Has abortion become the Democrats’ duct tape, its fix-all for electoral politics? It sure seems so. And what a sad, sorry, supremely bad situation to be in.

Long gone are the days when centrists ran the Democrat Party, when Bill Clinton said that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare.” These days, the party has become little more than a death cult in which the right to kill one’s unborn child is not only paramount — it’s also a matter of economic empowerment.

Take election-denying Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, who trails incumbent Governor Brian Kemp badly and who in 19 days will be kicked to the curb by Peach State voters in a far more resounding fashion than was the case four years ago. Yesterday morning, Abrams appeared on MSNBC’s reliably left “Morning Joe” show, where she tried to set the parameters of the discussion: “Right now we are walking away so often from the real issues that people care about. Abortion is an economic issue. It’s been reduced to this idea of a culture war. But for women in Georgia, this is very much a question of whether they’re going to end up in poverty in the next five years because women who are forced to carry unwanted pregnancies end up within poverty — they’re four times more likely to be impoverished in five years.”

Cohost Mike Barnicle, who clearly has a far sharper sense of what drives voters to the polls than Abrams does, wasn’t having it: “While abortion is an issue,” he countered, “it nowhere near reaches the level of interest of voters in terms of the cost of gas, food, bread, milk, things like that. What can a governor, what could you do as governor, to alleviate the concerns of Georgia voters about those livability, daily, hourly issues that they’re confronted with?”

Almost reflexively, or perhaps because she’s not at all comfortable talking about real economic issues as opposed to ghoulishly concocted ones, Abrams reached for abortion:

.@staceyabrams says abortion can help address inflation issues: “Having children is why you’re worried about your price for gas, it’s why you’re concerned about how much food costs. For women, this is not a reductive issue.” pic.twitter.com/BNHJWqKRpa

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) October 19, 2022

“But let’s be clear,” she said. “Having children is why you’re worried about your price for gas, it’s why you’re concerned about how much food costs. For women, this is not a reductive issue. You can’t divorce being forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy from the economic realities of having a child. And so these are — it’s important for us to have ‘both and’ conversations. We don’t have the luxury of reducing it or separating them out.”

There you have it. Abrams has become a one-trick abortion pony, and the craziness of her argument is outstripped only by its condescension. If times are tough for a woman of child-bearing age, she says, it’s probably because she’s carrying a child. Not because we’re in an economic recession, nor because our nation’s Biden-caused inflation is at a 40-year high, but because she’s pregnant. As our Mark Alexander put it, “Stacey Abrams’s inflation-fighting message is that we need to kill our babies so we can afford the good things in life.”

This suggestion that abortion is needed as a hedge against inflation is sickening indeed. As blogger Ed Morrissey writes: “People who don’t want to get pregnant should adjust their procreative activities rationally for that outcome. … As a human being, the child has a right to life that transcends its economic cost. Abrams takes the utilitarianism that drives abortion (as well as euthanasia) and makes it even more grotesque in her attempt to stay relevant.”

And lest you think Abrams merely misspoke, just recall what she said last month: “There is no such thing as a heartbeat at six weeks,” Abrams said of babies in the womb. “It is a manufactured sound designed to convince people that men have the right to take control of a woman’s body.”

“A manufactured sound”? Sadly, abortion really is all she has.

Here in our humble shop, we believe that human life is sacred from the moment of conception, and we rejoiced when the Supreme Court rightly overturned nearly a half-century of judicial overreach and cultural depravity. But if Abrams wants to make this a heartless economic debate of dollars and cents, then she’d do well to remember that we have 11 million unfilled job openings in this country — and that we’re killing a million future workers every year by way of abortion.

Elections tend to be decided by economic issues, and this year’s midterms are no exception. How sad it is that Stacey Abrams and her fellow Democrats can’t engage in meaningful debate about the issues that voters care about most. How sad it is that all they can talk about is abortion, and all they have to offer is membership in a cult of death.