Guttmacher has now released their 2023 abortion estimates, and the numbers are grim—to say the least. The last time America saw an annual abortion increase this bad was 1977. That was just four years removed from Roe v. Wade, when total abortions were still increasing by 10%-20% each year. Because legalizing abortion, it turns out, leads to dramatically more abortion. When you combine the new abortion numbers with the abortion love fest that just concluded at the Democratic National Convention, it puts me in a fairly sour mood. The right to kill unborn children, apparently, is so important to some Americans that they will vote for anything or anybody so long as they support the savaging of human embryos and fetuses. Emperor Palpatine? Sure. Sauron? Why not. Lord Voldemort? No problem. If they’ll champion abortion, stick ‘em on the ballot! 

No matter how vile the candidate or how reprehensible their other policies, there is a not insignificant number of people who will happily punch their ticket if that will ensure their continued right to snuff out the most innocent and helpless members of the human community. I’m sorry for the vitriol, but the DNC’s unbounded “joy” in celebrating abortion is despicable. Actually, that may be selling it short. It’s demonic. You shall not sacrifice your children to demons, and so profane the name of your God. That’s from Leviticus. But as a former pastor of mine has pointed out, there is now a political party in the United States that is running almost exclusively on the sins of Romans 1. What is it that defines a wicked ruler? Simply this, from Psalm 94. They enshrine injustice in law, “condemn(ing) the innocent to death.” And what does the Psalmist say our response to such rulers should be? Do not be allied with them! In other words: if you fear God, do not join with those who want it legal to kill the innocent—which should be fairly self-evident.

Now to the numbers. 

In 2018, roughly 20 years of steady abortion decline ebbed to a halt. Total U.S. abortions increased by just over a percentage point that year and did so again in 2019. Then came the lockdowns—along with the accompanying fear, doomsaying, and economic malaise. Not surprisingly, total abortions rose. By almost five percent. And did so again in 2021. Total abortions were poised to increase even more in 2022, until something miraculous happened. On June 22, Roe v. Wade—which had been the law of the land since 1973—was invalidated. States were no longer forced to pretend that abortion is constitutionally protected, and 13 of them promptly wiped it from the books. Three more banned abortion after six weeks. As a result, total abortions fell by 4.5% nationwide. It was the largest year-over-year drop in American history. 

On the other side of the ledger, states that didn’t outlaw abortion experienced an abortion increase of almost 13%. Some of that owed to an increase in interstate abortions but not all of it. States that didn’t outlaw abortion and didn’t experience a significant uptick in out-of-state abortions still saw an increase of roughly 6%. This, it’s fair to assume, would have been the average for all states were it not for the abortion bans that were in effect for half the year. Here’s another way of looking at it. As many as 55,800 of the children who were born in 2022 would have been killed in the womb were it not for the Supreme Court’s willingness to admit that there is no abortion guarantee in the Constitution. That is worth celebrating!

But then the bottom fell out in 2023. 

Whereas an estimated 930,000 U.S. abortions took place in 2022, that number rose to 1,037,000 in 2023—an increase of 11.5%. As I said at the outset, it’s the largest jump in 45 years—and abortion proponents like Guttmacher have been positively giddy to announce the news. “This increase,” Guttmacher proclaims with a wagging finger, “demonstrates that people continue to seek and obtain abortion care despite the drastic reduction in abortion access in many states.” But this is a gross mischaracterization. Adding the word “care” doesn’t mitigate the violence of abortion, and there is absolutely no scenario in which outlawing abortion leads directly to more abortions. The abortion lobby has long understood that regulating abortion in any way makes it less likely that the average mother will have one—which is why they oppose all such measures so vehemently. The harder it is to get an abortion, the fewer abortions there will be. This is so obvious that it doesn’t even merit further explanation. Even Guttmacher sheepishly admits that “not all increases at the state level can be attributed to increased travel across state lines.” This is because, by their own admission, “states not bordering ban states” still saw an 18% increase in total abortions from 2020 to 2023. All that to say, the culprit for 2023’s abortion increase was not the fall of Roe. The actual culprit is less straightforward and far more dangerous. Call it a perfect storm of cultural and economic demise—unleashed by an administration that has simultaneously devalued children and devalued the dollar. 

According to Pew Research, almost half of American adults without children now say they’re unlikely to ever have children, a number that has risen by a jaw-dropping 10% in just five years. In 2018, 37% of childless adults didn’t want kids. By 2023, it had risen to 47%. When The Wall Street Journal asked last year whether having children is important, 33% of surveyed adults said it is not. And whereas 59% of respondents in 1998 said having children was “very important,” that number had fallen to 43% by 2019 and sits at 30% or less today. Writing for Gallup, Frank Newport observes that there have been “substantial drops since 1998 in the importance Americans assign to a number of the values tested, including patriotism, religion, having children and community involvement.” Though these responses aren’t broken out by political alignment, Pew Research provides at least some insight. When asked whether America’s falling birth rate is a problem, 60% of Republicans and those who lean Republican said yes, compared to just 37% among Democrats and the Democrat adjacent. 

