(LifeSiteNews) — One day, sooner than we think, we will have to choose: societies that permit and even pay for abortion, or societies that prize and incentivize children. In the long run, we cannot have both. We cannot have a future and kill our children.  

We are still in the “denial” stage of this civilizational crisis. As Andrew Glover noted in Quillette on June 13: 

We are in the throes of a global crisis, which touches every nation, threatens our economic prosperity, and if left unaddressed, could bring about the demise of the human species. Yet we have no agencies dedicated to responding to it, have invested no major funding into researching it, and almost never talk about it in the political sphere. This is the situation we face with regard to our declining fertility. Birth rates across the developed world have fallen well below replacement levels and are not projected to rise or rebound in any meaningful way in the future. This means ageing societies, mounting fiscal strain, and, for many countries, shrinking populations.

READ: UK could decriminalize abortion at any stage of pregnancy next week 

Yet, this question is being left unaddressed. While progressives still babble about overpopulation and climate change dominates the agendas of governments around the world, the real problem is mostly ignored. There are exceptions, of course, like Hungary and South Korea; Russia and China are also trying to encourage people to have children. But here in the West, you are far more likely to hear claims that children are bad for the planet than anyone noticing that few people are having them.  

If faced with a choice between voluntary extinction or pro-life laws, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) makes its answer crystal clear in a recently published report titled “The real fertility crisis: The pursuit of reproductive agency in a changing world.” According to the UNFPA, the real concern is “reproductive freedom,” which it recommends as a solution to the collapse in global fertility. 

There is some interesting data in the report. The UNFPA partnered with YouGov to survey 14,000 adults in 14 countries, including South Africa, Indonesia, Nigeria, Morocco, Brazil, South Korea, Thailand, Mexico, India, and Hungary. According to the report, 39 percent of those surveyed stated that financial considerations limited their family size; 19 percent said fears about the future impacted their family decisions; nearly a third reported an unwanted pregnancy. 

Additionally, only 37 percent of those polled said they expected to have the number of children they wanted, while almost a fourth said they could not have a child when they wanted one. “One-in-4 people currently live in a country where the population size is estimated to have already peaked,” the report noted. “The result will be societies as we have never seen them before: communities with larger proportions of older persons, smaller shares of young people, and, possibly, smaller workforces.” 

The UNFPA moved from recognition of the “global fertility crisis” to the “real crisis” swiftly: a lack of “reproductive autonomy” that prevents people from realizing “their fertility aspirations.” According to the UNFPA: “We find that when we ask the right questions, we can see both the problem and solution clearly. The answer lies in reproductive agency, a person’s ability to make free and informed choices about sex, contraception, and starting a family – if, when, and with whom they want.” 

To claim that “reproductive freedom” – including abortion and state-supplied contraception – are part of the answer to our demographic crisis is frankly ludicrous. At least 45 million children were killed in the womb in 2024. The reason China is so desperate for babies is because they aborted over 336 million of them under the One Child Policy. In other words, it is not that people are not having babies – it is just that we are killing millions of them while they are still in the womb. If you want more babies, pass laws that protect them. 

But the UNFPA, of course, endorsed the same “solutions” that helped create the problem in the first place: “more sex education in schools, stronger access to contraceptives and abortion, adoptions by homosexual couples, access to assisted reproductive technology, and the dismantling of traditional gender norms.” No reasonable person believes that any of those things is a solution to a baby shortage brought about by cultures that promotes precisely those things.  

The UNFPA not only proposed the same “solutions” currently destroying society but also condemned those countries which are trying to support families and encouraging having children. As the Catholic News Agency reported:  

The report also criticized campaigns that encourage people to start families. It claimed that tax credits for parents “can offer critical help” but can also stigmatize people who get the benefits and that incentives for larger or smaller families can “lead to constraints on reproductive choice by increasing men’s and women’s vulnerability to coercion from partners, families, or in-laws.”

In short: Don’t say babies are a good thing, because people who don’t want them might feel bad about that, even though some of these policies actually work. 

READ: Devastating IVF bungles are leading to babies being implanted in the wrong mother 

“What is the alternative to policies seeking to influence fertility rates? Policies that expressly – in letter and spirit – affirm the rights of individual women and men to make their own choices,” the report claimed. As Rebecca Oas of C-Fam noted: “UNFPA’s definition of what constitutes human flourishing involves the redefinition of the family, the micromanagement of care within the home by the state, and legal, government-subsidized access to contraception and abortion, and for this reason, it falls well short of the ideal.” 

As far as the global elites are concerned, they are only too happy to welcome self-destruction rather than reject sexually revolutionary societies.