[Want even more content from FPM? Sign up for FPM+ to unlock exclusive series, virtual town-halls with our authors, and more—now for just $3.99/month. Click here to sign up.]
The Democrats had gone all in on abortion in 2024. They hoped that a groundswell of pro-abortion voters would hand them the election. But those voters never showed up.
What happened? One clue could be found in the latest fertility rate numbers.
In 2024, America’s fertility rate hit an all-time low of 1.6 children per woman. Those rates are closer to the UK and Europe than to the 2.5 rate that existed when Roe v. Wade first came on the scene. You might be tempted to think that fertility rates are low because abortion rates are high, but abortion rates hit a high in 1990 and have been dropping ever since. Since then, birth rates and abortion rates both decline because the two are linked. If fewer women are getting pregnant, fewer abortions are needed. The real threat to Planned Parenthood and the political abortion industry isn’t abortion being banned, it’s that fewer women even need to get one.
Forty years later, Americans are still having the debates of the 1980s, about teenage unwed mothers and abortion, as if we still lived in a world of teens prowling malls and wearing big hair.
Surveys show that 70% of high school teens have never had sex. Teen birth rates fell 78%. Abortion rates also dramatically declined. But that’s no surprise since it’s harder for teens who don’t even date to get pregnant and the majority of Gen Z didn’t actually date as teenagers.
Abortion has become the feminist solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. Fewer women are getting pregnant or are in relationships and divorce, like abortion, is on the decline because fewer women are getting married. Less than half of households are headed by a married couple. The old debates about sexual morality have been trumped by a sexless culture.
Divorce, abortion, unwed mothers and all the rest of it have become irrelevant because our culture is so deeply unhealthy, so fractured and isolated, that the prerequisites for sexual morality are no longer there. We have passed beyond debates about sexual morality and, like the Europeans, we are becoming a culture that is unwilling to make the effort to go on existing.
Abortion is no longer our problem. National suicide is. We no longer have to worry about sex or single mothers because like the rest of Western civilization, we are dying off. In the first year of the Obama administration, America’s birth rate fell below the replacement rate. It had happened before in the 70s and 80s, but we seemed to be pulling out of it in the 90s, and then we fell.
And this time we don’t seem to be stopping. As religion declines sharply among American youth, there’s no longer a net there to catch us. And unless we turn around the cultural causes of the crisis, the fall will only ‘break’ when mass migration turns those numbers around. Our politicians, like European politics, will offer up immigrant birth rates as our hope for salvation.
When it’s actually our extinction.
Most politicians failed to recognize the crisis and went on having the debates of the 1980s. Trump was one of the few to state that the problem was not simply abortion, it was births, and defied those elements of the anti-abortion movement that had also become anti-life by championing IVF subsidies. But pro-natalist policies like IVF subsidies, child credits and other payments to parents have been tried in other countries and will not turn around a cultural crisis. They can help slow down the rate of descent, but they won’t make a broken nation healthy.
The choice to marry and bring children into this world is not an economic one. If it were, the Irish of a century ago would have had far lower birth rates than they do today. Poverty never stopped anyone from having children and the roots of Planned Parenthood lay in a brand of progressive eugenics which sought to stop the poor from having children. Those efforts invariably failed.
Modern parenthood does come with grave financial challenges, but they are nothing compared to life in the Dust Bowl, the Great Depression and other difficult periods and places when birth rates were much higher than they are today. The issue isn’t the lack of money: it’s the culture.
The generation of the 1930s had a clear sense of what was important in life and why they were here. Their counterparts in the present day have no sense of why they were put on this earth or what they would want to accomplish with their lives beyond bourgeois consumerism and advocating for social justice, and their lives reflect those priorities, values and lack of focus.
Next year, America will have its 250th anniversary. But two and a half centuries after the birthing of a nation, the nation is being unbirthed. The villain isn’t as simple as abortion. For all the outrage over abortion, it was only a symptom of how little each new generation valued, family children and bringing them into this world. Each generation had less that it was interested in passing on, less commitment to building the nation and fewer dreams for the future.
Americans are more certain than ever of what they oppose, but less certain of what they want. Politics has become oppositional rather than aspirational with more to fight against and less to fight for. The Left’s ceaseless deconstruction of every area of morality and life has left little unscathed and removed every reason for those affected by its ideology to go on living.
Turning this trend around will require working for something, not just against it, faith, vision and a dream of the kind that drove our ancestors to build families, careers and a great country.
Making America great again requires a great people living lives of conviction and courage.
