On this week’s second edition of The Editors, Rich and Michael discuss the disappointing statistics on abortion. Michael agrees that the numbers are bad, but says that the problem actually has deeper roots.
“I can now no longer think of this question separately from the larger pattern demographically of people not . . . forming families anymore,” Michael said.
“I know my friend Tim Carney over at American Enterprise Institute has a book coming out early next year called Family Unfriendly about how our culture makes it harder to raise children than it ought to be, and kind of discourages parents from even conceiving them.”
This isn’t just an American problem, he points out, saying, “I saw a report yesterday that South Korea’s birthrate plunged another 12 percent . . . to less than 0.7 children per woman over a lifetime in just the last quarter. So this is a nosedive that we all have to figure out how to get out of to make our culture more family-friendly and more willing to tolerate the existence of children.”
“I don’t think the abortion question can be isolated from that.”