I have never been to England. In fact, I have never set foot on any continent but my own. I am neither young enough nor rich enough to travel the globe, but I’ve always been rich enough for books and television—which have allowed me to vicariously cross the pond for going on half a century. I have almost religious affection for Austen and Dickens and hold C.S. Lewis in even higher regard—as does virtually every literary Christian of every liturgical stripe. Only Jesus is more popular among the brethren, by a hair’s breadth. I never turn down an invitation to 221B Baker Street (on screen or on the page), and though Agatha Christie lacks the critical acclaim of her compatriots, there’s a reason she’s outsold everyone to ever walk the planet. Then there’s J.K. Rowling, the once broke single mom who is so talented that she built a global empire with nothing but her words. And if streaming television has added anything to my life, it’s been a slew of British crime dramas that have taken me across Jolly Old England, both past and present. Like many Americans, I have a fondness—or even a reverence—for Great Britain. Which is why it’s hard to watch its demise with anything like indifference.

It was two recent headlines that put England in my abortion crosshairs, one from The Free Press (“Why Are So Many British Women Getting Abortions?) and one from Life News (“UK Kills a Record 300,000 Babies in Abortions”). Since it had been several years since I updated Abort73’s statistical pages for Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand, the path before me was clear. I’d neglected the rest of the English-speaking world for long enough. Then again, Abort73 is just me, and the CDC can’t even keep up with U.S. abortion totals despite a staff that numbers in the thousands and states that are literally sending in the data they need. Maybe I should offer them my services. In the meantime, here’s where things stand for Britannia. In 2023, a total of 277,970 abortions occurred in England and Wales. That’s up 50% in 10 years. If you compare 277,970 abortions against 591,072 live births, you’ll discover that almost one-third of British children are killed in the womb. A decade ago, it was 21%. England’s 2023 abortion percentage is higher than the 29% that are killed in Scotland, the 23% that are killed in New Zealand, the 22% that are killed in Canada, the 17% that are killed in Ireland, and the 13% that are killed in Northern Ireland.

The fact that 32% of English unborn children were killed by abortion in 2023 is disturbing enough, but how they were killed bodes still worse for the future. And I doubt you’ve seen this anywhere else before. Even if you were aware of the fact that 87% of English abortions took place medically, you probably didn’t know that 83% of those abortions took place without an abortion clinic. That is, both sets of abortion pills were taken at home. Said differently, 72% of the abortions that took place in England and Wales in 2023 did not occur in a hospital, doctor’s office, or abortion clinic. They occurred in the mother’s own bathroom—and her baby was flushed down her own toilet, or loo if you prefer.

Why is it worse to kill babies at home than in a clinic? It’s worse because it’s easier. And because there’s less oversight, less accountability, and less shame. It also means that the sewage system in England is annually carrying the remains of more than 200,000 human embryos. That has ramifications, both physically and spiritually. The mothers in 5,740 of those abortions were less than 18, and since England does not require parental consent, I suspect a large number of these abortions took place surreptitiously by minors who were too scared to tell their parents they were aborting their grandchildren. The future I feared in an article published this past December is already the reality of today in England.

Here’s something else that jumped out at me from the Department of Health and Social Care report. “Overall, 98% of abortions were funded by the National Health Service (NHS), while the remaining 2% were privately funded, consistent with trends over the last decade.” In other words, England paid to kill 272,411 of its own citizens before they were born. They are the most innocent and helpless members of the human community, but they are executed en masse because their existence is exceedingly inconvenient. To justify the violence, they’re written off as somehow less than human—which is always the way those in power dehumanize those who aren’t. 

Countries that allow babies to be killed bear one type of culpability. Countries that pay for babies to be killed bear another. But it gets even worse for England. Why, you may have wondered, were 2% of English abortions paid for with private funds? Isn’t every Brit eligible for free abortions? Yes, but despite that fact that healthcare in England is “free” for all, somewhere around 14% of the English population still pays for private health coverage. The problem with public health care, it turns out, is that it’s not very good. So those who can afford to pay for their own, do. They pay twice, in fact. They’re taxed for the services they don’t use and billed again for the services they do—much like American parents who send their children to private schools. 

