The World's Other Existential Crisis

The December 24th, 1973, edition of TIME magazine featured a cover picture of a young child and the title “The Child’s World.” In the article TIME called out the substantive cultural challenges facing all American children, including a decline in birth rates which had dropped to the lowest point in American history (15.1 per 1,000 population).

Nowhere in the article was the question of legalized abortion brought into the discussion. The word “abortion” never appeared in the article. Although in January of that same year, the United States Supreme Court issued a ruling that upended every abortion law across all 50 states and launched a 50-year period of unrestricted abortion and unprecedented national political debate.

Since 1973 the U.S. birth rate has continued to fall. The current rate (2023) is just below 12 children per 1,000 population. The population replacement level (2.1 children per woman) has also been in consistent decline. According to the CDC, the U.S. is now at an all-time low of 54.4 births per 1,000 women of childbearing age between 15-44. Along with Great Britain and all of Europe and China, the United States is now facing a future of serious and seemingly irreversible population decline. Thus, the crisis of human survival across many nations is no longer theoretical. The crisis of depopulation exists in real space and time.

One question that seldom seems to enter the debate over the impact of legalized abortion on modern society is this: Is there a link between detaching the value of human children and the survival of human societies? Without babies, has any society ever survived?

What if the impact of “enshrining” the right to end a pregnancy for any reason is diminishing the value of all life across American culture? Is it possible that disregarding the value of birthing children, the value of protecting the “least of these” is creating a devolution that now threatens the ability for the American civilization to survive?