Last March, Guttmacher gleefully announced that “Despite Bans, (the) Number of Abortions in the United States Increased in 2023.” According to their estimates, America’s 2023 abortion total came in at 1,037,000. They have since amended that to roughly 1,029,000, but that still represents the largest year-over-year increase in nearly 50 years. I called it “The Abortion Catastrophe of 2023”—not least because it came directly on the heels of the largest drop in total abortions in American history.  But now it’s January, 2025, and January is the month in which I’ve historically published Abort73's own annual abortion estimate based on available state level data. This year, of course, Guttmacher beat us to the punch—for the first time ever—but it’s increasingly looking like they got it wrong.

To date, I have obtained 2023 abortion totals from 31 states. These numbers come directly from state health departments and represent the exact number of both surgical and medical abortions recorded for each state in 2023. Guttmacher’s estimates, you’ll remember, are not based on actual counts. They instead send surveys to every known abortion provider in the country and use the responses they receive to calculate their annual estimate. They do this every three years, but this is the earliest they’ve ever published relative to the year in question. Of the 31 states for which actual abortion counts are now available, Guttmacher’s estimate was high 18 times and low three times. Overall, they overestimated the abortion total for these 31 states by 12%. If we were to apply this same miscalculation to their nationwide total, that would mean there weren’t 1,029,000 U.S. abortions in 2023. There were somewhere around 905,000—which is actually down from the estimated 913,000 abortions that took place in 2022. 

I’m not saying it’s all good news. Among the 31 reporting states, the abortion percentage rose in 19. In fact, the abortion percentage rose in every state where abortion remains legal except for Nebraska—which has a 12-week ban in place. So despite being outlawed in more than a dozen states, 905,000 annual abortions is still higher than it was in both 2016 and 2017, when abortion was legal across the board. That’s the bad news, but the good news is that 2023’s U.S. abortion total may well be 125,000 less than Guttmacher reported. The Guttmacher Institute, if you’re not aware, began as the research arm of Planned Parenthood. It was named after Alan Guttmacher, who was instrumental in its development, and was the president of Planned Parenthood when it threw off its prior commitment to never perform or recommend abortion. Now Planned Parenthood runs the largest abortion business in the country, by a wide berth, and Guttmacher has been in the pocket of big abortion from the very beginning. They have long clung to the ridiculous assertion that outlawing abortion does not reduce abortion, which may explain the apparent padding of their 2023 numbers.

Alongside state-by-state abortion numbers, I also examine state-by-state birth numbers as published by the CDC. This is what allows me to calculate each state’s abortion percentage. It’s total abortions divided by the sum of total births and total abortions. This reveals what percentage of pregnancies end in abortion, not counting miscarriages. For the sake of comparison, it’s a much more useful number than total abortions because it negates changes and differences in population size. For instance, Minnesota aborted 14,124 children in 2023 which is comparable to the 13,904 children aborted in Nevada. But 30.4% of all pregnancies in Nevada ended in abortion compared to 18.6% in Minnesota—which means children have a significantly higher chance of surviving the womb in Minnesota than they do in Nevada. Of course, because 2023 was the first year in which some state abortion bans were in effect for the entire duration, several states—including Texas—logged abortion percentages of zero. It did my heart good to log those numbers.

Looking at births independently, the projections remain grim. Total births declined in 2023 in 48 states and DC. That means they rose in only two. Congratulations North Dakota and Tennessee. I wish we’d all follow your lead. On the other side of the spectrum, births fell most precipitously in Hawaii, Vermont, Alaska, and California—where I was born 50 years ago this November. A week after my birth, 40,000 acres went up in flames in the foothills of Los Angeles—driven by 60 mile-an-hour Santa Ana winds. Sound familiar? My mom and I evacuated to Orange County while my dad stood guard on our roof with garden hose in hand. And now all these decades later, Southern California is burning anew. Once again to the tune of 40,000 acres. When Doug Wilson was asked whether these fires might be the judgment of God, Wilson answered in the affirmative. His predictably-good explanation went like this:

There are two types of judgment. One is where the judgment is apparently unconnected in any causal way to the behavior that supposedly summoned forth the judgment, while the second kind is a man-reaps-what-he-sows kind of thing. California is most definitely in the second category. If you consistently vote for something other than good management, at some point you are going to be afflicted with mismanagement. Not only that, but the effects of such mismanagement can be really disproportionate. Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind… Divine intervention judgment is more difficult to determine. I believe that it is possible for us to do, but a larger degree of caution is needed. Job’s three friends were too quick to assign a meaning to his suffering. The disciples were too quick to ask whether it was the blind man’s sin or his parents’ sin that resulted in his blindness. But in order to assign responsibility for the “God is not mocked” kind of judgment, the only qualification necessary is to have a working pair of eyes in your head.