The next question is, if 14% of English residents pay for private health care, why weren’t 14% of English abortions paid for with private funds? I’m sure you already know the answer. Abortion disproportionately targets and kills the poor, and it is the rich who disproportionately utilize private health care. Hence, the 2%. So not only is England paying to eliminate the most innocent and helpless members of the human community. They’re paying to eliminate the poorest among the most innocent and helpless. If a society wanted to dare God to actually execute its demise, it could hardly do more. Scoff, if you will, but the wrath of God in this case requires no fire or brimstone. It’s built into the practice. A nation that kills its children kills itself. And even progressives are starting to raise the alarm.

The Telegraph reports that declining fertility rates are “a growing threat to Britain’s population, which can only remain stable if the total fertility rate is around 2.1 children (per woman).” What is England’s total fertility rate right now? That would be 1.4 children—the lowest ever. The total fertility rate in London is less than one. As a result, “primary schools across swathes of London are closing due to a lack of demand,” while the NHS “spend[s] more to cope with the ageing population [than it does on] maternity facilities.” Keir Starmer can’t bring himself to admit that England has a fertility problem, but Bridget Phillipson, the U.K.’s Education Secretary, has taken to publicly pleading for more births. She wrote an article for the The Telegraph last summer calling Britons to have more children, but she struggles to connect the ideological dots. 

Phillipson’s article opens with a celebration of the fact that three-quarters of British moms now work outside the home, then laments the fact that child care is so expensive. She doesn’t seem to realize that if mothers were not working outside the home, there would be no need for exorbitantly-priced child care. Nor is she reckoning with the fact that the influx of mothers into the workforce is one of the primary factors that has caused wages to fall. When the supply of workers goes up, wages go down. And when the demand for child care goes up, so does the cost to acquire it. It’s not rocket science. What is Phillipson’s solution? Government-provided child care, of course, because what’s wrong with saddling working-class people with even more of a tax burden? And with all those empty schoolrooms, she reasons, why not use them for childcare instead? If only it were that simple. U.K. residents already pay tax rates far in excess of those in the U.S. They fund all manner of social programs, but as the percentage of residents consuming those benefits is increasing, the number of residents paying for them is decreasing. For the first time in 50 years, there were more deaths in England than births—causing the Office for Budget Responsibility to speculate that this new norm will “cause the national debt to soar over the next 50 years.”

Phillipson publicly declares that she “want(s) more young people to have children,” but this misses a crucial reality. The problem is not that England and Wales are not having enough children. The problem is they’re killing those children in the womb. Here it is by the numbers. A total fertility rate of 1.41 would have to increase by 49% to reach replacement level. What would that require in terms of actual births? It would have required an extra 289,248 births in 2023—a number that is strikingly close to the 278,000 children who were aborted that same year. “Families are the bedrock of our society,” Phillipson opined, and “as Education Secretary, I am determined that we support every child, in every family, in every part of the country.” Except in the womb, that is. 

Bridget Phillipson is a Catholic, apparently, but both her party affiliation and voting record show her to be a staunch advocate for abortion—which may be why she makes no mention of abortion in trying to explain England’s plummeting fertility rates. In 1967, the year abortion was made legal in Great Britain, total fertility stood at 2.65. By a decade later, it had fallen to 1.66. One would almost think there’s a connection. Phillipson says it’s the cost of living that’s to blame, but the cost of raising children has always been vastly more expensive than the alternative. People did it out of duty or desire. The notion that life has become too expensive for the bearing of children is a thoroughly modern one. Modern and dishonest. According to Kara Kennedy, in The Free Press article I referenced earlier, the cost of living has almost nothing to do with Britain’s abortion boom. It’s merely a convenient excuse. She writes:

Experts have attributed the rise (in abortions) to an increase in the cost of living… But the idea that rising abortion rates are primarily the result of financial desperation is, to put it generously, incomplete… I spoke to a dozen British women of different ages across the country about their abortions. The cost of having a child did not come up. Not once, even among younger or working-class women… What emerged (instead) was a pervasive belief that parenthood is a high-risk opportunity to do irreversible harm, and that opting out entirely is the responsible choice. The fear in these women was palpable.

Ann Furedi, the former chief executive of Britain’s largest independent abortion provider, calls the appeal to financial distress a convenient excuse for those who are morally uncomfortable with abortion. She considers this a weakness; I consider it a revelation. Furedi’s position is that since there is nothing wrong with abortion, women shouldn’t feel compelled to explain why theirs was necessary. My position is that this incessant compulsion to do so is further evidence that there is something wrong with abortion. Women don’t bend over backwards, after all, to justify a tooth extraction. Even in a country where 87% of the populace purportedly believes abortion should be legal, Furedi notes that “the cost-of-living explanation [reveals] a certain cultural discomfort with abortion.”

