On April 4, the governor of Russia’s Novgorod region made an extraordinary statement at an event on boosting birthrates. “We’ve had these small victories, but that’s not enough,” Gleb Nitkin said while discussing a 30% drop in the abortion rate. “The [demographic] situation in our country is critical, and allowing elective abortions is too big a luxury. Our task is to try to prevent such cases—not through bans, but through high-quality work, care, and responsibility.”
Cynics might rightly point out that Russia’s desperate demographic need stems in part from their horrifying losses on the front lines of the war in Ukraine, which are approaching 1.2 million by some estimates. Nonetheless, Nitkin is correct: Abortion is a luxury that Western countries cannot afford if they want their civilizations to survive (a question for another day). Few conservatives will say this out loud for fear of sounding like Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, who signed Decree 770 in 1967, restricting abortion and contraception to boost the birthrate. It is nonetheless indisputably true.
At precisely the moment when we are worrying about the economic and societal implications of too few births, we are also presiding over historically high rates of abortion. Had numbers in 2023 been in line with 2015, there could have been roughly 15 per cent more births. That is not a rounding error; it’s a demographic fact with long-term impact.
Of course, she hastened to add, “None of this is to argue against abortion rights. The case for bodily autonomy—to the current limit of 24 weeks—is, to my mind, irrefutable.” A baby boy born prematurely at 21 weeks in Iowa in 2024 survived outside the womb and turned one year old last July.
In France, there are over a quarter of a million abortions annually. In the Netherlands, nearly 40,000. In Germany and Spain, over 100,000 each. In Europe overall, the average annual butcher’s bill stands at between 3 and 3.5 million abortions, which is more than the collective populations of eight EU countries. Only 5% of the world’s babies are projected to be born in Europe in 2026. The fertility crisis is, without doubt, a many-headed hydra—but it is also true that abortion is ending the lives of millions before they are even born.
Progressive politicians are hellbent on increasing these numbers. Despite technological advances pushing the age of viability earlier and earlier, Denmark and Norway recently raised their abortion limits. France and Luxembourg enshrined abortion as a constitutional right. The UK decriminalized abortion until birth last year; the vote in Westminster was 379 to 137. That, at least, seemed to shock some Britons awake; one MP called Labour “the party of baby killers.” Andrew Lilico of the Telegraphput it bluntly: “We’ve voted to kill our old, our sick, & our infants. We deserve everything that’s coming to us.”
