As research on state abortion bans emerges, the national debate deflects from abortion’s moral permissibility and toward its raw outcomes. It’s a move to which the states’ rights framework lends itself.
Birth rate data from 2023 are the principal lens through which to track changes since the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022. The total fertility rate in the U.S. continued its decrease of 2% per year, to 1.6 births per woman in 2023, while the total number of live births hit a 40-year low of 3.6 million. At the same time, the New York Times reports “a 2.8 percent increase in births relative to what would have been expected without a ban.” Births among Hispanic, black, unmarried, or non-college-educated women all rose over one percentage point more than their white, married, or college-educated counterparts.
The Times takes on a predictably dour tone in reporting a births increase. From the pro-life and pro-abortion perspectives, then, the same feeling of disappointment emanates, despite the two making the same observation: Abortion bans are still resulting in considerable access for some women, despite working to prevent others. The pro-lifer finds encouragement in the proven deterrent of distance but knows that means next to nothing for broader cultural change. The abortion advocate is frustrated by the tangible successes of prevented abortions and realizes that the only consistent workaround is money. Both have to interpret the bans primarily with reference to access.
The difference, though, is that the pro-abortion side is happy to do so. Abortion groups want martyrs — it is an explicit component of their post-Roe playbook. If all conversation revolves around ban outcomes and how they’ve affected women, that is a win. Pro-abortion strategists want to see big success from restrictions — it keeps the debate on their terms. What results is that abortion advocacy groups rely not only on twisted representations of how the laws work, through mothers’ deaths, but on abortion considerations formed around nuance, or state-level focus. The central concern of the Times article is one example: “What’s happened is an increase in inequality of access: Access is increasing for some people and not for others.”
RFK JR. INSIDER HIRED AS WHITE HOUSE SPECIAL ADVISER
It used to be that society argued abortion on the clear basis of whether it kills a child. Former President Ronald Reagan made his stance simple: “abortion takes the life of a living human being.” Since then, the pro-life vantage has made concession after concession, to the point that so straightforward an assessment as Reagan’s hardly applies. The more the pro-life side declines to assert the truth of the matter, the more fodder there is for dishonest evaluation of the issue. The public picks up these ways of thinking.
As politically tactful as an incremental abortion policy may be, the unfortunate reality is that it sustains a constant tug toward the “equality of access” arguments that the Left never ceases to pursue. The strict states’ rights model for abortion law keeps the debate up in the air, while a federal ban brings it down to moral content, something more noble. Perhaps the ambiguity is worth it for a time; it seems that we have decided it is. But the pro-life movement’s plans for future success do not deter the gains that the pro-abortion side aims to make by the same proposition.