Fifteen hundred socialists convened in suburban Chicago, the murder capital of the world, at the International Socialist Organization’s annual conference.

They shouted the usual socialist slogans about free this and free that. They’re already getting most things free — education, healthcare, food stamps, housing subsidies. But they want more. These occupiers called for “free abortion on demand.”

Now, I’m opposed to abortion, but there comes a time when it useful to argue the position of fools. Consider Proverbs 26:4–5:

Do not answer a fool according to his folly,

Or you will also be like him.

Answer a fool as his folly deserves,

That he not be wise in his own eyes.

So let’s answer the free abortion fools according to their folly. I want to give them all free abortions, and I’m willing to add free sterilization. Within a generation, the gene pool will be better off. If we supply contraceptives, abortions, and sterilization long enough, who knows, maybe we’ll have a better world.

I’m reminded of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1927 decision of Buck v. Bell. Writing for a near majority eight-to-one court, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes upheld the compulsory sterilization of Carrie Buck, an inmate of a state institution in Virginia for “Epileptics and Feeble-Minded,” in these words:

“It is better for all the world if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind….Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

Maybe Holmes and Company were on the right track.

To repeat, I am not an advocate of abortion. I would, however, love to outline the long-term consequences of the free abortion mantra. Maybe it would knock some sense into them.