I like listening to Batya Ungar-Sargon—who shows up with some frequency on The Megyn Kelly Show and The Free Press. She is charming and energetic and generally full of astute analysis, but her takes on abortion and gay marriage are less commendable. Batya’s argument is essentially this: The country wants gay marriage. The country wants abortion. It’s time to move on. Perhaps I should expect such thinking from a self-described "MAGA leftist,” but it’s her framing of the issues that irks me the most. By attributing to both more cultural support than either actually enjoys, she infers for herself a dubious moral loophole. It’s the Pontius Pilate approach to avoiding culpability. I do not support this miscarriage of justice, but who am I to thwart the will of the people? Batya said something to Megyn Kelly back in November that prompted me to DM her the following:

I was dismayed this week when you equated support for gay marriage with opposition to transgender ideology. “The right side of those two issues won,” you argued. “The country is very pro-gay and really not into this trans-extremism.” Have you not considered that gay marriage is to marriage what a transgender woman is to a woman? Both are fraudulent redefinitions that can’t stand up to basic reality. Gay couples can be many things, but they cannot be married. It’s not biologically possible. Just as a man can be many things but not a woman. Thoughts?

I never heard back from Batya. No doubt she’s still wrestling through the questions I raised. Or my message was simply lost in the sea of correspondence she no doubt receives. But I did post the same premise to X last week and attached a poll for viewers to respond to. It read, “Gay marriage is to marriage what a transgender woman is to a woman. Agree or disagree?” It’s an interesting framing because neither response reveals anything of the participant’s position on gay marriage or transgenderism. It merely measures how you understand their relationship to each other. One commenter posted, “they're both the same thing; gay marraige is marraige (sic), a trans woman is a woman.” Another said, “Both gay marriage and trans women are an abomination to the real thing: marriage and women.” These two people take diametrically-opposed positions on the issues, but they both agree with the premise and put both issues on the same side of the ledger. One opposes both; one supports both. But Batya takes it as a matter of course that reasonable people will see nothing wrong with gay marriage but will see something wrong with pretending a man can be a woman.

All told, some 2,534 votes were cast in my X poll. Forty-three percent of respondents agreed with my premise that “gay marriage” and “trans women” are moral equivalents; 57% disagreed. And based on comments from the 75,000 people who saw the poll, lots more lacked the capacity to even understand its premise. “Logic!” I say with the erudite Professor Kirke, “Why don’t they teach logic at these schools?” Of course, poor schooling isn’t the only reason so many people are now done in by a once-basic formula for expressing parallel relationships. There’s a disturbing cover story by Liel Leibovitz in the January-February issue of County Highway which talks about the various ways smartphones have rewired our brains—making us far less capable of maintaining focus or engaging in analogical reasoning. On average, the article maintains, we Americans are interrupted by our phones every seven minutes. Sometimes it is via explicit notification. More often, it is our own incessant impulse to “check something.”

Twenty years ago, the average American attention span was 20 minutes. Today, that average has reportedly fallen to 47 seconds—which is about the maximum amount of time any of us are willing to wait in line or sit on a couch without reaching for our dark master. “No or little attention,” Leibovitz writes, “equals no or little formation of long-term memory, which, in turn, leads to an inability to solve complex problems, connect ideas, build mental models, regulate emotions, form relationship or do just about anything else a human being needs to do to remain, recognizably, a human being.” The primary threat of the interruption machines living in our pockets is not the insidious content they can deliver or the ideological echo chambers they can trap us in. It’s much deeper than that, and if we’re not yet considering how we might metaphorically cast them into the fires of Mordor, we don’t sufficiently grasp the threat. But I digress.

