On April 4, the governor of Russia’s Novgorod region made an extraordinary statement at an event on boosting birthrates. “We’ve had these small victories, but that’s not enough,” Gleb Nitkin said while discussing a 30% drop in the abortion rate. “The [demographic] situation in our country is critical, and allowing elective abortions is too big a luxury. Our task is to try to prevent such cases—not through bans, but through high-quality work, care, and responsibility.”
Cynics might rightly point out that Russia’s desperate demographic need stems in part from their horrifying losses on the front lines of the war in Ukraine, which are approaching 1.2 million by some estimates. Nonetheless, Nitkin is correct: Abortion is a luxury that Western countries cannot afford if they want their civilizations to survive (a question for another day). Few conservatives will say this out loud for fear of sounding like Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, who signed Decree 770 in 1967, restricting abortion and contraception to boost the birthrate. It is nonetheless indisputably true.
Consider the grotesque numbers. As the West enters a deep demographic winter, abortion was the leading cause of death worldwide in 2025, with an estimated 73 million babies killed in the womb. The abortion rate in England and Wales has soared to 30% of recorded conceptions. Annabel Denham got close to saying the quiet part out loud in The Telegraph last month, noting that abortion has become “a mass phenomenon”:
At precisely the moment when we are worrying about the economic and societal implications of too few births, we are also presiding over historically high rates of abortion. Had numbers in 2023 been in line with 2015, there could have been roughly 15 per cent more births. That is not a rounding error; it’s a demographic fact with long-term impact.
Of course, she hastened to add, “None of this is to argue against abortion rights. The case for bodily autonomy—to the current limit of 24 weeks—is, to my mind, irrefutable.” A baby boy born prematurely at 21 weeks in Iowa in 2024 survived outside the womb and turned one year old last July.
In France, there are over a quarter of a million abortions annually. In the Netherlands, nearly 40,000. In Germany and Spain, over 100,000 each. In Europe overall, the average annual butcher’s bill stands at between 3 and 3.5 million abortions, which is more than the collective populations of eight EU countries. Only 5% of the world’s babies are projected to be born in Europe in 2026. The fertility crisis is, without doubt, a many-headed hydra—but it is also true that abortion is ending the lives of millions before they are even born.
Progressive politicians are hellbent on increasing these numbers. Despite technological advances pushing the age of viability earlier and earlier, Denmark and Norway recently raised their abortion limits. France and Luxembourg enshrined abortion as a constitutional right. The UK decriminalized abortion until birth last year; the vote in Westminster was 379 to 137. That, at least, seemed to shock some Britons awake; one MP called Labour “the party of baby killers.” Andrew Lilico of the Telegraph put it bluntly: “We’ve voted to kill our old, our sick, & our infants. We deserve everything that’s coming to us.”
What’s coming is grim. Louise Perry, who describes herself as “uneasily agnostic” about abortion but opposed to criminalization, observed in a 2024 essay that our collective decision to abandon procreation is “modernity’s self-destruct button,” and,
The people on whom modernity depends are failing to reproduce themselves, which means that modernity itself is failing to reproduce itself. Most voters have no idea that this is happening. Nor do most politicians. But it is happening nonetheless, and we are experiencing its early stages in the form of diverse political crises across the modern world.
It is incredibly frustrating to see so many on the Right obsess over these multiplying crises while steadfastly avoiding the issue of abortion. Mass migration; Islamization; the strained social welfare systems creaking under the weight of an aging population supported by fewer and fewer young people; the inevitable euthanasia proposals to cynically thin out top-heavy family trees—all of this comes down, in part, to the fact that we are not having babies. Worse, we are killing millions of babies every single year. Luxury infanticide.
Right-wing politicians will insist that majorities across Europe support abortion rights. Hungary, however, is a compelling model for how leaders can work within that reality to move the Overton window on abortion and reduce the abortion rate. Hungary is not ready for sweeping protections for children in the womb, but the government has prepared for that moment. In 2012, the Fidesz government passed a new constitution recognizing that the right to life begins at conception, while leaving in place Hungary’s 12-week abortion limit, creating a foundation for restricting abortion.
Additionally, abortion pills are illegal in Hungary, and in September 2022, the government required that women seeking an abortion hear the fetal heartbeat before proceeding, with doctors having to submit confirmation that this took place. Combined with a raft of pro-marriage and pro-child policies that have been one of the government’s key focuses, the abortion rate has halved since 2003. Viktor Orbán took power in 2011; if abortion rates had continued at 2010 levels, approximately 300,000 fewer babies would have been born. More bluntly, approximately 300,000 more babies would have been aborted.
Critics might rightly respond that protecting pre-born children in the womb will not, by itself, boost the birthrate. Indeed, countries with pro-life regimes like Poland (which faces relentless and illegal attacks from Donald Tusk) and Malta (which recently rejected attempts to overturn pro-life laws) still have birthrates far below replacement level. But pro-life laws—as well as attempts to consciously build a pro-life culture—save hundreds of thousands of lives. The collective effects of these attempts—and these lives—are a cultural force multiplier that cannot be underestimated.
There is another, more solemn reason that abortion is a luxury that we cannot afford. Babies were once rightly understood as divine blessings. That understanding prompted previous generations to embrace new life despite economic and social circumstances far grimmer than those now cited as key reasons for the surge in prenatal infanticide in the UK and elsewhere. But when we reject those children—when we carve “Return to Sender” into their tiny corpses and toss them back into eternity—we provoke divine wrath, and we cannot expect to prosper.
A civilization without children does not have a future. A civilization that kills its own children does not deserve one.
