The Generational Toll of Abortion
How large would Gen X, Millennials, and Generation Z have been without abortion?
How many of the people who would’ve been in your generational cohort aren’t here because they were aborted?
Between the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 and the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision in 2022, women had access to abortion because of the Supreme Court’s decision to establish a woman’s constitutional right to it based on the right to privacy. During that time, Americans underwent tens of millions of abortions. Given that America only experienced tens of millions of births in that same timeframe, the answer to my question is likely a nontrivial portion: a potentially sizable part of the generations that have been born since 1973 may have been aborted.
Using data from the Guttmacher Institute—a nongovernmental organization sprung out of Planned Parenthood in 1968 with the aim to expand reproductive rights globally—we can see that aborted generation members have been a very sizable percentage of every generational cohort since the Roe v. Wade decision.1
If we naïvely tally up America’s abortions, we can see that potentially over a quarter of Gen X and Millennials were aborted, nearly as many Gen Z met that fate, and almost a fifth of Gen Alpha were treated the same way.
These figures help to contextualize the human toll of abortion—these are, at minimum, millions of lost lives. But these numbers are off when it comes to describing the number of people who would be in these generations were it not for abortion. If we want to understand how large generations would be without abortion, we have to account for the effect of abortions on completed fertility.
Different studies—reviewed below—suggest banning abortion would likely lead to 3-6% more births rather than the larger numbers these figures suggest, because people adjust their reproductive behavior in response to abortion availability. If we just add 3-6% to each generation, that’s 5.53 to 11.06 million more people born between 1973 and 2020. But many of the people who aren’t aborted will likely have their own kids. Therefore, we need to set up a model—detailed below—where the generational birth gains propagate forward. With that propagation, America would have likely had somewhere between 7.63 and 15.26 million additional births between 1973 and 2020.
There are millions of missing Americans due to abortion. The human toll of the practice is real and nontrivial, and I hope everyone—pro-choice or pro-life—can admit to that fact. But I also hope the discussion doesn’t end there. There’s so much more to discuss about this topic; how we can humanely reduce abortion rates; how we can save babies from miscarriages; and how we can make for more, happier families.
Sections
How Many Missing Births?
Quantifying Uncertainty
Why Are Babies Aborted?
Which Babies Are Aborted?
Did Abortion Reduce Crime Rates?
Can We Reduce Miscarriage Rates?
Can We Reduce Abortion Rates?
How Many Missing Births?
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