One woman whom Kennedy interviewed has had three abortions. The reason she’s not on birth control, she says, is because it’s “nearly impossible to get a doctor’s appointment.” Welcome to the world of socialized medicine. Getting an abortion, she maintains, is “so much easier… than 10 minutes face-to-face with a doctor.” Doctor visits are expensive; putting drugs in the mail is not. It’s the same profit motive driving grocery stores who would rather not pay someone to scan and bag your groceries if you will do it for them. And so, while the expense of raising a child may not be the driving factor for the British mothers who are having abortions, it does seem to be a driving factor for the state. Because when a government pays for the health care of its people—and most of them have no viable means of opting out—it is in the state’s interest to pay as little as possible. It wants a preponderance of healthy tax-payers and a dearth of “useless consumers.” That would be the old, the young, the sick, and the poor. This is why countries that pay for health care are so amenable to assisted suicide. And abortion. Killing the old, the sick, and the young is much cheaper than caring for them.

In a culture that “presents motherhood as an almost unbearable responsibility,” Kennedy posits, where “the most supported, least terrifying option is the one that ends a pregnancy, is it unsurprising that so many more women are choosing it?” Another mother she spoke to said that “Having a child feels irreversible (but) abortion doesn’t.” To that I would say, give it time. Abort73 has published nearly a thousand abortion stories that feel painfully irreversible. Anyone who forgoes the bearing of children on the assertion that the world is too messed up is condemning the world to the very fate they complain of. They are declaring in practice that the world is good enough for them but not good enough for their children. And so they casually break a chain that goes all the way back to the beginning of human history. Is there any higher expression of hubris? It is the bearing of children that saves the world. It is voluntary barrenness that destroys it.

When the English Parliament passed the Abortion Act in 1967, did its members know it would come to threaten the English people with their very extinction? I doubt its human agents had any such premonitions. This was the era of Paul Ehrlich’s ominous Population Bomb, after all, when overpopulation was seen as the real threat. But what of the darker forces at play? Those who prowl about like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour? The Bible is not insensible to those who commit crimes of desperation, but abortion in Great Britain is increasingly less about desperation and more about self-absorption. Ironically, as Jordan Peterson frequently points out, the more you think about yourself, the more depressed you become. English women, it seems, have become too neurotic to have children. And the reason they’ve become so neurotic, is because they’ve stopped having children. It’s a vicious cycle, but there is hope.

Eight years after abortion was legalized in England, America followed suit. For many years, the trajectory of our demise looked to be much the same. But then something happened to change the status quo. A petulant and persistent opposition movement rose up, and the unthinkable took place. After nearly 50 years, federal protection for abortion came crashing down. Abortion remains legal in most states, but there are now bastions of light and life in an otherwise dark landscape. As 32% of English babies are killed in the womb, the estimated percentage in America is 18%—but even that can be misleading. Among the 36 states that have reported 2024 abortion totals, the percentage of aborted pregnancies is 12%. That’s 286,000 abortions against 2.2 million births. It’s the states that have yet to report, states like California, New York, and Illinois, that kill a quarter or third of their unborn children. That’s no less of a problem for these localities than it is for the U.K. 

In another article Kara Kennedy wrote for The Free Press, “Progressives Can’t Bear Pregnancy,” she noted that “though the majority of young Americans still say they want children… Democrats seem incapable of presenting a positive vision of pregnancy, childbirth, or parenting.” Batya Ungar-Sargon calls it a PSYOP. “What is so disgusting about [the thought leaders on the left],” she says, “is they will produce culture in which marriage is (denigrated as) a patriarchal institution, but they all get married (themselves) and have children in wedlock, which gives them an enormous economic advantage while sentencing working class people of all stripes to the immiseration of broken homes and children born out of wedlock.” 

Coleman Hughes calls the birthrate decline—“happening in every single western, capitalist country in the world”—one of “the most important [problems] of our lifetime.” When your whole welfare state is built on a pyramid scheme, he warns, it is entirely dependent upon “each generation [having] enough workers to create enough tax revenue to take care of grandma.” That is no longer happening. Andrew Klavan noted last Friday that there is no top-down solution for the fertility problem blanketing the West. It’s not going to be solved through government programs or giving people money to have babies. It will come down to individual men and women “redeveloping the sense that each one of them is sacred, and their joining together in marriage is sacred, and the bodies they produce through that marriage are sacred.” It is only the short-sighted or naive who think that the rejection of normal family relations can fix society rather than destroy it.

