Demography is destiny, goes the saying. Of course, nothing is truly set. However, the populations of many nations are shrinking. South Korea has the world’s lowest fertility rate, 0.72 per person. Rates are well below replacement throughout Asia and Europe. Women are having fewer children even in the Middle East, with fertility rates in several countries also below replacement.
There is no reason to expect childbearing to significantly rebound, so the populations of many major nations, including China, Japan, Russia, and Germany, are expected to shrink rapidly and dramatically. Even the United States is below the replacement rate, at 1.79. Only immigration has kept America’s population growing. Economic growth, cultural practice, military strength, and international relations around the world will be affected.
Demography also has political impacts within nations. Those who are religious, socially conservative, and family-oriented tend to have more kids. Which may offer a boost to the right. Children do not necessarily grow up to share their parents’ beliefs. During the 1960s an entire generation seemed to be affected by the “counterculture.” In 1972 Sen. George McGovern, with a strong youthful support base, was tagged as the candidate of “acid, abortion, and amnesty.”
Today lefty parents are asking what they are doing wrong as their kids, most often sons, back Donald Trump. An appalled New York Times reported: “It is easy for Alex Behr to gush about her son, Eli, whom she describes as a generous and thoughtful college junior who had a serious skateboarding phase. It is much harder for her to talk about his politics. Ms. Behr, 59, is a Democrat in Portland, Ore., who voted enthusiastically for Vice President Kamala Harris in the November election. She and her ex-husband were appalled that Eli, 20, decided to cast his first vote in a presidential election this fall for Donald J. Trump.”
Nevertheless, one would expect Donald Trump and the GOP to have a significant demographic advantage. True, older voters tend to vote Republican, and they have higher mortality rates. However, in November, Trump won several demographic categories and made gains in almost all of them. More important, Republicans are more likely to have kids, who are more likely to follow than abandon their parents. According to the Atlantic’s Kristen V. Brown:
Donald Trump’s first term saw a great deal of political polarization. Right- and left-leaning Americans disagreed about environmental regulation and immigration. They disagreed about vaccines and reproductive rights. And they disagreed about whether or not to have children: As Republicans started having more babies under Trump, the birth rate among Democrats fell dramatically.
A few years ago, Gordon Dahl, an economist at UC San Diego, set out to measure how Trump’s 2016 victory might have affected conception rates in the years following. And he and his colleagues found a clear effect: Starting after Trump’s election, through the end of 2018, 38,000 fewer babies than would otherwise be expected were conceived in Democratic counties. By contrast, 7,000 more than expected were conceived in Republican counties in that same period. (The study, published in 2022, was conducted before data on the rest of Trump’s term were available.)
Over the past three decades, Republicans have generally given birth to more kids than Democrats have. But during those first years of the first Trump administration, the partisan birth gap widened by 17 percent.
This obviously doesn’t account for Trump’s win last November, since those born during his first term were not yet old enough to vote. (Of course, some MAGA voters might suspect that babies with Democratic parents, age would pose no problem for them voting!) However, a relative GOP baby boom might strengthen Republicans in the years ahead. And Trump’s latest term could further reinforce this trend. Explained Brown: “According to experts I spoke with, as the ideological distance between Democrats and Republicans has grown, so has the influence of politics on fertility. In Trump’s second term, America may be staring down another Democratic baby bust.”
Why, one wonders? Democrats appear to be choosing to not have children. At first glance, it isn’t obvious why President Donald Trump would inhibit Democratic fertility. He might pose a fearsome specter to progressives, but he has not threatened to, King Herod-like, kill the young of those who vote Democratic. If anything, Vice President JD Vance has become a symbol of young families in public life. (RELATED: Planned Parenthood Mobile Clinic Provides Abortions and Vasectomies at DNC)
Lefty voters might fear for the future, but do they imagine a world so terrible that they should not bring children into it? 2020 was an awful year, but because of COVID and the resulting lockdown, not the Trump presidency. Nor did President Joe Biden produce a world more welcoming to the young. His term featured new seemingly endless wars, wild spending, high inflation, and rampant wokism. Given the number of Democrats, including members of minority communities, who defected to the GOP, it looked like Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris frightened more people than did Trump.