According to the admittedly-limited results of my X poll, Batya’s position on gay marriage and transgenderism appears to be the more mainstream one—despite its philosophical inconsistencies. It’s also the one held by Joe Rogan, who takes umbrage when men pretend to be women in the context of sport or bathroom visits but sees nothing wrong with men pretending to be women in the context of marriage. Shouldn’t keeping men out of women’s spaces also include keeping them out of wives’ spaces? This is where homosexuality and transgenderism overlap. In public discourse, transgenderism is often framed as a threat to homosexuality, and at some level it is. Hence the growing push to remove the T from the LGB. If young boys who think they’re girls were left alone, it’s frequently asserted, they’d simply grow up to be gay men. But this argument has never sat well with me because it feels disingenuous, as if those making it are just trying to score points with our wildly gay-affirming culture. And I wonder if the distinction isn’t something of an artificial one in the end.

What is the difference between a gay man and a transgender woman? One ostensibly tries to look the part of a woman; one doesn’t. But at the end of the day, they are both men who are sexually attracted to other men. Except, of course, for those who only pretend to be a woman so as to gain intimate access to actual women. Or girls. Perhaps you could argue that in a gay relationship, neither man is supplanting a woman or pretending to be a woman, but this is certainly not the case in a so-called gay marriage. Because marriage, by definition, is one man and one woman. So one of the men in a gay marriage is playing the role of a woman, because he has replaced the wife. To those who expressed confusion over this framing in my X poll, I offered the following explanation:

The existence of gay marriage and transgender women are philosophical equivalents. Both rely upon subverting established norms. Until recently, it was universally understood that two men could not get married and a man could not become a woman. Now both have become open questions. But it is essentially the same question in both cases. As such, they must be accepted or rejected in concert. That is what we were asking people to agree or disagree with.

Gay marriage pretends to be a real marriage just as transgender women pretend to be a real woman. The first pretense maims an institution. The second pretense maims a person. Lots of persons, in fact. And while Batya, Rogan, and a world of others recognize the danger of the latter, they fail to see its connection to the former. I think that’s a problem. And when Batya appeared more recently on The Andrew Klavan Show, she employed something of the same playbook—this time with regard to abortion. Here is what she said:

On an issue like abortion, when you have 80% consensus in a country like ours, which is filled with the most-tolerant people in human history, I kind of think a democracy would prioritize that… Your democracy is broken if 80% of your country wants something and it’s impossible to get it. And I think the fact that 80% of Americans think abortion should be legal somewhere in the 6-8, to 10 (or) 12 weeks (range), and pretty much illegal after that, unless the mother is dying. That seems to me to be the common-sensical (position). As a populist, I want to see policy reflect the inherent goodness of the American people.

Exposing the injustice of abortion has been my primary vocation since January of 1999. That’s 27 years, but never in nearly three decades of closely monitoring this issue have I seen any indication that 80% of the country supports abortion. I have no idea what Batya is talking about. For the last half century, Americans have been pretty evenly split on the ethics of abortion—which is why we've been stuck in such a legal and cultural quagmire. On the one side, there is a pretty stellar moral argument. On the other side, there are billions of dollars to be made and the undeniable appeal of being able to extricate oneself from the practical difficulties of licentiousness. On one side, principle. On the other, pragmatism. Klavan’s response to Batya was a good one. It speaks to the importance of ventures like Abort73, but he took the accuracy of her 80% assertion for granted, saying:

I would like to see no abortions. I think abortion is an atrocity. But when 80% of the people want it, the only way to get there is through culture. It’s by explaining to them, this is what [abortion] is. This is what it looks like. This is what it does.

That, in a nutshell, is what Abort73.com has been doing for the last 20+ years—explaining what abortion is, what it looks like, and what it does. The website focuses on what is wrong with abortion; my articles focus on what is wrong with indifference to abortion. Ours is important Ephesians 5:11 work, no matter where the country’s opinion currently stands, but Batya’s assertion is once again dangerous. Because it aims at giving good people—who have qualms about abortion—the moral cover to look the other way. Assuming Batya must have actually seen the number somewhere, I queried, “Do 80% of Americans support abortion?” The first return in the affirmative was a 1979 article—with no listed authors—from PubMed headlined, “80% of Americans believe abortion should be legal.” But Batya wasn’t yet born in 1979, and when you look at the article’s abstract, you’ll find that “80% of Americans think that abortion should be legal in all or some circumstances.” That little caveat, it should be noted, makes the initial assertion all but meaningless. The same Gallup poll referenced in the article, which polled fewer than 1,200 Americans, reported 60% support for Roe v. Wade. Sixty percent, I would argue, is not 80%.