JD Vance has been mercilessly mocked for suggesting there’s a danger in being ruled by too many childless politicians. The rebuttal (to his three-year-old remark) has been swift and damning. Just because someone doesn’t have children doesn’t mean they don’t care about children! Which is of course true. We all know that single men pretending to be women who want to read queer sex books to kids are just as mature and responsible as married couples who actually have kids. And just to show us how ridiculous it is to claim that the Democratic Party doesn’t value children, Planned Parenthood offered free abortions and free vasectomies this week at the DNC. Because, you know, Democrats love kids! Just not as much as they love abortion. Kristen Day, executive director of Democrats for Life of America, finally seems to have realized that there’s no place left for them among today’s Democrats. She has called the DNC simply: Abortion-Palooza. 

Because Guttmacher et al are so bloody fond of abortion, it’s fair to wonder whether their estimates might be artificially inflated. They absolutely could be inflated. In fact, they probably are—which I’ve talked about before in the global context. We shouldn’t just assume that those who have no qualms about offing the least of these among us would suddenly grow a conscience when it comes to data modeling. The abortion industry, after all, is the very definition of the end justifies the means. To date, only three states have reported their 2023 abortion totals. That would be Florida, Michigan, and Oregon. In all three cases, the Guttmacher estimate was higher than the actual count. For Florida, the discrepancy was less than 2%. But for Michigan and Oregon, it was 18% and 29% respectively. Those are not small differences. In 2020, which is the last year we have data available from both Guttmacher and the CDC, the Guttmacher estimates were 15% higher than the actual counts from reporting states. There is a second source of abortion estimates for 2023 that wasn’t available in years past, but #WeCount is also an advocacy group radically committed to the normalization of child sacrifice. The #WeCount estimate for 2023 is even higher than Guttmacher, coming it at 1,053,690 abortions.

If their numbers aren’t reliable, you might wonder why we bother with the Guttmacher estimates at all. Unfortunately, because California, Maryland, New Hampshire, and New Jersey don’t record or publish abortion counts, the Guttmacher estimates are the only national tallies we’ve got. It’s also possible—as Guttmacher maintains—that official abortion counts are perennially underreported. Guttmacher says there’s a 50% chance their 2023 abortion estimate is correct but maintains there’s a 90% chance that the total sits somewhere between 1,023,390 and 1,045,080. So that’s what we’ve got to go on, and even though there are some clear reasons why the abortion lobby might want to pad their numbers, especially this year, there are other factors serving to reign those propensities in. As hard as they work to mainstream abortion, the industry also understands that most people are deeply ambivalent towards the foul practice. They’ve been conditioned to accept it and pay it lip service, but they certainly don’t want to think about what abortion actually is or does. Which is why those selling abortion work so hard to not even say the word. Here’s how Kamala Harris put it earlier this year while becoming the first sitting Vice President to visit Planned Parenthood: 

In states around our country, extremists have proposed and passed laws that have denied women access to reproductive healthcare… Women [are] being denied emergency care because the healthcare providers there, at an emergency room, were afraid that because of the laws in their state, that they could be criminalized, sent to prison for providing healthcare. So, I’m here at this healthcare clinic to uplift the work that is happening in Minnesota as an example of what true leadership looks like, which is to understand it is only right and fair that people have access to the healthcare they need and that they have access to healthcare in an environment where they are treated with dignity and respect. 

In case you don’t speak euphemism—or got increasingly glassy eyed with her every repetition of the word “healthcare,” I’ll parse it out for you a bit. “Extremists” are people like me who don’t think it should be legal to poison or maim children in the womb—just because they’re tiny and helpless. “Providing (emergency) healthcare” refers to killing unborn human beings by using surgical instruments to pull their fragile bodies to pieces. “Healthcare clinic” refers to a government-subsidized killing center that aborts roughly 228 children for every one it refers out for adoption. “True leadership” is what’s exhibited by abortionists and their support staff as they daily commit brutal and fatal acts of violence—“with dignity and respect.” Even though abortion itself is a clinical term designed to mask the true horror of child sacrifice, its proponents are still generally loath to use it. For all these reasons, it is unlikely that the abortion industry would allow their abortion numbers to get too far afield from reality. They at least want to maintain the fiction that birth control is working and do not want people to realize that abortion is virtually all they care about. Although that does seem to be changing. Somehow, Planned Parenthood has managed to find a new revenue stream that’s every bit as reprehensible as their bread and butter. It’s euphemistic name? Hormone replacement therapy. “In less than a decade,” The Free Press reports, “(Planned Parenthood has) become the country’s leading provider of gender transition hormones for young adults”—but that’s a story for another day.

