Abortion statistics for the United States are perennially incomplete and perennially out of date, so every January—on the anniversary of Roe v Wade—I try to mitigate this problem by publishing an updated nationwide abortion total well in advance of Guttmacher or the Centers for Disease Dontrol. To do this, I gather state-by-state abortion totals, along with CDC birth numbers, and extrapolate a nationwide total based on all available data. So far, I have 2020 abortion totals from 32 states and hope to have a few more by the time I publish on the 22nd. But the 2020 birth totals are available for all 50 states—and it’s not pretty. 

So far as I can tell, this is the first time in U.S. history that the yearly birth total has decreased in all 50 states. Every single one—and the District of Columbia. This, of course, is the direction we’ve been heading for a decade or more, but it’s never been so pronounced. For "the sixth consecutive year,” the CDC tells us, “the number of births has declined [and is] the lowest number of births since 1979.” Elon Musk puts it a little more bluntly. “If people don’t have more children, civilization is going to crumble.” The establishment media immediately ran him into the ground—as they’re wont to do—accusing the world’s richest man of only wanting more people to sell to and exploit. The problem with this jaded and juvenile response is that it’s unable to account for the fact that the Pope recently said something of the same thing. And Pope Francis can hardly be accused of being a grubby capitalist. 

Whereas Musk warns of the pragmatic problems created by a declining population—including a top-heavy populace with more retirees than workers, Pope Francis speaks of a more existential threat. He noted last May that “a society that does not welcome life stops living.” And individuals who pursue personal aspirations—namely, money and success—over the bearing of children create a “mentality (that) is gangrene for society and makes the future unsustainable.” The crisis we’re facing cannot be fixed with temporary emergency responses, Francis argued, but requires an economy and culture that supports families and promotes new births. More recently, he called out the inherent selfishness of a society that prioritizes pets over children:

Nowadays people do not want to have children, or just one and no more. And many couples do not have children because they do not want to, or they have just one because they do not want any more, but they have two dogs, two cats…. Yes, dogs and cats (have) take[n] the place of children…  This denial of fatherhood or motherhood diminishes us. It takes away our humanity. And in this way civilization becomes more aged and without humanity, because it loses the richness of fatherhood and motherhood. And our homeland suffers as it does not have children.

Yes, there is some irony in the papal assertion that it is selfish to forego the bearing of children, but it’s safe to assume the Pope is referring here to married couples, or those that should be. The diminishing that results from denying parenthood is something akin to what Jordan Peterson said in his biblical lecture series. I’ve referenced it before:

There are three things you don’t know until you have a baby. The one is that you didn’t grow up, yet. Because you don’t actually grow up until someone is more important than you. You can’t. So people think they grow up if they don’t have children but they don’t. They just think they do.

Obviously there are exceptions to Peterson’s analysis. Being a parent is not an absolute prerequisite for growing up nor does becoming a parent guarantee maturity—but it certainly helps. And for most people, having a child is the first time that someone else truly supplants them as numero uno. Becoming responsible for another human being sort of forces you to get your life in order, or at least to try. I’ve yet to meet anyone who’s quite figured it out, but as I’ve said before, having a baby is a declaration of hope and resolve. Having an abortion is a declaration of fear and despair.

For two years now, we’ve been peddled a steady diet of fear and foreboding. Not surprisingly, one of the results of this unyielding drumbeat is more abortions and fewer births. But the longterm fallout of our global COVID response—as it relates to the bearing of children—may be even worse. More than half the world’s population has been injected with an experimental drug—developed at “warp speed”—and administered under an emergency use authorization. The COVID vaccine is not just a billion dollar business; it’s a billion dose business. Close to five billion people have already received 9.5 billion doses. Vaccine manufacturers, along with a cadre of government and media evangelists—whose programming is overwhelmingly funded by big pharma, have assured us that it’s all perfectly safe. The COVID vaccine does not and cannot have any detrimental impact on reproductive health. But then last week, a new study published in the the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology conceded that maybe it does. But only temporarily!