Listed just below the 1979 PubMed article was one from those stalwarts at the Planned Parenthood Action Fund. This one comes from 2024 and is almost certainly to blame for Batya’s confusion. Its headline: “Over 80% of Americans believe abortion care should be legal.” Note the insidious inclusion of the word care—as if you can just apply it to anything. Holocaust care, slavery care, sex-trafficking care. Ugh. I’m reminded again that these are not good people. On what basis do they say that “58% of conservatives” believe abortion should be legal? That would be a March 2024 poll conducted by Impact Research—who doesn’t even try to hide their political bias. Their homepage features the massive smiling mug of President Obama and two hero shots of Joe Biden. “Impact Research,” their website declares, “is a proud ally and asset to progressive causes and campaigns around the globe.” How many people did they survey for this massive nationwide poll (conducted entirely online and via text)? That would be a mere 1,000—which is even fewer responses than I get in a $50 X poll—and 200 of those participants were Asian American, 200 were black, and 200 were latino. In other words, they vastly oversampled minority populations, which are vastly more-likely to support abortion. If it strikes you that those who conducted the survey are a bunch of dishonest scoundrels, well, you may be giving them too much credit.

Here’s another thing I discovered. Participants in this survey were queried, then subjected to a round of pro-abortion propaganda, then queried again. For one particular question—the only one I can find any public record of—this resulted in a 21-point swing. Here’s the question: Do you support or oppose ensuring that access to abortion is protected throughout pregnancy, including later in pregnancy? The first time this question was asked, 31% of respondents strongly supported access to abortion throughout pregnancy while an additional 20% somewhat supported access throughout pregnancy. On the flip side, 27% of respondents strongly opposed access to abortion throughout pregnancy while an additional 15% somewhat opposed access throughout pregnancy. Adding those numbers together, we find that 51% of respondents somewhat or strongly support access to abortion while 42% somewhat or strongly oppose access to abortion. After being subjected to the pro-abortion messaging, support for access to abortion rose to 62% while opposition fell to 32%. This proves, the pollsters maintain, that messaging in support of abortion is “incredibly potent.” And so is the ability to entirely control the narrative.

Unlike more-reputable polling bodies, Impact Research does not publish their polling questions. I spent hours looking for them, but not even Google’s built-in AI could turn anything up. Instead, all Impact offers are carefully-curated interpretations, but even this is enough to demonstrate how entirely bogus their 80% claim actually is. Even after subjecting their exceedingly small pool of participants, who were already disproportionally favorable to abortion, to another round of abortion propaganda, they were still only able to push abortion support to 62%. On what basis, then, does Planned Parenthood say that more than 80% of Americans believe abortion should be legal? That would be the first bullet point in Impact Research’s dubious summary report. Forty-nine percent of Americans, they tell us (aka, 49% of their 1,000 left-leaning respondents) “support abortion being legal and available without caveats.” Another 32%, they continue, oppose abortion but believe it should be legal (with caveats, by implication). What are those caveats? They don’t bother to say. They just add up 49% and 32% and get “over 80%.” Voila. It’s no wonder that even Batya’s explanation of the findings was so maddeningly imprecise. Her contention, you’ll remember, was that 80% of Americans want abortion to be legal until sometime after “the 6-8, to 10 (or) 12 week” range. Huh? Which is it? Because banning abortion after six weeks would eliminate up to 60% of all abortions while banning abortion after 12 weeks would eliminate less than 10%. Batya’s sliding of the bar from six to 12 weeks is hardly an insignificant adjustment. 