However, at least one Democrat has rushed into the breach to provide answers. For her, the specter was contraception, or more accurately, the alleged dire threat posed by Trumpism to access to birth control and abortion. Seriously. (RELATED: Deny Them Abortion and It Doesn’t Matter Who the Dems Nominate)
State representatives are a dime a dozen. It’s an important position in a federal position, but most states have scores of them. Toss in the D.C. city council and governments for various territories, commonwealths, and such, there are 7,575 state legislative positions in America. One of these officeholders, 36-year-old Michigander Laurie Pohutsky, recently decided to make sure that she could never have children.
The Telegraph reported: “Dressed in a purple parka jacket and tortoiseshell glasses, the chairman of Michigan Women’s Progressive Caucus announced that she had booked an irreversible medical procedure in the aftermath of the Republican’s election victory.”
So terrified was she of a world in which Donald Trump was president, she chose to be sterilized. As she announced to a supportive crowd earlier this month: “Just under two weeks ago, I underwent surgery to ensure that I would never have to navigate a pregnancy in Donald Trump’s America.” Lest you doubt her commitment, she added: “If you know people who are questioning how serious this is, I’m going to repeat myself: a sitting government official opted for voluntary sterilization because she was uncertain she would be able to access contraception in the future.”
She hoped her statement would encourage others to follow her “either because of Donald Trump or otherwise.” (RELATED: Leftists Exercising Their Right to Choose … Extinction)
Normally one would expect such a decision to be taken privately, without public announcement, press conference, and contemporaneous commentary. However, Pohutsky is an abortion activist and evidently doesn’t like Trump. Her husband heads the state ACLU, an organization that once stood for civil liberties but has since devolved into just another progressive interest group. She said she and her husband decided that they were too busy for kids and “I feared that I would not have access to contraception long term.” Moreover, “I had concerns that I would not be able to access pregnancy-related healthcare if I did become pregnant.” By “pregnancy-related healthcare” she presumably meant killing the baby. (RELATED: Abortions Went Up After Dobbs)
Obviously, she and her husband are free to choose their future together. However, politicizing a decision for sterilization provided her with a great opportunity to win fawning attention from fellow lefties. Moreover, one senses that Pohutsky might have a general problem with TMI. The Telegraph noted that she is “an openly bisexual woman.” Who knows what else she routinely shares with those around her? I’ve never felt any great need to know the details of my political representatives’ sex practices, but she apparently has a different view.
In any case, her reasoning makes little sense. Donald Trump hasn’t proposed to halt contraceptive sales. Nor has he campaigned for a national law or constitutional amendment to outlaw abortion. The first would fail a filibuster in the Senate. The second would never get close to the necessary two-thirds in both houses of Congress. Even in her worst case, since neither would happen without an extraordinarily difficult and lengthy political battle, she would have plenty of time and could have waited. If the horror that she feared actually proceeded politically she could have chosen sterilization then. She’s a heroine to no one.
Except, perhaps, to Republicans. People like Pohutsky are ceding the demographic race to the GOP, intensifying already politically negative trends for the Democrats. One suspects the Republicans, and especially members of MAGA nation, are celebrating progressives who don’t want to have kids in such a world. Because of such attitudes, the demographic future might be increasingly won by Trump’s foot soldiers.
READ MORE from Doug Bandow:
The Rule of Law Serves the American People, Especially Conservatives
Demonizing Heroic Private Firefighters
South Korea’s President Commits Self-Immolation
A former special assistant to President Ronald Reagan, Doug Bandow is the author of several books, including The Politics of Plunder: Misgovernment in Washington, and co-author of Beyond Good Intentions: A Biblical View of Politics.