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.
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