In an earlier version of this article, things started to go off the rails right about here when I suggested that the marriage advice offered by the apostle Paul in I Corinthians 7 is equally shortsighted. That earned me a swift and thorough rebuke from a beloved friend. One who knows the Bible better than I and jealously guards its reputation. Why would I make such an audacious claim? Or consider myself qualified to question the counsel of God’s anointed? These are precisely the questions I’ve been trying to answer for the last several days. My inability to leave well-enough alone frustrates even me at times, so let me walk you through the process. Hopefully with more humility, more grace, and less cynicism than I showed the first time through.

If I had to summarize our cultural move away from marriage and child bearing, I would put it like this. A growing portion of society—mostly on the left—frames marriage as an institution that has run its course, a relic from the past that has little to no relevancy for the future. And they see children as either things that get in the way of worthier pursuits, or things that are too precious to bring into such a messed-up world. In either case, barrenness is celebrated—for the first time in history. I reject this world view completely but am struck by the notion that there is a troubling parallel in some of Paul’s remarks to the church in Corinth. Here is a selection of those remarks from I Corinthians 7:

To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is good for them to remain single, as I am. But if they cannot exercise self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry than to burn with passion… Now concerning the betrothed, I have no command from the Lord, but I give my judgment as one who by the Lord’s mercy is trustworthy. I think that in view of the present distress it is good for a person to remain as he is… Do not seek a wife… those who marry will have worldly troubles, and I would spare you that. This is what I mean, brothers: the appointed time has grown very short. From now on, let those who have wives live as though they had none… For the present form of this world is passing away.

Paul’s only mention of children in this chapter is in reference to divorce. He urges parents to stay together lest their children become “unclean.” This surprises me because I would have expected the bearing of children to lead the list in reasons for marriage, but Paul doesn’t go there. His reasons for not getting married include the maintenance of more singular devotion to the Lord and the avoidance of worldly troubles. His reasons for getting married begin and end with a reluctant concession that it may be necessary for the avoidance of sexual sin. It is better to marry than to burn.

The only way I can account for Paul’s leaving the bearing of children out of the equation is to conclude that Paul believed Christ’s return to be so imminent that it rendered having kids superfluous—along with marriage itself, at least for those able to exercise self-control. I see support for this premise in phrases like “the appointed time has grown very short,” and “the present form of this world is passing away.” That being said, the men I have conferred with this week, men who far exceed me in their time spent studying Scripture, have more assurance in the veracity of their position than I have in mine. That’s not nothing. Paul was not encouraging the Corinthians to forgo marriage and child bearing because they were in the end times. The “present distress” he spoke of, I’m told, was more likely a reference to something specific that was happening in first-century Corinth. Something that made the putting off of marriage advisable.

It’s also been pointed out that Christ made a similar argument in Matthew 19, though Jesus never said he would prefer everyone to be unmarried as Paul did. Rather, Jesus’ remarks came after telling the Pharisees that it was impermissible for a man to divorce his wife, causing his disciples to wonder if it wouldn’t be better in that case to not marry at all—which strikes me as a strange conclusion to draw. Was divorce really that commonplace in ancient Israel? Jesus’ response was that most people are not able to forsake marriage—because they do not have the gift of celibacy. “Only those to whom it is given,” can do so. I’ll grant that Jesus doesn’t say anything here about the bearing of children, but it is at precisely this point in the narrative when children are brought to Jesus, and he rebukes the disciples for trying to send them away. The kingdom of heaven, Christ tells them, belongs to little children. 

I could certainly be wrong in my impression that Paul thought the return of Christ to be imminently near, but I wouldn’t think any less of him if he did. Not even Christ knew the hour or day, but the assertion that Paul’s ambivalence towards marriage owed to something then going on in Corinth does not negate my central argument. In some ways, it strengthens it. If Paul was suggesting that things had gotten so bad in Corinth as to merit the leaving off of marriage and the bearing of children, how is that materially different from what we’re hearing on the left today? The underlying reasoning is not the same, of course, but the conclusion is. In view of the present distress, it is better not to marry.

