Welcome to Family Matters. On tap:
The Main Event: A new First Things essay underscores the cultural headwinds facing religious voters
It’s Me, Hi: Harris-Trump debate reaction and more
Et Cetera
The Main Event
This year’s slate of abortion-related referenda will be a chance for the pro-life movement to look itself in the mirror, and it’s increasingly obvious it won’t like what it sees. There will be eleven amendments across ten states: Arizona, Colorado, Florida (where it needs 60% of the vote), Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, Nebraska (which gets two amendments, one from each side,) New York, and South Dakota. Per the New York Times, there are just three more states with voter-initiated referenda that restrict abortion: Arkansas (where a clerical error left an amendment of this fall’s ballot), North Dakota, and Oklahoma.
So come mid-November, the dust will have at least started to settle. And the pro-life movement will have to grapple with the long and winding road ahead. There are few better places to start than an essay recently published by EPPC President Ryan T. Anderson at the journal First Things. In it, he assesses the pro-life movement’s success in getting Roe overturned, as well as the very real challenges that show how ill-prepared it was for that success. He writes:
We can’t give up on politics, but neither can we allow the pro-life cause to be a mere appendage of the Republican Party. Every human being is made in the image and likeness of God. Every human being deserves the law’s protection. That must be a bedrock principle of any decent civilization, and certainly of a party that claims to be pro-life. Pro-lifers need to insist that our political leaders show courage in advocating the truth, even if we can’t immediately enact all of the truth into law. We can be incrementalist, prudent, and pragmatic without undermining the ultimate goal of the pro-life cause.
His call for prudence highlights an at-times underplayed dynamic of the abortion debate. Most women who get abortions are in their 20s, relatively low-income, with patterns of less reliable contraception usage, and often already have one or more children. Most importantly, in this context, is that fact that 86 percent of women who get abortions are unmarried.
Setting a goal of more children conceived with the built-in (though of course never guaranteed) support structure of a married household will make it more likely that moms get the care they need and that more babies avoid the lethal violence of the abortion pill or clinic. As Anderson notes, that means a countercultural approach to sex, starting in the pews — “Before we try to persuade the secular world of a Christian sexual ethic, we might try persuading Christians.”
Because believers get abortions, too. Women with no religious affiliation are overrepresented among those who received an abortion. But according to the Guttmacher Institute’s analysis of the NSFG, 30 percent of women who got an abortion in the early 2010s identified as Protestant, and one-quarter as Catholic.
“Before we try to persuade the secular world of a Christian sexual ethic, we might try persuading Christians.”
To put it another way - according to my look at the 2017-2019 NSFG, 7 percent of Catholic women age 18-44, and 8 percent of Mainline and Evangelical Protestants report ever having had an abortion. Black women tend to have lower incomes and have correspondingly higher abortion rates. (We know abortion prevalence tends to be underreported, so treat those point estimates with a grain of salt.)
Lower rates of abortion could indicate more reliable use of contraceptions or more stable dating relationships. Some religious conservatives might want to believe it suggests a difference in sexual behavior prior to marriage, but the data doesn’t fully bear that out. Women in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and Hispanic Catholics have traditionally tended to get married at younger ages, helping boost their outlier status. But two-thirds of Evangelical married women, and four-fifths of married Mainline Protestants, report having had more than one sexual partner throughout their lifetime. (I’m only showing women here, but the overall numbers are broadly similar though slightly lower for men.)
Again, these estimates are only women who are currently married to a man; including unmarried or divorced women might lead to even higher estimates. And it’s not the case that controlling for religious practice, rather than simple self-identification, changes those numbers considerably.
Even among the most dedicated religious attendees, most had sex with someone other than their spouse or future spouse prior to marriage. Just over one-third of women who attend church, mosque, or synagogue weekly had sex with the first time with their husband or husband-to-be. (One caveat is that this is asking about current religious practice — someone who attended church more or less often prior to marriage would skew this data one way or the other.)
A full two-thirds of regular church attendees had sex with someone other than their future spouse. This gap between the religious ideal and the culturally predominant practice helps explain how tinny some religious rhetoric around abortion can sound to the mainstream modern ear.
Obviously, sex does not always lead to pregnancy (nor, with apologies to Mean Girls’ Coach Carr, to death.) But sex that leads to an unintended pregnancy outside of marriage asks more — much more — from a potential mom-to-be than one that occurs when a married couple wasn’t quite expecting it. And America has shifted towards patterns of human capital and family formation that delay marriage and make sex prior to marriage more likely, and thus unintended pregnancies harder for women in their 20s.
In 1980, the median age at first marriage for women was 22; it’s now 28.4 (for men, the increase over that time was from 24.7 years old to 30.2.) A world in which more individuals are spending a greater share of their sexual and reproductive prime unmarried, and fewer end up tying the knot overall, will inevitably result in more unplanned pregnancies.
