Whom Do You Abort When No One is Expecting?

The greatest threat to abortion may be its own success.

The Biden administration is preparing to run the 2024 election on abortion. With a miserable economy and failure on every side, that is the one thing still left for the Democrats to run on.

But no generation has ever had less use for abortion than this one.

After the end of Roe v. Wade, Democrats warned of a decline in abortions, what they failed to mention was that abortions had been declining long before the Supreme Court decision.

After Roe v. Wade first came on the scene, abortions shot up all through the 80s and hit a peak in 1990 with 1.6 million. Then, just as the Democrats decided to go all-in on abortion, purging their pro-life wing, abortion rates crashed, and now struggle to pass the million mark.

The numbers are even more striking when accounting for the large U.S. population increase since 1990. According to the CDC, there were 345 legal induced abortions per 1,000 live births, 24 per 1,000 women, in 1990. By 2021, there were 204 abortions per 1,000 live births and 11.6 abortions per 1,000 women. The actual abortion rate had fallen by more than half.

There were over 4 million babies born in 1990 to a population of 250 million. In 2021 there were only 3.6 million babies born among a population of 330 million. It wasn’t abortion that accounted for much of the decline. The babies were not being aborted, rather they were not even coming into being.

Fewer of the young women in their twenties who used to get abortions need them anymore. 63% of men under 29 describe themselves as single, but only 34% of women under 29 do. 57% of those who say they’re single aren’t looking for a relationship or even casual dates. Only 13% of those who are looking, are seeking a committed relationship.

Rates of sexual intimacy have also dropped. 1 in 3 men in 2018 reported no intimate encounters. Even among teens, the number of high schoolers who ever had sex fell from 54% to 38% in 2019. (These numbers predate the pandemic which means nothing that happened during the pandemic had any impact on them.) There’s a decline in casual sex and intimacy among married couples, but it would be more accurate to say that it’s a decline in relationships.

It’s not just a male-female romantic decline either. Friendships are disappearing as are all sorts of in-person interactions. More people are single, not just as couples, but are lonely and alone.

Nothing Biden or any of the Democrats can do will save abortion from itself.

The war on the family has succeeded all too well, but what replaced it isn’t whatever perpetual orgy the sexual politics activists of the sixties imagined would ensue. There are endless varieties of new sexual identities emerging, men are getting castrated and women are getting mastectomies to try and pretend to be the other sex, but none of this is bringing people together.

The alternatives to the family have failed miserably even on their own terms. The family has been crippled, but in its place are lonely shallow narcissists who can’t tear themselves away from their phones long enough to connect to another human being. The country has come to inhabit the world of Edward Hopper’s ‘Nighthawks’, but the late night diner is a 5 inch screen.

There is a grim comedy to the endless fight to save abortion when it’s aborting itself.

The idea that the family would be replaced by casual relationships temporarily spurred a wave of them accompanied by the widespread use of abortions. But each succeeding generation became less likely to have any kind of relationships. Women turned off by casual sex and men by the demands of relationships drifted apart. Social media replaced real relationships with virtual ones offering online pornography and narcissism as substitutes for human intimacy.

And that is where we are now.

Democrats believe that it’s urgent to fight for abortion and to plant graphic pornography in schools, especially of the non-heterosexual kind, but apart from spurring a rash of teenage girls to mutilate themselves in the hopes of making themselves over to be boys, it’s not doing much to what may be the least sexual generation of teenagers since the 1880s.

In the 1990s, liberal men claimed that they didn’t want to get married until gay marriage was legal. Now liberal couples claim that they don’t want to have kids because of global warming. But marriage rates didn’t turn around when gay marriage was legalized and childbirths wouldn’t be significantly impacted if it was announced tomorrow that the climate is doing just fine.

Likewise, overturning Roe v. Wade didn’t have all that much of an impact on abortion.

Abortion, like marriage and childbirth, are all in decline. That’s also bad news for Biden and the Democrats because it means that there are fewer younger and traditionally more liberal voters.

In 1990, 18 to 24 year olds, more likely to vote Democrat, made up 10% of the population while those 50 and over, who are more likely to vote Republican, made up a quarter of the population. Now the 18 to 24 cohort has dropped down to 9% while the over 50 group makes up a third of the country.

Democrats have become more fanatical about abortion even as it becomes less relevant in a country without marriages, children or even intimacy. The real threat to abortion isn’t coming from Republicans or the Supreme Court, but a society with no more babies to abort.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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