The Left presents itself as a great champion of the disabled even as it favors wiping them out in the womb. This stark contradiction resurfaced this week as liberals complained about a proposed law in Ohio that would outlaw abortions motivated by a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome in the child.

In protesting the proposed law, the Left has reiterated its raw support for eugenic abortion, which is reaching levels even Hitler may not have anticipated. Some studies on eugenic abortion suggest as many as nine out of ten unborn babies diagnosed with Down syndrome are aborted. In the face of these staggering numbers, liberals just shrug. Their attitude was once summed up by Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg when she bloodlessly approved of the eugenic rationale for Roe v. Wade by saying,  “Frankly, I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”

One group the Left doesn’t “want to have too many of” are the disabled. The Left measures enlightenment and progress not by the protection of the disabled unborn but by their elimination. The New York Times managed to editorialize on the subject of Ohio’s proposed law without a single note of concern for these children. Usually eager to excoriate Republicans for an alleged indifference to the disabled, the Times in this case disparaged them for their concern.

“It is hard to imagine any other circumstance in which Americans would tolerate this sort of government intrusion,” the paper editorialized. “But of course this is precisely the dilemma that opponents of the right to choose aim to create: instilling guilt and fear in women making intensely personal and private decisions about their own bodies. In fact, a significant majority of women who receive a fetal diagnosis of Down syndrome choose to abort their pregnancy. A smaller percentage choose to carry the fetus to term. In both cases, it is a personal decision.”

The Left never worries about government spending on behalf of the handicapped, until it involves unborn ones. Then liberals suddenly turn into fiscal hawks. On CNN, a tense and frowning host grilled an Ohio lawmaker for potentially saddling the government with extra costs. “It’s nice to think that all those babies would be adopted but history doesn’t necessarily prove that they are always adopted. In fact, many are institutionalized at great cost,” said Alisyn Camerota.

If a Republican argued for the killing of the handicapped for budgetary reasons, he would be called a monster. Liberals do it and they are praised as progressive. If a Republican argued that the strong should possess more rights than the weak, his career would sink. Liberals make that very argument for eugenic abortion and rise to the top of their party. Hillary Clinton famously defended partial-birth abortion on the grounds that handicapped babies deserve less protection than healthy ones.

For all their rhetoric about equality, liberals do not see the handicapped and healthy as possessing the same worth. Implicit in their support for eugenic abortion is that humans should be assigned value not by their humanity but by their utility. Eugenic abortion rests on the view that human beings gain or lose rights depending on their strength.

Of course, liberals are loath to put their support for eugenic abortion so baldly. When infamous Princeton Professor Peter Singer bluntly said, “It does not seem quite wise to increase any further draining of limited resources by increasing the number of children with impairments,” polite society balked. But it is that essential view which drives the questioning of someone like Alisyn Camerota.

We should kill the weak, the inconvenient, and the costly. That is the Left’s final solution, and it is the fear of losing recourse to it which has led to carping about this Ohio law. Beneath all the trivial objections to it—that it represents “wedge politics,” that it is “unenforceable,” and so on—lies the Left’s enthusiastic embrace of eugenic abortion. Its slogan “every child a wanted child” now means every child an undiseased child. The Left is happy to promote the Americans with Disabilities Act, provided that it continues to exempt brutalizing babies with disabilities.