In a curious turn, the left-leaning mainstream media has found a unique way of appealing to conservatives’ concern for the institution of the family in order to try to win their support for expanded abortion access.
The argument is articulated in a Politico piece titled “The End of Roe Is Having a Chilling Effect on Pregnancy.”
In the subtitle, the article proclaims: “New polling shows that a third of young women say they or someone they know has decided not to get pregnant because of concerns about maternal health care after Dobbs.”
In the article, Lauren Leader, co-founder and CEO of the nonprofit All in Together, argues that even in states where abortion is still legal, young women are deciding against having children because of the political changes that the post-Roe age has ushered in.
Leader cites polling conducted by her pro-abortion group (which, per its website, has a mission of “Encouraging, equipping, educating, and empowering voting-age women to participate fully in America’s civic and political life”), which claims that that 34 percent of women aged 18-39 said they or someone they know personally has “decided not to get pregnant due to concerns about managing pregnancy-related medical emergencies.”
Leader contends:
For young people, the maternal healthcare crisis is deeply personal. More than a third of young people and 22 percent of young women told us they have personally dealt with or know someone who has “faced constraints when trying to manage a pregnancy-related emergency.” And 23 percent of 18- to 39-year-old women say they have themselves or know someone else who has been unable to obtain an abortion in their state — a number almost three times higher than respondents in other age groups.
Perhaps most surprisingly however, these results are similar regardless of whether the respondents are living in states with abortion bans or states without restrictions on abortion access. The consistency between red and blue states suggests that the statistics on maternal mortality and the stories and struggles of women navigating the new normal on abortion access have penetrated the psyche of young people everywhere. The Dobbs decision, it seems, has fundamentally altered how people feel about having families and the calculus for getting pregnant.
Leader also cites Planned Parenthood CEO Alexis McGill Johnson, who said that the stories of women dying or having near-death experiences due to restrictions on abortion have made young women afraid of taking the plunge into pregnancy and parenthood.
“Abortion bans make pregnancy less safe,” said McGill Johnson. “Women are acutely aware of the consequence of restricting access to reproductive health care in their own lives.”
Conservatives have long noted that the declining birth rate in the Western world — including the United States — is a problem in the long term. Picking up on what has traditionally been a right-wing talking point, Leader goes on to assert that the problem is being exacerbated by recent restrictions on abortion. She cites numbers from Pew indicating that U.S. birth rates have been falling since the early 2000s, plummeted during Covid, picked up again after Covid, and then sank again following the repeal of Roe.
The All in Together CEO then argues that if the birth rate decline continues, “the reluctance of young women to have children now will have vast and long-term consequences for the American economy and fabric of the nation. Falling birth rates can affect everything from tax revenue to labor force participation, schools, housing, elder care and more.”
Leader then emphatically declares:
But beyond the macro-economic ramifications, there is also a human and emotional toll for people who may want children but are too afraid to have them. The hallmark of a flourishing society is one where people can fulfill their hopes and dreams, and for many, those dreams include raising a family. But for a generation of Americans, that dream now appears frustrated. Gen Y and Z Americans report higher rates of mental health challenges and stress than other generations. The Dobbs decision has clearly contributed to that anxiety.
Ultimately, the article is a heavy exercise in irony that shows how desperate the Left is to preserve abortion, going so far as to adopt some conservative rhetoric about declining birth rates and being pro-family in order to make their case.
But it all falls apart upon close inspection. Leader really want us to believe that young women’s hopes of having children are being frustrated … by not allowing them to kill their children? She wants to convince us that the solution to the declining birth rate is … to stop more babies from being born?
Leader says young women are afraid of giving birth because they no longer have the option of getting an abortion. Even if that statement is true, it may be for the best that those women aren’t getting pregnant — because, apparently, there was a high likelihood they were just going to abort their preborn children anyway.
Leftists such as Leader may think they’re being clever, but conservative Americans won’t succumb to the “night is day, day is night” gaslighting. The pro-abortion crowd can shake their fists all they want — the movement to protect life isn’t going anywhere.
