Experts are worried about the decline in the birth rate and its economic and cultural consequences.
The total fertility rate–that is, the number of children that a woman of child-bearing years has, on average–has fallen to 1.64. To maintain the current population, the fertility rate needs to be 2.1.
I wondered what effect abortion might have on these numbers.
The Center for Disease Control estimated that in 2020, the year for which they have the most reliable data, 21% of pregnancies ended in abortion. Think of that! One out of every five children conceived is killed in the womb!
If those children were allowed to live and were born, what would the total fertility rate be?
I know I’ve been critical of AI, but pulling together data and crunching numbers in complicated calculations is one of the things it does best, as long as someone checks its work. So I asked ChatGPT what the total fertility would be if all abortions were live births.
The answer: 2.08. That’s almost exactly the replacement rate of 2.1!
My virtual assistant included the caveat that not all of the children who weren’t aborted would necessarily be live births, since some of those pregnancies might end in miscarriages or the like. But still!
If we want to avoid the “depopulation bomb,” as some are calling it, the answer is not just to persuade or entice couples to have more children, as important as that is. The problem can also be addressed by encouraging fewer abortions.
Making abortion illegal again throughout the country is not likely to happen (sadly), though states that have made it illegal are showing an increase in the number of births. How that translates into the fertility rate is not clear.
But it would be in the national interest to offer incentives for letting children be born, rather than aborting them. That could include offering incentives to mothers who do not feel that they can take care of their babies to let them be adopted. Increasing the number of children available for adoption would help lower the demand for surrogate mothers, generating extra embryos for IVF implantation, sperm and egg trafficking, and other exploitive practices of reproductive technology.
In order for our nation to have more babies, we need to stop killing the ones we have!
Photo: Two Babies via PickPix, Public Domain
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