The problem with their blithe assertion that the menstrual changes being caused by the vaccine are only minor and temporary is that those making this claim have already spent the last year assuring us that it was categorically impossible for the vaccine to have any effect on reproduction. And yet now they’ve admitted it does. Virtually everything we’ve been told about these vaccines has turned out to be false. They make a statement, then walk it back—over, and over, and over. But instead of admitting their mistakes and re-evaluating, they simply adjust their talking points and crack on. At this point, why should we believe anything they tell us about its safety and efficacy? Dr. Robert Malone, who invented the mRNA vaccine platform used in the Pfizer and Moderna COVID vaccines, and who is himself double vaccinated and double COVID positive, recently said the following:

Think twice about giving these jabs to your kids. Among other things, your girls are born with all the eggs they’re ever going to have. And these lipids are going to the ovaries, and they appear to be affecting menstruation in some way. But menstruation is just one of these adverse events… These childhood vaccine mandates are obscene. We’re setting up a situation in which children are going to see peers who have been vaccine damaged as a consequence of the policies that their teachers and their government have forced on them. The damage here is going to be with us for generations. I’m not being Chicken Little here. This is deep profound stuff. It’s way beyond myocarditis. And no one seems to care. 

As you may already know or have deduced, Dr. Malone has become persona non grata for the Tony Faucis (and Twitters) of the world. They do everything in their power to write him off as a fringe scientist who doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but you only have to listen to him for five minutes to realize just how credible and well-informed Robert Malone is. And then there’s the fact that he patented the technology which the vaccines are built upon. COVID vaccine apologists demand that Dr. Malone prove these vaccines pose a threat to reproductive health, but “that’s not the way it works,” he counters. “It’s the job of the pharmaceutical companies to prove that their engineered spike (protein) is safe (but) they never did that.” Corners were cut, he explains, to push these vaccines through:

What did we learn early on from the Pfizer data package… which, by the way, was the first thing that really lit me up and let me know that something here was rotten?… I was given the task of independently evaluating it and then I took that package, and I gave it to a more senior regulatory professional that I respect, and I said, “These are the things that I see; this looks really bad.” He looked at it and he said, “Oh, you missed this thing, that, and the other thing.” These missing things include reproductive toxicology (and) evaluations of birth defects—standard stuff that’s always done. Genotoxicity, not done. What was done was a cobbled-together group of data that didn’t even involve the vaccine. It used other mRNAs in non GLP—that’s fancy talk for not done with rigor—studies. Not done according to the rules, all cobbled-together and sent into the regulatory agencies of the world to justify going ahead and giving jabs to everybody under emergency use authorization. 

What led Dr. Malone to the conclusion that these vaccines pose more than a hypothetical threat to reproductive health? He continues:

One of the studies they did do was administer these lipid RNA complexes to rodents and showed the distribution of the synthetic lipid component—that’s the fats that package the RNA that let it slip into your cells. It’s a synthetic chemical, positively-charged molecule. It’s a fat with a charge on the end. It goes to the ovary at a very high rate. It’s like 11% of the lipids. Now this wasn’t supposed to happen. It was supposed to stay in the arm, where it got jabbed, but it doesn’t. It goes all over the body, and it goes to two places that are really kind of anomalous: bone marrow and ovaries. Now the ovarian signal is really clear because it doesn’t happen in testes. So now you’ve got a synthetic molecule going to an organ—the ovary—that controls menstruation in a non-clinical model—a rodent—and subsequently it’s deployed widely in humans and you have this phenomena of alteration in menstrual cycle.

Dr. Malone tells the story of meeting with a Hasidic rabbinical court in New York. Fifteen different Gandalfs, he calls them. Their concern was the mentrual disruptions taking place among their female congregants after receiving the COVID vaccine. How did they know this? Because apparently it is the business of Hasidic rabbis to closely monitor menstruation since “there is strict guidance about cleanliness in intercourse.” Long story short, the court determined to forbid vaccine administration to all Hasidic children and to strongly discourage its use among healthy adults. Their decision had nothing to do with opposition to vaccines in general. It had everything to do with the “major threat (these particular vaccines pose) to reproductive health.” This is such a big deal to them because, as Dr. Malone puts it, “if you’re in the Hasidic community, increasing the size of the population of Hasidic Jews is kind of important to you.”