God is not mocked. What you reap, you will sow. The judgment of God, according to Romans 1, is most often the simple giving over of people to the natural results of their life choices. When you forsake common-sense practices that help prevent wildfires and implement social policies that make the fire department materially worse at fighting fires, why should you be surprised when your cities burn? Or blame God for the devastation? You’re getting exactly what you signed up for. The same is true with regard to the bearing of children. There is at least one example in scripture of God supernaturally “clos[ing] all the wombs” as an act judgment—when Abimelech unknowingly took as his wife the already-married Sarah. And when the prophet Hosea rebuked Israel for “play[ing] the whore” with other gods, the promised punishment was “no birth, no pregnancy, (and) no conception!” America may be enduring something of the same judgment right now, but just like the raging fires in California, our increasing barrenness flows naturally from the errant choices we’ve made. We celebrate birth control, abortion, homosexuality, and the abolition of marriage without seeming to notice that each one takes us closer to our collective demise. When a culture trades marriage for abortion, its end cannot be far. 

In rereading the Exodus account this week, a few things stood out to me. First, right at the outset, we learn what should be an obvious truth. The strength of a nation is bound up in its birth rate. “But the people of Israel were fruitful and increased greatly,” verse seven reads, “they multiplied and grew exceedingly strong, so that the land was filled with them.” Simply put, a nation is strengthened when it has more children and weakened when it has less—which the Egyptians understood full well. Solomon’s proclamation in Psalm 127 that children are a reward from the Lord infers that the inverse is also true. That’s not to say barrenness automatically betokens God’s displeasure. There were plenty of righteous couples in the Bible subjected to it—and the same is true today, but barrenness is never celebrated in scripture. It is only and always mourned.

My second observation from Exodus relates to the connection between the bearing of hardship and the bearing of children. It says in verse 12 that the more the Israelites were oppressed, “the more they multiplied and the more they spread abroad.“ This was not the result Pharaoh expected. In fact, the reason Egypt began oppressing Israel in the first place was precisely because they wanted to prevent them from further multiplying. First they tried enslavement, then infanticide. Neither worked. But why? Was it God divinely circumventing the normal bounds of cause and effect? Perhaps, but there is a more natural explanation as well. Whenever Israel lost its way in the Old Testament, the culprit was always the same. We’ve already seen it in the warnings of Hosea. They abandoned the God of their fathers to pursue the gods of their neighbors. 

It seems, then, that Egypt would have been better off assimilating the Israelites instead of oppressing them. As Mel Gibson’s Edward Longshanks deviously opined: “If we can’t get them out, we’ll breed them out.” But Egypt went full totalitarianism instead which pushed the Israelites even further into the solaces of family and faith—including the solaces of the marriage bed. And so the more Pharaoh tightened the screws, the more children Israel had. The Hebrew midwives—under false pretense—refused to euthanize the male babies they delivered, and God rewarded them with children of their own. Instead of stymieing the birth rate, the sufferings visited upon Israel pushed its birth rate even higher, which is not always the case.

If you look at a chart of the U.S. birth rate over the last 100+ years, you’ll notice two precipitous falloffs. The first came from 1921-1933 when America’s birth rate fell from 119.8 births per 1,000 women of reproductive age to 76.3. The second occurred between 1957 and 1976 when the birth rate fell from 122.9 to 65. The first collapse approximately correlated to the Great Depression—the worst and longest financial crisis in American history. The second is harder to account for, at least in economic terms. There were seasons of recession during that 20-year stretch but nothing to rival the Great Depression. What changed, then? Mostly this. The birth control pill was released in—you guessed it—1957. Remarkably, the birth rate at the start of our second crash was higher than it was at the first. This is because our birth rate came roaring back through the 40’s and 50’s. The first baby bust was prompted by economic malaise whereas the second was the result of technological advance—if you want to call it that. This also helps explain why our birth rate has yet to come back. It rose modestly during the 80’s and early 2000’s, but sits now at 54.5. That’s the lowest in American history—even lower than the 55.7 we fell to in that nightmarish 2020.

