Even as the Tory government stumbles resignedly towards what will probably be a cataclysmic defeat in the next election – some opinion polls suggest they will lose more than 250 seats – reformers on the political right are setting out ideas to solve the country’s big problems; low birth rates, low productivity and low economic growth. We need, they say, to reduce taxes, build more houses and more infrastructure, clear away obstacles to businesses working effectively and so on.
Discussions of the UK’s declining total fertility rate (TFR) – now at 1.61 births per woman, down from a peak of almost 3 per woman in 1964 – tend to focus on the increasing economic obstacles to family formation, such as over-inflated property prices and high childcare costs. And these financial trends are definitely part of the puzzle.
Our TFR was increasing steadily for most of the first decade of this century after reaching a then-record low of 1.63 in 2001, but hit a plateau at about the same time as the 2008-9 crisis and then began to fall again, quite steeply, falling as low as 1.56 in 2020. It is true also that much research into “desired fertility” – the number of children which women say they would ideally want – finds that it is well above the actual fertility rate, suggesting that many families are having fewer children than they want because they feel they cannot afford them.
However, there is another factor in play: the 1967 Abortion Act. In 2021, the last year for which statistics are available, there were 214,256 abortions in England and Wales, and only 625,008 live births. This equates to one abortion for every three births. Or to put it another way, about a quarter of all pregnancies end in abortion. The rate of abortion in England and Wales has skyrocketed since 2016; from about 16 per 1000 women of childbearing age to 18.5 per 1000 women. Add in a further 13,758 in Scotland and you start to get a scale of the loss of life. Every year we lose well over 220,000 Britons to abortion.
Now, the argument against abortion does not stand or fall on whether the individuals whose lives are lost would have made great contributions to society. All the same, when we think about the fate of nations, and the health of our civilisation, we do have to consider whether our struggles might be related to this extraordinary rejection of so many children. Mass abortion, permitted and encouraged by legal frameworks, is both a sign of civilisational decline, and a cause. A sign, because it symbolises our loss of faith in Christianity, our decaying social fabric and our lack of confidence in the future; and a cause, because it hugely reduces the number of people available – the inventors, the discoverers, the innovators, the creators – and poisons healthy relations between men and women, without which a sustainable and healthy civilisation is impossible.
Unsurprisingly, many people are outraged by the mere suggestion that a less permissive abortion regime might be part of solving certain problems that we face. When I mooted this on Twitter, one prominent socialist commentator cited Malta, which has a disastrously low birth rate even though abortion remains almost entirely illegal. He also mentioned Communist Romania, which criminalised abortion briefly in the 1960s, but only succeeded in raising its birth rate a small amount. Another critic noted that the UK birth rate was already in decline before the Abortion Act came into force (1969 was the first full year in which the Act was in effect).
These objections are not entirely wrong but they are incomplete. For example, while it is true that the UK TFR fell sharply between 1964 and 1968 – from 2.93 to 2.60, presumably because of access to the Pill – that decline accelerated during the 1970s, from 2.44 in 1970 to 1.69 in 1977, at the same time as the abortion rate more than doubled in a few years (from around 5 per 1000 women to 11 per 1000). As regards the Maltese and Romanian situations, they show that restrictive abortion laws can co-exist with low birth rates in certain countries under certain conditions. They show that given the many and varied downward pressures on birth rates in the modern world, abortion restrictions are not a magic bullet. What they don’t do is refute the idea that abortion restrictions could help to push birth rates upwards, in conjunction with other pro-natalist policies, like reducing housing and childcare costs, or raising child benefit.
The truth is that no-one really knows whether Western countries in the contemporary world might be able to increase overall birth rates by moving from liberal abortion regimes to restrictive ones, alongside other pro-parenthood measures, because almost nowhere has actually done so. There are no appropriate test cases to be found, although we might soon have some relevant data from the USA, where several states have banned or heavily restricted abortion since the overturning of Roe v Wade last summer. Public policy is complicated, for sure. But it doesn’t seem wildly irrational to theorise that making it harder to stop people from being born might just increase the number of people being born.
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