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, whose been in the news this week for the false statements she made about COVID hospitalization numbers among children, asserted last month—during the oral arguments for Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health—that it is merely “a religious view” to claim that abortion ends a life (spoiler alert: it's not). Justice Sotomayor, who is avidly pro-abortion, apparently has no qualms with lying on record, but it was her ideological colleague, U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, who made an even more revealing declaration. “The idea that contraceptives could make the need for abortion dissipate,” she said, “is contrary to the actual reality.” Prelogar is right, of course, about the inefficacy of birth control. Birth control was supposed to reduce the number of total conceptions, but it actually did the opposite—by increasing the prevalence of intercourse. Prelogar freely admits that half the unplanned pregnancies in the U.S. occur to women using birth control, which is an admission abortion advocates are almost never willing to make. Twenty years ago, when I first started combatting abortion professionally, the call for more birth control was ubiquitous. Now, it seems, they’re willing to admit that what they really want is more abortion.

All this makes me wonder what Prelogar and Sotomayor would say of Alexis Avila, the 18-year-old New Mexico woman who last Friday attempted to abort the life of her newborn baby boy by literally tossing him into a dumpster—on a near-freezing day. The whole thing was caught on surveillance video—including his rescue nearly six hours later. Avila claims that the birth of her son was a total surprise. She didn’t know she was pregnant. Perhaps she was on the pill. Statistically, there’s at least a 50% chance she was using birth control. Either way, I suspect there are few if any abortion advocates who would publicly support what Alexis Avila did. Safe haven laws in all 50 states make it possible for newborns to be simply handed off without penalty or obligation, but Avila chose the dumpster instead. It seems unfathomable, and yet the only difference between what Avila did and what thousands of other women do every single day is that Avila’s baby was older and more developed. And Avila’s baby didn’t die. A case can be made, in fact, that abortion is actually worse than tossing your baby in a dumpster. In leaving her child to die, Avila thereby left the door open for him to be rescued. This is not what abortion does. Abortion takes no such chances by ripping the tiny child to pieces. 

Baby Avila was not viable in any ultimate sense when his mother so unceremoniously tossed him out. He had no capacity to care for himself. Left alone, he would have died in that dumpster. But he wasn’t left alone, so let’s consider the three people who saved his young life. According to news reports, they heard cries coming from inside a trash bag while scavenging through the dumpsters for “anything of value.” That in itself is telling. It’s probably safe to assume that these are not wealthy people. Folks with money to spare tend not to comb through dumpsters at night. No doubt they have problems of their own—and yet they intervened. The good Samaritan comes to mind, which raises another question. Would anyone else in their shoes have simply left the baby to die? It’s hard to imagine—and yet all the reasons are there. This isn’t my problem. I don’t have time for this. This world has too many people already. We don’t need anyone else trying to eke out a living by digging through the trash. The list could go on, but I think it comes down to this. If you suddenly find yourself with the opportunity to save the life of a child, don’t you also have the obligation? If the answer is yes, and I’m convinced it is, then that closes the book on abortion. A mother is the only person in the world who has the opportunity to save the life of her unborn child, which gives her the obligation to do so—though privilege is probably a better word. 

Three friends went sifting through the garbage for anything of value and they found something of infinite value. A human child. There’s a global life lesson there, and it’s more pertinent today than ever before. Pray that we learn it. We have become an exceedingly selfish society, myself included. When I look back at pictures of my childhood, I marvel at how minimalistic it all was. It’s not that we were particularly poorer than my own young family was. There just wasn’t as much stuff. We’ve been conditioned to expect and demand more luxuries, and in some measure we’ve traded in our children to get them. We’ve been conditioned to see selfishness as a virtue, which reminds me of an old Seinfeld episode in which George asks Jerry whether it’s really so selfish to want some things that are “just for me.” Jerry’s response was predictably perfect: “That’s actually the definition of selfishness.” There is both tremendous value and tremendous heartache that comes with having children—and it’s a value that goes way beyond the pragmatic benefit of having more contributing members of society. “Whoever receives [a] child in my name,” Jesus said, “receives me, and whoever receives me, receives not me but him who sent me.” You won’t find this verse in the four spiritual laws, but I'm starting to think you should.