Like contraception, abortion boomed. In 2020, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated there were 198 abortions for every 1,000 live births in the United States. At the high-water point in 1984, there were 364 abortions for every 1,000 live births, and that number never dropped below 300 for 20 years from 1976 to 1996. There were over 44,500,000 abortions between 1973 and 2015, and many more since then. And dismal as they are, these statistics increasingly underestimate the number of abortions.

The latest abysmally low birth rates from North America, Europe, and Asia continue to alarm business leaders and policy makers, as well they should. In Europe, only France is within spitting distance of replacement level fertility. Italy’s has tanked so low as to be the subject of a highly publicized meeting between its Prime Minister and the Pope a couple months ago. Every part of North America, even Mexico, is below replacement. Asia is just as dismal or worse, with a huge majority, including all of our top trading partners — except the Philippines and (barely) India and (maybe) Vietnam — lower than replacement. Some have plummeted close to one baby per woman. When even the BBC touts headlines like “’Jaw Dropping’ Crash in Babies Being Born,” and the Economist devotes an entire issue to “The Baby-Bust Economy” just last month, well, we have a problem.

Yet for decades, many of these same hand-wringing elites and policy wonks have been pushing contraception and abortion with the intensity of engineers shoveling coal into speeding trains. And not just to help married folk space, delay, or limit childbearing. No, they want every adult to be able to have sex with as many people as they want, as often as they wish, regardless of marital status, without having any babies they don’t choose.

They want Every Adult to be able to have sex with as many people as they want, as often as they wish.

Since at least the 1960s, separating sex from procreation has been almost an obsession. In the United States, our largest political party is radically committed to this. In recent years, climate activists, including some celebrities, have even talked as if having babies is grossly irresponsible. We have “BirthStrikers,” and “anti-natalists” who wish they’d never been born. We even have the “Voluntary Human Extinction Movement,” the subject of a recent article in the Atlantic they listed as a “must read.”

And now? The chickens have come home to roost.

Let’s look at how contraception use exploded in the 1960s, naturally leading to abortion-on-demand — these two together being the fraternal twins most responsible for our deepening Demographic Winter. We will focus on the United States, starting with contraception.

Not even counting voluntary sterilization, contraception has been around for a long time. As a PBS historical piece covered, condoms, sponges, cervical caps, diaphragms, douches, and even intrauterine devices all existed at some point in the 1800s. But they weren’t reliable, were often “messy and awkward to use,” embarrassing to obtain, and women didn’t like the fact that it was men who controlled condoms. Then along came “The Pill” in 1960. As that PBS documentary put it, “The Pill … was female-controlled, simple to use, highly effective, and … separated reproduction and contraception from the sexual act. The Pill could be taken anytime, anywhere, and without anyone else knowing.”

The Pill & the Sexual Revolution

Most analysts of the 1960s sexual revolution have identified the widespread availability of “The Pill” as a key element and cause of this movement.

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