News headlines rarely elicit an LOL response from me, but this one from Science Alert did the trick:
US Fertility Rates Have Plummeted Into Uncharted Territory, And Nobody Knows Why
Nobody knows why?
For starters, we abort somewhere around a million babies every year. That would have to take a nick out of the fertility rate.
Then there’s the “contraception mandate” imposed on U.S. employers by the Obama administration. I always thought it was strange that the most important priority of the government was making sure Americans would not reproduce, but I’m just a right-wing, Bible-thumping anti-choicer who wants to curtail women’s freedom, so you can’t go by me.
The contraception mandate was widely hailed as the most important development for women since we won the right to vote, and those of us who inconveniently pointed out that contraception kills and providing abortion is against our religion were routinely, and sometimes unkindly, lambasted.
So now, all trussed up with science and math, we read that for some unfathomable reason, women in the U.S. are not even having enough babies to replace us when we’re gone. Heaven help Social Security! And if you think there aren’t enough cashiers at Wal-Mart now, just wait!
On some level, I am enjoying these news stories on the latest CDC figures, because they are finally saying what we in pro-life have been saying along: People are important. Let’s let them get conceived, and allow them to make it out of the womb alive. Life finds a way … if we let it.
A bevy of op-ed contributors at The Hill, though, think they have a better idea: Let senior citizens continue working even longer than they do now. They say 69.4 years old is a fine time to retire, and for many of us, that might be true. I have no plans to retire, but that depends on the blessing of my good health to continue. Many people, realistically, can’t work that long. Manual labor takes a toll on the body. Disease happens. Should we insist on keeping abortion legal and contraception free at the expense of a huge segment of our aging nation?
As I Googled my way through story after story on the fertility dip, I kept thinking someone, somewhere, would mention abortion and contraception. Nope. But this is not really a surprise.
The spate of stories that accompanied a 2013 study that found more young women diagnosed with aggressive breast cancers since 1976 couldn’t point to a reason. Obesity? Smoking? Too much of a couch-potato lifestyle?
None of them approached that sacred buffer zone around abortion to mention two other things regarding women that happened in the 1970s: The birth control pill became legal for unmarried women and abortion-on-demand throughout pregnancy became legal for all. Something to ponder.
The CDC figures on our falling fertility rates are troubling because they will reverberate for generations to come, much as China’s elimination of siblings has begotten a nation of bachelors. The first thing we have to do to address this problem is to take an honest look at what’s causing it. It’s time, finally, to address where legal abortion and free-flowing contraception have led us, and how we can find our way back.
Janet Morana is the executive director at Priests for Life.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of The Daily Caller.