Batya calls it common sense to yield to the 80% on abortion, but that assumes Planned Parenthood’s 80% claim passes muster. It doesn’t. Nor is there anything middle-of-the-road about leaving abortion legal through 12 weeks. That would be like the South calling it a middle-ground proposal to have only banned slavery in North Carolina, which accounted for roughly 8% of America’s slave population in 1860. Since almost all abortions happen during the first trimester, the true middle-ground position would land much closer to a 6-week abortion ban—like the one passed in Florida in 2023 and enacted in 2024. The year before that 6-week limit went into effect, there were 84,052 abortions reported in Florida. In 2025, the year after it went into effect, reported abortions fell to 44,206. That’s not to say a 6-week abortion is any less abhorrent than a 12-week abortion, but neither should we turn up our abolitionist noses at a law that almost halved a state’s abortion total. The work in Florida is by no means done, but a 6-week ban is a whole lot better than a 12-week ban and is vastly superior to no ban at all.

Last week, on what would have been the 53rd anniversary of Roe v. Wade, I posted a nationwide abortion estimate for 2024. To date, I’ve been able to obtain 2024 abortion totals from 31 state health departments. The totals from those 31 states, which account for roughly 30% of U.S. abortions—according to Guttmacher—were then extrapolated to arrive at an estimated abortion total for the entire country. For years, California, Maryland, and New Hampshire have failed to record or publish statewide abortion totals. And New Jersey only reports abortions performed in hospitals. Now Michigan and Washington have joined their ranks, deciding they’d rather not keep track of how many unborn children are killed within their borders. Not surprisingly, the more states who opt out of abortion reporting, the less reliable our nationwide totals become. This is the reason Guttmacher’s abortion estimates have become the standard bearers. Because the CDC data is perennially incomplete and does not include the most populous state in the Union. But Guttmacher’s 2024 abortion estimates for the 31 states that have now reported turned out to be 27% too high. In fact, they significantly overestimated the abortion totals for all 31 reporting states. In my state, South Carolina, Guttmacher estimated 6,930 abortions for 2024. The actual count was 2,986.

As such, my 2024 U.S. abortion estimate is significantly lower than Guttmacher’s. They put the number at 1,047,740. I put the number closer to 800,000. I could be wrong, of course, but so could they. And I trust the reliability of hard counts more than soft estimates. For the last 15 years, I have gathered, assembled, and published state-by-state abortion data, much as the CDC does. But my reporting has typically preceded theirs by 10 months. What I publish in January will be published by the CDC in November. Until now, that is. The 2023 Abortion Surveillance report that the CDC should have published two months ago is still MIA. That means there has been no official federal reporting on abortion in the aftermath of Roe v. Wade. Is that intentional? It’s hard to say, but I was struck by something Andrew Klavan noted on Friday. “The fight to know what’s real is the fight we’re (now) in.” And there seems to be a concerted effort to keep us away from anything like real abortion numbers.

CNN reported last month that former CDC Chief Medical Officer Dr. Debra Houry shut down the abortion surveillance data project before resigning in protest over the firing of CDC Director Susan Monarez. According to HHS officials, Houry “directed staff to return state-submitted abortion data rather than analyze it” and unilaterally decided to shelve the program. Houry denies both claims, stating that she didn’t have the funding or staff to maintain the program and that all her superiors knew that. Having essentially done myself the work Houry complains of, without the benefit of a staff or the convenience of having state data automatically sent to me, her excuse feels pretty thin. And vindictive. The CNN report indicates that the CDC hopes to publish a 2023 Abortion Surveillance report by this spring, but even if the Centers for Disease Control has not formally abandoned their abortion-reporting function, their data—and ours—will be even less complete moving forward. What’s the solution? I don’t know. But I did read this today in Proverbs over my morning tea: “Rescue those who are being taken away to death; hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter.” And that is something we can and should be doing even if we don’t know how much of the country supports the slaughter or how many children are stumbling towards it.