Paul assured his readers that it is not a sin to get married, but his preference is clear. “He who marries his betrothed does well, and he who refrains from marriage will do even better.” The inclusion of the term “his betrothed” strikes me as further indication that Paul didn’t believe God’s people were long for this world. He doesn’t say, he who marries does well, he says, “he who marries his betrothed does well, and he who refrains from [marrying her] do[es] even better.” This is a man who is already betrothed to be married, but Paul still advises him—assuming “his (sexual) desire (is) under control,” to not marry her. How do we make sense of that, apart from the assumption that Paul believed their time on earth to be nearing its end? When you don’t think humanity has much earthly future, whether it’s 26 AD or 2026 AD, what point is there in having kids?

Underlying this entire discussion is a much deeper question. Whose opinion is being expressed in I Corinthian 7? Is it Paul’s or the Lord’s? For my part, I’m inclined to take Paul at his word. The reason I’m willing to question the sagacity of Paul’s marital advice is because Paul was willing to repeatedly concede that he was speaking for himself—not for God. Those who disagree might counter that even though Paul didn’t know he was communicating the literal words of God, he was. But this creates a problem all its own. Because if Paul is claiming not to speak for God when he is in fact speaking for God, then that is an untruth. And God does not author untruths. So doesn’t that mean that Paul is either telling the truth, and not speaking the words of God, or not telling the truth and thereby still not speaking the words of God?

I am more than willing to grant the possibility that I have misunderstood and misrepresented Paul’s arguments. We might even call it the more likely possibility since, as the apostle Peter observed, Paul wrote things that are “hard to understand, things that the ignorant and unstable can twist to their own destruction”—which is not a warning to be trifled with. I try to take the Bible as I find it, not as other men tell me to find it, but Peter and Paul were not just other men. It is a fearful thing to commit to a contrarian position. Fearful because there’s a better than even chance you’re wrong, and even if you’re right, you’re still likely to be excoriated for it. Opposition to abortion is a case in point. But while offending your enemies is one thing, offending your friends is quite another. It makes me physically sick. It makes me long to keep quiet and keep my head down. But then I think, what if this needs to be said? What if I’m the only one to say it? What if this relentless internal prompting is not me being ornery? What if it’s the Spirit of the living God?

As a young man, my reading or misreading of I Corinthians 7 created two not-insignificant problems. One, it gave me the impression that sexual self-control is not possible for most men. Victory over lust could only be achieved through an accommodating wife. And two, it gave me the impression that “ministry” is more important than marriage. The first conclusion caused me to take a “grit your teeth and bear it” approach to sexual temptation. I didn’t make much effort to reform my desires because I assumed the time would come when lust would no longer be an issue. I managed to marry as a 25-year-old virgin, but marriage is not the cure-all for lust I’d assumed it to be. I suspect no married man in the world gets to have sex whenever he wants—unless he is rich and immoral. Which is to say, victory over sexual sin is not achievable through mere accommodation. It takes the fostering of superior passions and a fair bit of discipline. I wish I would have known that sooner. On the second front, my conviction that marriage should take a backseat to ministry did untold harm to my wife and children—because I subtly saw them as a potential interference to ministry rather than ministry itself. To be fair, when Paul said the married man should live as though he is unmarried, I suspect he was speaking hyperbolically—just as Christ did with great frequency. Paul is not saying to ignore your wife as you dash about in a mad frenzy to save the world. He is reminding us that our primary devotion should be to the Lord.

The reason I find it difficult to sign off on the assertion that God would prefer people not to marry and bear children is because it does not align with the Lord’s oft-repeated creation mandate. Be fruitful and multiply! The admonition to be single and barren seems more in line with the thinking of those who hate God than those who love him. But even if Paul was expressing the Lord’s opinion, when encouraging the church in Corinth not to marry amidst its present distress, I know of no believers who would say that this reflects God’s revealed will for all people in all places—which brings us back to the joy of common ground. There are no warnings in the Bible against having too many children. Solomon proclaimed instead that children are a reward from the Lord. Blessed is the man who fills his quiver with them! He shall not be put to shame when he speaks with enemies at the gate.

“All of us possess knowledge,” we read in the first verse of I Corinthians 8, but “this ‘knowledge’ puffs up.” It is love that builds up. “If anyone imagines that he knows something,” Paul warned, “he does not yet know as he ought to know.” To me, that is both an encouragement and a warning. May we not get discouraged when we encounter things in the Bible that are hard to understand. That’s an exceedingly long list, and may we not pretend to understand more of it than we do. In the context of this article, may God grant you the grace to glean from it whatever is true and helpful and to reject whatever is not.