he wrote.

However, the arguments presented in the brief fail to establish causal links between the statistics cited.

In fact, Schaerr admitted to The Washington Post that the brief doesn’t “say conclusively that this reduction in marriage rates has been the result of adopting same-sex marriage.”

He insisted, though, that there are “theoretical reasons” why this might occur.

Schaerr clearly has a personal stake in the issue; he previously quit his job at a law firm to unsuccessful attempt to block marriage equality in Utah on behalf of that state’s government.