It starts out innocently enough. Women terminate pregnancies for easily defensible reasons — maybe it’s a case of rape, or maybe there’s a fetal disease, something that directly threatens the life of the mother. Over time, this practice becomes the norm.

The next step is that children set to be born into financial or familial instability will be aborted, as will children who show early signs of mental or physical handicaps. The mothers will say it’s for the best, and maybe it will be, but one way or another, the institution will expand.

And what if a woman just flat out doesn’t want a kid? Is it really fair to make somebody carry a leech for nine months as punishment for one careless night?

So yeah, abort the accidents, too. It’ll save money, if nothing else. Killing a kid is cheaper than raising one.

It won’t be long before nearly every sexually active woman in the United States will have had at least one abortion, because naturally everybody will be having more sex, and why bother with contraception when you can just terminate the next morning?

If your insurance funds the procedure, all the better. Abortions are wonderful. You can have all the fun with none of the worries.

Women, as we know, are prone to addictions. In this case, though, who could blame them? Abortions will be the drug of our generation. Women will come to crave them. They’ll actively seek out the thrill, the feeling of power that goes with swaying the balance of life and death. Some might even enjoy the sensation. Abortophilia, it will be called. (You can put the vacuum back in the bedroom, honey.)

Will the madness end there?

I think not. Humans have little to no capacity to distinguish right from wrong. When the boundaries of abortion have been pushed as far as they’ll go, we’ll be left with no choice but to expand our idea of what an abortion is, in the most basic sense. Why not abort children after they’ve been born?

It’s brilliant, actually. Some kid has Down’s syndrome, so cut open his head and suck his brain out. It’s the humane thing to do.

Since we’ve started after-birth abortions, we might as well euthanize while we’re at it. (Say goodnight, Grandma — your darling boy can’t afford to keep you on life support.)

We’re now a utilitarian nation, so I see no reason why we shouldn’t begin giving the death penalty to all convicted felons. They had their chance, and room and board is costly, you see, even in a prison environment. Speaking of which, can we please go back to execution by firing squad? Bullets are so much cheaper than those new-fangled chemicals.

As we devolve into heartless, murderous beasts, society will crumble. We will have no concept of the value of a life. We will kill for money, for personal gain, for sport, for no reason at all. Eventually only one killer will remain, and when that one dies, the tombstone of the human race will read, “It all began with an abortion.”

Eli is a sophomore majoring in human rights and English.