David J. Ayers

Abortion and Contraception Equals Birth Dearth

Written by David J. Ayers |
Tuesday, August 1, 2023
Like contraception, abortion boomed. In 2020, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated there were 198 abortions for every 1,000 live births in the United States. At the high-water point in 1984, there were 364 abortions for every 1,000 live births, and that number never dropped below 300 for 20 years from 1976 to 1996. There were over 44,500,000 abortions between 1973 and 2015, and many more since then. And dismal as they are, these statistics increasingly underestimate the number of abortions.

The latest abysmally low birth rates from North America, Europe, and Asia continue to alarm business leaders and policy makers, as well they should. In Europe, only France is within spitting distance of replacement level fertility. Italy’s has tanked so low as to be the subject of a highly publicized meeting between its Prime Minister and the Pope a couple months ago. Every part of North America, even Mexico, is below replacement. Asia is just as dismal or worse, with a huge majority, including all of our top trading partners — except the Philippines and (barely) India and (maybe) Vietnam — lower than replacement. Some have plummeted close to one baby per woman. When even the BBC touts headlines like “’Jaw Dropping’ Crash in Babies Being Born,” and the Economist devotes an entire issue to “The Baby-Bust Economy” just last month, well, we have a problem.
Yet for decades, many of these same hand-wringing elites and policy wonks have been pushing contraception and abortion with the intensity of engineers shoveling coal into speeding trains. And not just to help married folk space, delay, or limit childbearing. No, they want every adult to be able to have sex with as many people as they want, as often as they wish, regardless of marital status, without having any babies they don’t choose.
They want Every Adult to be able to have sex with as many people as they want, as often as they wish.
Since at least the 1960s, separating sex from procreation has been almost an obsession. In the United States, our largest political party is radically committed to this. In recent years, climate activists, including some celebrities, have even talked as if having babies is grossly irresponsible. We have “BirthStrikers,” and “anti-natalists” who wish they’d never been born. We even have the “Voluntary Human Extinction Movement,” the subject of a recent article in the Atlantic they listed as a “must read.”
And now? The chickens have come home to roost.
Let’s look at how contraception use exploded in the 1960s, naturally leading to abortion-on-demand — these two together being the fraternal twins most responsible for our deepening Demographic Winter. We will focus on the United States, starting with contraception.
Not even counting voluntary sterilization, contraception has been around for a long time. As a PBS historical piece covered, condoms, sponges, cervical caps, diaphragms, douches, and even intrauterine devices all existed at some point in the 1800s. But they weren’t reliable, were often “messy and awkward to use,” embarrassing to obtain, and women didn’t like the fact that it was men who controlled condoms. Then along came “The Pill” in 1960. As that PBS documentary put it, “The Pill … was female-controlled, simple to use, highly effective, and … separated reproduction and contraception from the sexual act. The Pill could be taken anytime, anywhere, and without anyone else knowing.”
The Pill & the Sexual Revolution
Most analysts of the 1960s sexual revolution have identified the widespread availability of “The Pill” as a key element and cause of this movement.
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Sex and the Single Evangelical

Written by David J. Ayers |
Monday, October 31, 2022
Given all we know about the impact of commitment and social support, teaching young people to prioritize church attendance and to keep religion central in their daily lives will most likely help them to be more faithful to their churches’ sexual teachings.

Evangelicals share something in common with every other branch of conservative Christianity. They hold to a simple view of sex outside of marriage, rooted in many centuries of historical teaching and what appear to be the plain teachings of the Bible, especially the New Testament—don’t.
Yet most self-identified Evangelicals1 engage in premarital sex. And doing so has become increasingly morally acceptable among them, regardless of what their churches teach. We have seen a long trend toward greater liberalization of sexual ethics among Evangelical laypersons over the past several decades, underscored in recent years by several prominent Evangelical leaders breaking ranks to embrace progressive views on sex.
The recent, highly public defection of a superstar of the “sexual purity” movement, Josh Harris, is a dramatic case in point. Starting with the repudiation of his own best-selling books promoting courtship practices that promoted abstinence until marriage, on to pursuing his own “amicable” divorce, and then rejecting Christianity entirely—all on social media—Harris has become a poster-child for the “new” Evangelical sexual ethic. Unique, perhaps, only in indicating that his views are no longer Christian (rather than the more typical attempt to claim that Christianity allows for pre-marital sex), Harris is indicative of a larger shift away from traditional stances on sex within Evangelical circles.
For example, in the General Social Survey (GSS), in 2014 through 2018 combined, only 37% of “fundamentalist2 adults said that sex outside marriage was “always wrong,” while 41% said it was “not wrong at all.” From 1974 to 1978, the same percentages were 44% and 27%, respectively.
Meanwhile, the GSS shows that among never-married fundamentalist adults between 2008 and 2018, 86% of females and 82% of males had at least one opposite-sex sexual partner since age 18, while 57% and 65%, respectively, had three or more. These percentages were even higher for those under 30.
In my recent book, Christian Marriage: A Comprehensive Introduction, I looked at data from the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG), which provides a lot more detail on sexual activity and includes a larger number of respondents.3 In this article, and in the corresponding research brief, I incorporate the most recent NSFG cycle released in December 2018 to further explore the sexual practices of young, never-married Evangelicals, combining the surveys for 2013-15 and 2015-17. I summarize my findings below.
The following figures compare the percentages of never-married respondents in these NSFG cycles, by gender and in two age groups and five major religious affiliation categories, who have ever engaged in sexual intercourse, as well as those who have ever engaged in any sexual activity (vaginal, oral or anal) with an opposite-sex partner.
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A Call to the Church: Teaching Post-Dobbs

