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The Unexpected results when no one’s expecting

Feb 7, 2013

By Dave Andrusko

NoExpectingWhen publishers are kind enough to send along an advance copy of a book, if it relates to our mission, I try my best to read them. Alas, because I have not had a chance to digest “What to Expect When No One’s Expecting: America’s Coming Demographic Disaster,” this post will be short and sweet.

I’ve profited from the work of author Jonathan V. Last in other related contexts.  He wrote a brilliant analysis of the book “Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men,” by journalist Mara Hvistendahl.

He later moved on from the worldwide “loss” of 160 million girls (the victims of cultural preferences for boys + sex-selective abortions) to the specific horrific policy of China’s one-child policy  in a piece that appears in the Weekly Standard. (Our take on this essay.)

I’ve been editor of NRL News since 1981 and long before I got here, NRL News was writing about the connection between hysterical worries over a “population bomb” and coercive abortion. Hvistendahl, unlike Last, is not one of us, but her book includes a sharp, indeed withering critique of “the 1960s population control enthusiasts,” which includes the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations.  She writes

“As I delved into this history for my book, the tragedy for me became this cold foresight: the fact that some prominent activists and scientists actually anticipated the side effects of widespread sex selection — that a massively imbalanced sex ratio at birth would result in rising instability, risks for those women who are born, and a social environment bordering on what one early proponent described as a ‘giant boy’s public school or a huge male prison’ — and yet dismissed those effects as necessary ills in the quest to solve humanity’s problems through technology. They knew, and still they plowed ahead.”

I glanced through the index of “What to Expect When No One’s Expecting,” and there are plenty of references to abortion as a contributing factor to the plunge in fertility. How could it not be?

While the number of abortions has stabilized the United States has lost over 55 million children to abortion. (Last writes “more than 49.5 million,” which does not include the number of abortions not counted for a variety of reasons—as even the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute concedes.)  Last explains

“(1) Post-Roe, the number of abortions significantly increased; (2) the plurality of abortions are performed on women who are 25 and older, the prime childbearing years; (3) Over 40 percent of women having abortions already have one or more children; (4) 20 percent of women having abortions are married; (5) Since Roe, more than 49.5 million babies have been aborted in America; and (6) Post-Roe, the fertility rate in America has been roughly inverse to the abortion rate, generally declining when abortion is on the rise, and rising when abortion is on the decline.”

This post has proven to be longer than I anticipated. We’ll take another look at “What to expect when no one’s expecting” in the not too distant future.