Long-lasting contraception can help ameliorate this dynamic. But contraception and abortion can often work as compliments, not substitutes. A famous 1996 QJE paper by George Akerlof, Michael Katz, and Janet Yellen indicated that the advent of reliable birth control led to an increase, rather than decrease, in both out-of-wedlock births and the prevalence of abortion because of how it shifted cultural scripts around the man’s responsibility to his partner.
More recently, access to birth control has, arguably, never been greater, with insurance companies mandated to provide birth control at no cost and federal dollars subsidizing contraceptives for low-income women. Yet that hasn’t stopped abortion rates from rising as of late. The Guttmacher Institute estimates abortions are now up 17 percent relative to where they were in 2017, their most recent post-Roe low.
So building a sexual ethic that can respond to these realities is the challenge facing the pro-life movement in the 21st century. It is entirely possible — perhaps likely — that after this election cycle, it will be a minority of states, predominantly in the South, that have laws protecting the unborn on the books. Legal minds and lawmakers will doubtless devise new ways of trying to clamp down on the supply within the confines of their new state laws.
To build a truly pro-life society will mean building a pro-marriage and pro-family society in which fewer women are left to face the burdens of parenthood, and the often heartbreaking choice to seek an abortion, alone. This first-person essay, published by Planned Parenthood, describes a familiar dynamic:
My partner thought I was joking at first when I told him I was pregnant, but when he quickly realized I wasn’t, his face and energy made it very clear that he was absolutely not ready to be a father. In that moment, my heart broke in a way I cannot describe. I still can’t find a way to put that feeling into words…My partner told me that ultimately it was my choice what to do and he would support me either way. I wish I could say that comforted me, but it didn’t. The only thing that would have comforted me was hearing that my partner wanted to continue the pregnancy, too.
Rebuilding a cultural infrastructure that encourages men to take responsibility in those situations, and an economy and society that makes it more possible (and desirable) for young adults to marry earlier in life, should have the goal of making those kind of heartbreaking stories less common. For a reeling pro-life movement facing difficult political headwinds, that might be the best place to start.
It’s Me, Hi
My instant reaction to this week’s presidential debate was part of a forum hosted by Newsweek:
[Vice President Kamala Harris] was content to let former President Donald Trump indulge some of his worst tendencies, from defending his actions on Jan. 6, citing dubious online memes, and relitigating the 2020 election. As a result, Trump was the main character, but couldn't effectively use the spotlight to give undecided voters new reason to give him another chance.
Elsewhere: Tim Carney in his Washington Examiner essay entitled “What’s Not to Love About IVF?” cites my recent COMPACT piece…Alice Ollstein and Megan Messerly quote me and other pro-lifers who oppose former President’s universal IVF plan for Politico.
Et Cetera
New Podcast Alert! Friend of the newsletter Abby McCloskey is launching a new podcast, Beyond Talking Points, that promises listeners a chance to experience the type of policy briefing a Presidential candidate might receive. First epsiode, on immigration, is now live:
Events: “Helping Working Families Thrive : Options for the Child Tax Credit in 2025” (Hosted by the Niskanen Center in Washington, D.C., Oct. 2)
Articles: Trump said fixing child care would not be very expensive. Here are price tags for other proposals (Moriah Balingit, AP)…Why the conservative push to increase the birth rate looks doomed (Emily Peck, Axios)…More Cash for Kids Is Popular. It Might Not Be Wise. (Rachel Wolfe, Wall Street Journal)…Australia plans social media minimum age (Michael Miller, Washington Post)…Congressional GOP Reacts to Trump’s ‘Make IVF Free’ Proposal (Charles Hilu and Michael Warren, The Dispatch)…Battleground House Republicans try to shake IVF attacks (Madison Fernandez, Politico)…Schumer cornering GOP on Trump IVF plan (Stephen Neukam, Axios)…Both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have families knit together by divorce (Megan Messerly, Politico)
Takes: The Nanny State Is Not the Answer to Parents’ Challenges (Naomi Schaefer Riley and Brad Wilcox, National Review)…JD Vance isn’t wrong about the value of family caregivers (Elliot Haspel, Washington Post)…The World Isn’t Ready for What Comes After I.V.F. (Ari Schulman, New York Times)…Sen. Marco Rubio responds to the Surgeon General’s advisory on parental stress…Child Care Policy Shouldn't Forget Stay-at-Home Parents (Ivana Greco, Newsweek)…Elon Musk's Creepy Politics of Birthing (Alan Elrod, The Bulwark)
Roundup: New Hampshire: First Dept. of Labor-approved child care apprenticeship program launched…States are turning to employers to boost child care benefits (Darreonna Davis, The 19th)…Rep. Katherine Clark (D-Mass.) and Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Wisc.) have reintroduced their CCAMPIS reauthorization to boost child care funding for college campuses
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Love the Celine Dion allusion in the title! Celine Dion is actually a distant cousin of mine (totally serious, a relative did the genealogy and discovered that).