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?