Written by David J. Ayers |
Thursday, June 30, 2022
A major concern I have had for a long time has not been so much political, as it has been pastoral and personal. This includes what will now be a growing need to care for pregnant women in difficult circumstances before and after they give birth. It includes compassionate ministry for post-abortive women and others, such as the biological fathers of these aborted babies and the families of these women. And this last thing includes, for too many who were comfortable with that decision to abort, helping them see the sin of abortion, encouraging confession and spiritual restoration. We have done a lot, and now will need to do more.

So now it is official. The Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization has overturned Roe v. Wade, and the legal issue of whether and how to restrict abortion has been returned to the states.
I cannot imagine how much this is going to be discussed in the coming days, months and even years—from every conceivable angle. Moreover, many states will become legal and political battlegrounds for this issue. This includes my own Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Dobbs shifts and even intensifies the struggle between pro-life and pro-choice, but it certainly does not end it.
Still, those who have stood for the pro-life cause, many of us for decades, have much to be thankful for. Not least among them are the many Evangelicals and Catholics who have stood for life, voting, pressuring, picketing, appealing, funding, manning legal organizations, lobbying, and educational organizations focusing on state and federal efforts, and a lot more. We stayed in the fight and have seen a wonderful victory.
However, a major concern I have had for a long time has not been so much political, as it has been pastoral and personal. This includes what will now be a growing need to care for pregnant women in difficult circumstances before and after they give birth. It includes compassionate ministry for post-abortive women and others, such as the biological fathers of these aborted babies and the families of these women. And this last thing includes, for too many who were comfortable with that decision to abort, helping them see the sin of abortion, encouraging confession and spiritual restoration. We have done a lot, and now will need to do more.
Which brings me to one of the issues I tackled in my recently released book, After the Revolution: Sex and the Single Evangelical. That is, the degree to which abortion is far more common among believers associated with conservative churches which are overwhelmingly opposed to it than most people realize or want to know.
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Why is America so Sad? And Where do We Find Joy?

Written by David J. Ayers |
Thursday, December 30, 2021
In measured loneliness and happiness, married adults fare much better than everyone else. Those who attend religious services regularly do better and changed less. In fact, 29% described themselves as “very happy” in 2021, compared to only 20% of those who go to church only one to three times per month, and 15% of folk who never do so. The visible differences between children in healthy families, and adults in good marriages, has also never been more obvious. We are not meant to go through life solo, especially during hard times. We need each other, not hard drugs nor escape by other means.

A study by the Harvard Graduate School of Education—based on an October 2020 poll released in February 2021—deserved widespread media coverage. It got almost none. Given what was going on this past February, that is not surprising. But it is regrettable nonetheless.
The study found that we were in the midst of a growing “epidemic of loneliness” that, already bad, has been made much worse by the pandemic. And that was before this thing dragged on and on even after effective vaccines became universally available to Americans. The report notes that the pandemic had “exposed wide holes in our social fabric” that reminded us just how much we depend on “the warmth and care of others.” Which of course we have much less of, thanks to the pandemic. But the relational gaps, including divisions and even hostility tearing at our primary bonds, were already in place.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, we got the bitter news about overdose deaths a few weeks ago. As of April 2021, we hit 100,300 such deaths, up 29% from last year. Opioid overdoses alone were up 35%, killing 207 Americans every day.
We can add to this the insights we gained from the latest General Social Survey (GSS) conducted December 2020 to May 2021. Comparing measured overall happiness levels with the 2018 edition of the GSS is startling. It is clear that the problems Harvard uncovered did not improve, given that lonely people tend to be, well, less happy. Nor, given what the GSS tells us, should all these overdose deaths surprise us.
To describe the drop in happiness between 2018 and 2021 as “steep” is an understatement. The percentages reporting they were “very happy” dropped by about a third, from 30% to 20%. Meanwhile, “not too happy” increased by almost 40%, from 14% to 23%. That’s almost a quarter of the adult population saying they’re unhappy.
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