It’s ironic to an extreme that people who are overly concerned about the poor are the same ones who advocate abortion on demand. They are also the ones who favor unrestricted immigration but that, at least, makes sense if we have killed a large portion of our younger generations.
Since 1973, when the United States federal government legalized abortion in all fifty states, an estimated sixty-seven million Amercans have lost their life before they were born. That’s seventeen hundred individuals per week, the leading cause of human death for each year since then.
Those who would sooth their conscience say a fetus isn’t human but they must agree that the unborn are potential humans and their absence diminishes the number of US citizens below fifty years of age. And thus, it makes sense to replace them with young people from other countries.
It is argued that a mother has a right to decide what happens to her body and the counter-argument, that she doesn’t, would never need articulation if she valued her offspring more than her own desires. But sadly, “My Body, My Choice” has been repeated many times by over fifty million American women who have chosen themselves over their child.
We shutter to unearth graveyards of children from antiquity who were burned alive by their parents in exchange for the gods blessing of good crops and prosperity. Yet we don’t see the parallel in what these modern women have done, aborting their pregnancy to maintain their standard of living. They don’t know that their unborn child feels the pain of being dismembered by aspiration, much as the sacrificed children felt being burned alive. At least the ancient ones got a burial urn.
Pro-Choice advocates point out that homo sapiens, that is mankind, isn’t the only species that kills its own young due to present circumstances. They put man with the likes of insects and fish who do this, not realizing that these lower species think they are protecting their young from a worse fate. Perhaps these human mothers think the same thing, that their child would prefer death over a terrible childhood in poverty. It’s too bad a fetus can’t hold up a sign which says “My Body, My Choice.”
But they can’t, so we must settle for the mother’s wishes, however unsavory. These mothers represent about a hundred thousand potential births per year or about two and a half percent of annual US pregnancies. In the past, population statisticians weren’t worried about the loss of these lives because our birth rate was well above 2.1 children per childbearing woman, the minimum number of births for a sustained population. But now, we are at a rate of 1.6 births per potential mother and we’ve been there for the last ten years. When you consider that one out of every eight childbearing women in American is foreign born and that they are holding up the average at 2.15 children per reproductive female, you begin to see the gravity of our problem. The loss of babies due to abortion has become a significant issue. But not to advocates of population control.
Since the days of Margaret Sanger, at the beginning of the twentieth century, proponents of population control have been vocal about limited resources like food and living spaces in the world. They have pointed to countries like Niger, where the average number of births per childbearing woman is around seven, and said that overpopulation is a world problem. Well, maybe in Niger, but not in the United States. Here we are already seeing the effect of missing representation among our younger generations as older people retire and there aren’t enough workers to replace them.
Our population is shrinking and we might as well admit it. There may come a day when we will pay women to have children that the state will raise. In a sense, that is what child-support programs are. But we haven’t admitted to ourselves that we have a problem, much less that it’s of our own making. We have glamorized working women and demeaned female homemakers to the point that some of them would rather kill their offspring than be stuck at home with youngsters. But youngsters are the future and nobody disagrees with this statement.
At the rate births are going, we need to consider that the “cowboy economy” no longer measures cultural success, that bigger isn’t necessarily better. If we won’t stop abortion and continue to discourage women from being homemakers, then we need to change our definition of success and hope that our new idea is at least partially valid. Russia, for example, has roughly half the people we do yet they think of themselves as a world power. Maybe we should lower our expectations with respect to our population and our economy but we will never overcome the stigma of killing our own children. This statement is supported by historical assessment of past societies that aren’t remembered fondly for their child sacrifices.