Though there is no way to know for certain how many abortions there would have been in 2023 without the state abortion bans in place, here’s one way to come at it. In 2020, the 13 states that have now banned abortion accounted for 11.5% of the U.S. abortion total. The two states that have partly banned abortion in 2023—Georgia and Wisconsin—accounted for 5.2% in 2020 but only 2.9% in 2023. That means 13.8% of the abortion pool from 2020 was nonexistent in 2023. So if 1,037,000 abortions took place in 2023 without those states, then everything else being equal, there would have been approximately 1,195,000 abortions with those states. That’s a theoretical abortion reduction of 165,000. But that doesn’t mean that 165,000 lives were actually saved, because some number of those abortions still occurred in other states, and in states where abortion is no longer legal, we must assume that there were fewer crisis pregnancies than would have otherwise been the case. Because women who don’t want kids and are unwilling or unable to have an abortion, must be more vigilant about not getting pregnant. 

As to how many of these vacated abortions still took place, we should note that 9% of the abortions that occurred in  2020 were performed on out-of-state mothers compared to 17% in 2023. If we assume that the entirety of that 8% increase (82,400 abortions) came from states that ban abortion, that cuts the theoretical abortion reduction in half, down to about 83,000. If these numbers are accurate, then at least half of the women who would have had an abortion were it legal still had an abortion in a different state. That’s a significantly higher percentage than I would have hoped or expected, but even if true, I doubt it’s sustainable.

Guttmacher notes that interstate abortion travel was massively subsidized in the immediate aftermath of the Dobbs verdict, but donations to these abortion funds have “dramatically slowed” since. It turns out that paying for people to kill their baby makes people a lot more likely to kill their baby. Who would have thought?! There’s also this, Florida implemented a 6-week abortion ban in June of this year. That immediately wipes out half of all future abortions in the state—more than 40,000 a year. And South Carolina’s 6-week abortion ban went into effect in August of last year. That’s two more abortion destinations off the board. While some states, like New Mexico, are perfectly content to kill more babies than they birth, those with any sense are getting out of the abortion business. 

By and large, the states banning abortion are the same states everyone is moving to. They’re not moving because of abortion, but neither can it be written off as mere coincidence. Public policy decisions run part and parcel. There’s a reason the best-run state governments are the least hospitable to abortion. There’s a reason people are leaving California and New York for Texas and Florida. Not surprisingly, the 2023 fertility rate—which is the number of births per 1,000 women of reproductive age (15-44)—was 11.4% higher in states that ban abortion. In 2021, before any abortion bans went into effect, the fertility rate was 10.2% higher in states that would go on to ban abortion. So these states were already having more children than their abortion-peddling neighbors. It’s the reason some states can ban abortion while others can’t. Some states have a much larger concentration of pro-family, pro-child citizens. That’s a good thing, for everyone except those in the abortion industry. 

If you visit the #WeCount website, you’ll find the following vision statement: “We believe in just and equitable abortion and contraception informed by science.” I’m inclined to think that was written by AI. The wording is so clunky and awkward that It’s hard to even decipher what they’re saying. But they seem to want equitable abortion outcomes. Or do they? This, after all, is how Guttmacher explains why abortion bans are such a threat to diversity, equity, and inclusivity: 

Communities of color, LGBTQ+ people, young people, immigrants, people living with low incomes and those living with disabilities already contend with multiple barriers to accessing care. Anti-abortion policies exacerbate the health inequities these communities face… Policy solutions must center the lived experience of those who are disproportionately affected by the fall of Roe.

I’m pretty sure there’s a typo somewhere in that last sentence, but who’s to say? It’s not like their string of platitudes really means anything, though they do seem extremely devoted to aborting black and brown babies, gay babies, immigrant babies, poor babies, and disabled babies. Basically anyone who isn’t straight, rich, and white should be sent straight to Planned Parenthood. Isn’t that noble of them? How proud they must be that abortion is doing such a bang-up job killing those on the margins. Our society is so racist that it’s heartening to see children with black moms getting to be aborted at 3-4 times the rate of children with white moms. They’re finally catching a break. And Down syndrome babies are faring even better. As in, they’re almost all getting aborted! What wonderful victories these are for DEI, and doesn’t it speak well of society that we’re pushing all these purportedly marginalized groups to the very head of the abortion queue?!

Okay, I’m done. It’s sometimes hard to keep my vitriol from spilling over into sarcasm. Especially when killing unborn children is so important to so many Americans that it becomes almost the only thing they’re voting for. I can understand why abortion opponents would be one-issue voters. On the Evil Things List, I’m not sure what comes after dissecting the youngest, smallest, and most helpless members of the human race. I can understand the moral calculus involved in never voting for those who sanction child sacrifice. But to only vote for those who sanction child sacrifice? To come to the polls and say, even though your policies might actually rescue our nation from the abyss, I won’t vote for you unless you’ll guarantee me the right to dismember my unborn child. God help us. And yet as bad as things were last year on the abortion front, here’s one thing to remember. They could have been so much worse. And apart from the steady application of Ephesians 5:11, they will be.