Spare Change

Re: Populate

Posted by Bryan

From a recent Wall Street Journal Best of the Web:

From an article on South Dakota's draconian new abortion law in the English-language edition of Der Spiegel:

Thelma Underberg, director of the regional pro-choice movement, has been fighting to uphold abortion rights for more than 40 years. For Underberg, professional and economic equal opportunity and a woman's right to choose are inextricably linked. When the Supreme Court passed Roe vs. Wade in 1973, enabling women to obtain abortions legally anywhere in America, Underberg celebrated. "We thought we had won," she says.

But now, sitting in her windowless office, she says she doesn't understand the world anymore. The 74-year-old has three children, four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren, and she is active in her church. Yet while she outwardly resembles her opponents in the pro-life camp, she refuses to speak with them. "You might as well be talking to a wall," she says.

Her three children produced only four grandchildren, or 1.33 grandchildren per child, well below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman. We wouldn't be surprised to learn that the head of the local antiabortion organization has considerably more fertile offspring.

This is an aspect of abortion that I'd not thought about before. I'd be curious to know the repopulation rate of abortion advocates versus that of anti-abortion advocates. This lady herself had three children, but has advanced an anti-child idealogy in her home that may have impacted the reproductive choices of her own offspring (I'm not suggesting that they actually had abortions - I haven't asked - but perhaps they were less inclined to pursue parenthood).

I don't have anything other than an anecdotal comparison. Kelli's parents...themselves in their mid-60s, have three children as well. Raised in a pro-life home, those three children have produced 7 grandchildren (with 2 more from a prior marriage of one child's spouse).

There's a biblical proverb that says if you raise up your child in the way they should go, when they grow old they will not depart from it. That passage has been mis-used a lot (most often as a somewhat-empty encouragement for prodigals, but that's another blog entry). Here though, is a simple affirmation that what you teach your children has a residual, generational effect. Consider the decisions that you make not only for the impact each will have on your children, but on how that impact upon your children will impact their children that they will (or will not, in this case) have.