We Could Be Doing Something About Our Birth Rate Problem. But We Aren’t.
When faced with a crisis, the ancient Romans sometimes turned to plagiarism.
Take, for instance, the Second Punic War: Hannibal had managed to cross the Alps with his famous elephants and had promptly descended into the neighborhood of Cannae, where he slaughtered some tens of thousands of Roman men in one of the most brilliantly orchestrated battles in history. There was, practically speaking, nothing much stopping him from approaching Rome.
Since offering sacrifices to their own pantheon wasn’t quite doing the trick, the Romans (per Livy) turned to a little known goddess from somewhere else named Cybele. As one might imagine, her specialty was war.
From a Roman perspective, the tactic worked: In 202, Scipio managed to decisively defeat Hannibal, and a little more than 50 years later, the Romans salted the Carthaginian earth. Cybele might have disappeared quietly, known only by Livy’s reference to her. But she didn’t. (READ MORE: Catholics Blast Notre Dame’s Promotion of Abortion Activist)
Cybele, you see, was good at something else the Romans were struggling with at the time: fertility.
At the time the Blessed Virgin was raising the Christ Child, Caesar Augustus was using the law to try and persuade Roman women to have more than three children — given that skeletons of elite women in Herculaneum suggest they were having less than two children on average, those measures were easily justified. On the religious and propagandistic front, Cybele remained prominent.
That seems ironic for an empire whose doctors happily employed more than two hundred abortifacients to rid Romans of their unwanted children. While Romans apparently recognized that children are a critical component of preserving a civilization, individuals weren’t all that interested in having children themselves. Unsurprisingly, their city and their empire eventually collapsed.
I’m not the first person to tell this story — plenty of writers and pro-life thinkers have noted that ancient Rome’s population problem is very similar to our own. But despite knowing how that story ended, our birth rate remains a problem we haven’t solved.
Last month, the Congressional Budget Office adjusted the population prediction it had made just last year. Taking into account lower immigration levels (until 2029) and the way birth rates have continued to plummet, it estimated that its original prediction for peak population was too high by eight million people. At this point, it looks like the death rate in the U.S. will overtake its birth rate in 2030 and that we’ll start seeing population decline sometime in the mid-2050s.
The new predictions are, as Daniel Di Martino from the Manhattan Institute said, both the most “pessimistic and realistic of any government agency.” They may still be too high. They assume that our country’s plummeting fertility rates will stabilize at 1.5 births per woman sometime around 2036, and stay constant ever after.
It would be inaccurate to suggest that we’re walking into this crisis unknowingly and without trying to avert it. Public figures like Elon Musk have frequently commented on it. Many on the Right (like Charlie Kirk) have attempted to inspire people to live the kinds of lives that would avert it.
Inspiration is great, but ultimately, reversing population decline is going to require more than just inspiration. We can debate cultural and economic factors endlessly, but the fact is our government’s public policy directly ends hundreds of thousands of lives every year, and that’s going to require some legal changes — changes the Trump administration seems loath to make. (READ MORE: New York State Serves Up Insanity on Egg Freezing)
Earlier this month, some Senate members attended a closed-door briefing with FDA Commissioner Marty Makary. One of the topics of conversation? The abortion pill, mifepristone.
Apparently, the briefing didn’t go super well. The FDA is in the process of doing a safety review of mifepristone, but according to Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), Makary couldn’t give a timeline on that review. He didn’t explain what it would involve. He didn’t even say whether it was underway.
When Politico reached out to the FDA for comment, they were referred to a previous statement.
It should be noted that the safety review is rather important. Last year, the Ethics and Public Policy Center used insurance claims to determine that “the rate of life-threatening complications due to mifepristone is at least 22 times higher than what the FDA … suggest[s].” The analysis found that more than one in 10 women who received chemical abortions experienced potentially life-threatening events, including “emergency room visits, hemorrhage, sepsis, infection, and/or follow-up surgeries” within 45 days of taking the pill. Despite the danger, mifepristone is responsible for well over half the abortions taking place in the United States.
There are, from a moral perspective, two paramount issues with the abortion pill. The most important is that it is designed to take the life of an unborn child; the second is that it frequently inflicts harm on that child’s mother. Tragically, neither of those moral issues has been sufficient to galvanize the government into action.
Perhaps this lesser issue will.
Mifepristone is partly responsible for the coming population crisis — both because the drug actually kills babies and because its ease of access perpetuates a culture of death. If we want to avert it and preserve our civilization (something Secretary of State Marco Rubio admirably defended in Munich this past weekend), we’re going to need to ban the pill.
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