For the sojourning and enslaved Israelites, not even extreme hardship could derail their fertility. For modern Americans, not even wealth, peace, and opportunity have managed to put ours back on track. There is now an inverse relationship between wealth and population growth in the world that cannot be sustained. The top ten fastest growing populations are all in Sub-Saharan Africa. The Wilson Center reports that “approximately 240 babies are born each and every minute in lower income countries, compared to 25 per minute in those with higher income—which is an order of magnitude difference. Why has the birth rate fallen below replacement in so many wealthy countries? The Wilson Center calls it the product of “increased access to contraception and reproductive healthcare (ie abortion), an increase in women seeking higher education, women’s empowerment in the workforce, lower rates of child mortality globally, increased cost of raising children, and overall gender equality”—none of which is happening at anywhere near the same level in the developing world. There is at least one good thing on that list, but at some point we have to ask whether all our social tinkering has been worth the cost. For hundreds of years, we’ve been warned of the apocalyptic future awaiting us due to overpopulation. But it’s looking more and more like we got that one backwards.

Margaret Sanger, who founded the organization that became Planned Parenthood, thought it was only ignorance or stupidity that could account for the continued bearing of children. Or lack of access to her beloved contraceptives. She believed the most intelligent members of society were the least fertile while the “feeble-minded” (as she put it) were the most. “The statistics indicate,” she wrote in The Pivot of Civilization, “a surprisingly low rate of intelligence among the classes in which large families and uncontrolled procreation predominate.” How she despised large families (like her own), but I would contend that one determining factor mostly escaped her. Faith. She warred against Christian charity, but never grasped the power religious devotion had to sustain people through the inherent difficulties of life. Why did the Israelites keep having children despite being subjected to horrific abuses—including slavery and infanticide? They were people of faith. They embraced their promised destiny. Your descendants will be as the stars of heaven and as the sand on the seashore. Why have modern Americans stopped having children even when times are good? More and more, we are not people of faith.

There is a correlation, after all, between wealth and unbelief. It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God. Jesus said that. And there’s also a correlation between wealth and low fertility. Just the other day I found myself behind a late-model minivan in Myrtle Beach whose window sticker read: “Huge Financial burden on Board.” I’m sure it was meant to be funny, but the assertion struck me as almost demonic—to think of a child in such shallow transactional terms. I understand that the world exists in different socioeconomic contexts. In some, children are considered assets. In others, they’re liabilities. But something more than mere financial calculation is clearly at work. “The U.S. birth rate has fallen by 20% since 2007,” according to Econofact, a “decline (that) cannot be explained by demographic, economic, or policy changes.” The Institute for Family Studies wrote in 2022:

Birth rates in the United States are near record lows, but not for everyone. Indeed, under the surface of the fertility decline since 2007 is a little noticed fact: fertility has declined much more among nonreligious Americans than among the devout... In recent years, the fertility gap by religion has widened to unprecedented levels… Fertility among religious people did decline after the 2008 recession, but by 2017 to 2019, it was once again rising… Indeed, virtually 100% of the decline in fertility in the United States from 2012 to 2019 can be explained through a combination of a growing number of religious women converting to irreligion, and declining birth rates among the nonreligious… COVID has not reduced these differences… women who never attended church reported a fertility rate of around 1.3 children per woman vs. 2.1 for women who attended weekly.

When the crime of genocide was formally defined in 1948, included was the following prohibition: “Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.” The framers understood that if you want to destroy a people, all that is necessary is to shrink their birth rate. Isn’t it interesting that it’s an international war crime to implement measures to prevent the births of an enemy population, and yet this is precisely what so many wealthy nations are now doing to themselves? Hardship is not the primary predictor of infertility. It’s unbelief—which is why adversity, in an abundance of faith, yields a baby boom while affluence, in the absence of faith, yields a baby bust. 

The final thing that struck me in my recent reading of Exodus was something I’d never noticed before. We know that the Israelites dwelt in Egypt for 430 years (12:40). They entered by royal invitation as a family of seventy (Gen 46:27) but left as a people of 600,000 men—not counting women and children (12:37). At some point in that 430 years, a new Pharaoh arose who had no memory of Joseph and thus no allegiance to his offspring. But here’s what jumped out at me. “And [Pharaoh] said to his people, ‘Behold, the people of Israel are too many and too mighty for us.’” His worry was that if the people of Israel were to rise up against Egypt, Egypt would not be able to prevail. In fact, the text states that “the Egyptians [lived] in dread of the people of Israel.” In light of this framing—which places Israel in a position of strength and Egypt in a position of weakness—how in the world did Pharaoh manage to enslave the Israelites? This is admittedly speculative, but I imagine it was a slow and steady winnowing away of rights until the Israelites were left cowed and toothless—ignorant of the collecive power they actually possessed. And that, of course, has all sorts of lessons and warnings for today. In large measure, government tyranny requires only one thing to persist: the consent of the governed.