The harsh reality. . .

Although it may seem that the decline in the birth rate, the decline among those who desire to be marriage, and the increasing invisibility of the family in America are all the result of choices not to have children, not to be married, and not to live in a family.  That would be hard enough to accept but it is easier than the truth.  The truth is that we can account for nearly all the decline in the birth rate by simply looking at the rate of abortion.  These children were not those who never lived at all but those whose lives were cut short in the womb by procedure or pill.  Their lives were ended on purpose.  Whether the decision was an individual one or both parents thought it through, they were alive but their lives were ended.

More than one out of every five pregnancies were ended on purpose in America.  Abortion is not what we think it is.  It is not something rare or about rape or incest or any other tragedy.  It is a choice to end the life begun.  While it is surely true that not all the pregnancies ended in abortion would have safely delivered a child, most of them would and it would have been a number remarkably close to the difference between population decline and a population sustained or even slightly growing.  That is the remarkable and stark fact of what our decision to make it respectable and even a right to kill the child in the womb.  While most of the time it seems like something as simple as taking a pill, the ease of obtaining and taking that pill mask its harder and harsher reality.  It make it easier to choose and to accept of those who have chosen but it cannot hide the dark and terrible reality of what abortion in American has come to be.

While I wish it was as simple as tinkering with a law, it is not nor has it ever been.  We must stop seeing the child conceived as a potential reality and learn again to call the child a child -- not a clump of cells or even a fetus but a child.  Abortion is invasive and results in a death.  We need as a population together to remember this and learn to say it and admit it out loud.  Where abortions were once back alley procedures, the whole idea of a child living within the womb has become the same kind of back alley idea.  It is, in the minds of the moderns, something held by religious extremists or evil misogynists or uneducated hicks or bigoted demons.  Until we see the child in the womb as a child, a gift of God, the shape of our ordinary lives, and our future, we will continue to live the lie that abortion is about a woman's body more than the child's.

The battle moved from the courtroom and into the legislative chambers of America but it needs to continue moving into the hearts and minds of the whole population.  It is a fool's errand to change a law thinking it will change minds.  We must be more diligent in the changing of the American mind about this child in the womb, the ordinary shape of society as husband and wife, and this marriage bringing forth children and becoming a family.  We need to change the image of America away from the solitary individual pursuing individual choices about desire, gender, and life and restore the family to the first thought and impression of what life looks like in America.  Whether in school or Sunday school, we need to tell our children what normal means and it means husband and wife and children.  There will always be exceptions but the false narrative of diversity in which the norm has become the oddity needs to come to an end.  Remember this happens year after year and not just once -- one out of ever five pregnancies ends in the death of a child EVERY YEAR.

At one point I feared that we were in a spiral of decline simply because people were not choosing to find a spouse, to marry, and to have children.  I have learned that this is the myth and the reality is that the children were there but were discarded as if they were nothing at all.  This is the holy cause that lies before us.