Elon Musk pointed out on Twitter recently that the “USA birth rate has been below min sustainable levels for ~50 years.” Musk pointed to a Wall Street Journal story that provided data showing the U.S. total fertility rate has been below the necessary 2.1 replacement rate since the early the 1970s, and currently hovers around 1.78—well below the peak of 3.58 in 1958.
No single factor explains the cratering fertility rate, but among the causes include: diet, cultural issues in which life is not appreciated or respected, and young men acting like perpetual Peter Pans. But also, as Dr. John Rowe of Columbia School of Health pointed out a few years ago: “Women are participating in the workforce more and women are leaving their home later, launching their careers later, developing what we call family formation—finding a partner and having offspring—later. If you started all that five years later, you wind up with one less child.”
But I would argue there is another reason for the decline in our population: abortion. It’s hardly a coincidence that Roe v. Wade was decided at the same time we started to see a fairly rapid decline in fertility rates in the United States. To be fair, while it’s hard to get a precise figure on how many babies need to be born in order to maintain the U.S. population, it’s somewhere north of 4 million babies per year. Regardless of the number, without a doubt we sure could have used the more than 70 million babies who have been murdered in this country alone since 1973.
What would the United States and the world look like if we hadn’t allowed each of these lives to be snuffed out in the womb? What strides would we have taken as a society? What inventions will we never have? Did it not occur to big-government, pro-abortion Democrats that the United States needs a broad tax base to pay for all the programs they love so much? Who will be around to support them in their old age through Social Security payments?
But I digress.
In the last week, after the horrific events in Uvalde, Texas, Democrats are bemoaning the terrible loss of children’s lives in this instance at the hands of a shooter while oblivious to the hypocrisy of advocating the slaughter of children at the hands of their mother and an abortionist. If you advocate and defend the butchering of tens of millions of babies, which is the true American genocide, I don’t want to hear one word about school shootings from you. You either believe in life or you don’t and most of the un-American Left doesn’t care about life.
Most on the Left don’t really care about making schools safe. They just want to grab guns so school shootings are acceptable, even helpful, collateral damage in their quest to destroy the Second Amendment. So if you have the impression that Democrats in America have zero moral authority on any level to talk about how we need to protect the lives of children, you are correct.
Under the circumstances, perhaps the first conversation we should be having as society is how we restore a culture in which all life is respected. It would be a start and I hope that one day, much as with the end of slavery, we will look back on these times and policies and be shocked at how a supposedly advanced and civilized people ever could have argued for the right to take a baby’s life at any point in his gestation. Or, as is the case in a recent California bill, up to 28 days after birth.
That’s right: if you think the Cult of Moloch is going to stop with baby-killing up to the moment of birth, think again. They’re not stopping there.
And maybe in this entire process, we can also leave behind our human tendency towards chronological snobbery, as C.S. Lewis called it, and realize that even though ages come and go, one thing remains constant: human nature and our tendency to debase ourselves into being satisfied with what we can do, not what we should do. Perhaps we will begin listening to and acting on the better angels of the divine spark present in all of us.
The Supreme Court is expected to hand down its decision soon in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which will likely result in five justices overturning Roe v. Wade. With Roe gone, the question of whether and how abortion should continue will return to the states. We should be able to tell from those debates who is and who isn’t truly upset about school shootings. If you don’t see other people as beings of immeasurable worth created in the image and likeness of God, then mass shootings shouldn’t upset you. In fact, they can’t upset you if you are being intellectually consistent.
Perhaps more people should look at themselves in the mirror and have that conversation with themselves. Then, if they conclude that they still must support abortion, they should be open about how they’re being intellectually consistent from now on and not respecting life at any stage. Such people would be ghouls but at least they would be honest ghouls.