Progressives are concerned that some US states have adopted abortion cut-off dates equal to those of France, which only raised it to 14 weeks in 2022. CDC shows American births are dropping so low that the Biden administration may need to start subsidizing the pro-life movement.
Government figures show that births declined from 62 per 1000 women in 2016 to 54.5 last year. That's a win for birth control because the drop in women ages 44 and under are women who clearly didn't want babies. Yet media outlets who share a political base with anti-science activists are instead claiming fertility is in decline. Which makes it sound like something bad is to blame. That is not true at all. This is a win.
Much of it is predictable. When more basic needs are met more affordably, culture increases, and women have fewer kids. That was long the argument of the eugenicists who, after fellow progressives the National Socialists in Germany actually used their centralized control to implement it, rebranded their beliefs as population control (Margaret Sanger the eugenicist founded Planned Parenthood) and environmentalism (the founder of Sierra Club was a eugenicist.) They said by sterilizing those less intelligent or with disabilities or "promiscuous" women they were just boosting the natural course of both evolution and culture.(1)
Like many activists, they take a kernel of truth and then wedge it into their agenda. One thing is clear; the surest way to lower births is to improve lives, which always made the left-wing war against science odd. Africa doesn't need more birth control if we let them make themselves wealthier growing more affordable food and with cleaner energy than wood and dung burned in homes. Y
This cultural win won't stop money-hungry environmentalists from claiming the thing they just happen to be promoting this season is the cause of a "fertility" drop. In the past, they have claimed that modern pesticides are the reason birth rates have dropped, but stopped once I noted that their flawed epidemiology shtick also suggests that DDT was the cause of higher fertility. Then they said BPA caused lower fertility, virtual pollution caused it, even vaccines before the left took credit for the COVID-19 one and suddenly ended their 25 year war against medicine.
The culture war never ends but culture adjusts. As American births continue to go down, immigrants will become more prominent. That's a good thing.
NOTE:
(1) It was all just gibberish to mask their hatred, the same way that their descendants in the progressive movement today burn American flags and call for the extinction of Jews under the pretense of giving Palestine a country they refused to accept in 1948. It only even has an air of "truthiness" to those in the movement.
