By Chuck Donovan

Babies, already a rare commodity in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, are becoming an endangered species. This week, Democratic Governor Maura Healey, surrounded by a cheering audience of almost exclusively female supporters, signed into law a bill making the Bay State the 10th in America to allow abortion for virtually any reason up to birth. 

Healey and much of the mass media described the bill as a measure to allow women to stay in-state for abortions when a baby has a grave medical condition and may not survive outside the womb. In truth, the bill wiped out an existing law that allowed late-term abortion for reasons of mental health and fetal anomaly and now makes the baby’s demise subject to the unquestioned judgment of the abortionist and the parent(s). It is no law at all.

The numbers show a fairly uniform correlation between these permissive legal regimes and collapsing birth rates. It’s only logical. Massachusetts’s total fertility rate (TFR) in 2024 was 1.38, more than 33% below replacement-level fertility, with only four states experiencing lower fertility. Of the 10 states with “open seasons” on the unborn, seven are below the current national TFR of 1.62 children per woman. The 10 states have fertility rates between 1.27 (Vermont) and 1.80 (Alaska). None is at replacement level, and all have declined further over the last six years. Overall, the situation offers a bleak picture. It is not that demographers, politicians, and economists are the primary story, philosophizing in their studies about gross national product and “golden eras” going unrealized, it is the personal stories of families not formed and babies never born. Surveys say that the typical woman would like to bear 2.4 children in her lifetime. That is clearly not happening.

For decades now, pro-family voices have bent the bow to develop public policy that will ease the financial challenges of childbearing. The truth is that, with the major exception of housing costs, these efforts have had some success. A new article at National Review by demographer Dr. Lyman Stone provides some accounting of these policies. The principal one is the child tax credit (CTC), a measure first enacted in the 1990s that was advanced by a wide coalition of groups, including the Family Research Council. I well remember visits to Capitol Hill with my colleague Bill Mattox, Jr., making calls on influential members of Congress urging them to back the CTC. One of our first breakthroughs with the reluctant GOP leadership was a top-ranking member of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, Rep. Dick Schulze of suburban Philadelphia. The Republican leadership ultimately came around and made the CTC the “crown jewel” of the 1994 Contract with America.

Since its enactment and over many permutations, Dr. Stone says, the CTC has gradually expanded and now costs the U.S. Treasury some $120 billion a year. He describes it as good policy but one that has cost the United States “a lot of money for not that many babies.” As senior fellow and director of the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies in Charlottesville, Virginia, Stone has written widely on the need for new government policies that will promote higher fertility rates. He now thinks he has one with an idea called American Birthday Accounts. The key characteristics of the idea involve its scale and its structuring of benefits to encourage childbearing down the road as the invested funds accumulate returns. The CTC, in his view, is welcome but not large enough to change much behavior on a sustained basis. That will require us, he says, to stop “thinking like a welfare state” and start “thinking like an investor.”

The ABA is designed, as Dr. Lyman contends, to help families “pay for a down payment, not a stroller.” It begins with the depositing by the U.S. Treasury of $17,000 into a dedicated account when a child is born. That money is the possession of the child, like the new Trump Accounts, but on a much larger scale. The account is immediately invested and cannot be touched during the child’s maturation. As I understand it, when that child has a child of his or her own 20 years or so later, he or she (the second-generation adult) can access and use up to 50 percent of the account at its new valuation, which, at ordinary rates of return, would be $50,000 or more. The process has an echo effect. When a second child is born, up to 75 percent of the remaining funds in the account can be accessed, and finally — at the birth of a third child — the remainder of the account can be accessed.

The accounts contrast sharply with Social Security, under which no individual ownership obtains and no connection with fostering creation of the next generation exists. Government would recover some of its investment over time as the income withdrawn from the ABAs would be taxable and some accounts would be abandoned or unutilized over time, reverting to the state. The birth of more children is the real investment benefit of the accounts; Social Security, in turn, relies on the separate arrival of more children and more workers to sustain its benefits, and its design — a regressive tax on earned income — does nothing to produce them. 

Perhaps surprisingly, comments on the National Review website so far don’t generally embrace the Institute for Family Studies idea. Investing in children over plant and equipment generally rankled The Wall Street Journal at the outset of the CTC, though it has tolerated the concept while it balks at making the credit refundable due to potential work disincentives. In 2022, Heritage Foundation analyst Scott Hodge, who was the first to advance the CTC in 1993, wrote that it now constitutes bad policy as its tax-erasing impact has produced a high percentage of earners who pay no taxes at all and have no stake in our faltering efforts to balance the federal budget. Then there is the galling tendency of politicians claiming that their actions to corral and redistribute tax dollars merit them fame and favor: the Trump Account epitomizes the tendency. The official government website for the accounts trumpets, “The American Dream Starts Now,” and the web summary proclaims the accounts are “courtesy of President Donald J. Trump.” And you thought funds from the U.S. Treasury came from you.

America’s collapsing fertility is as important as any challenge facing the nation. It deserves more attention, not less, and measuring whether particular investments are working is an enterprise that merits more concern. In the meantime, a more fundamental recognition is needed. America is experiencing demographic collapse because it has chosen it as a matter of policy. The evidence on that is overwhelming. It is also global. As Family Research Council pointed out two generations ago in a paper titled “Population Panic and the Future of the Family,” U.S. public and private entities have invested billions – now even trillions — in policies designed to destroy nascent human life, advance a sensate culture, and exacerbate public perceptions of children as somehow toxic and damaging to every aspect of individual and community life. At various points, the debate over these policies — led by folks like Paul Ehrlich, Indira Gandhi, Garrett Hardin and many more — was over whether these policies should be voluntary or compulsory.

The most ideological elements in entities like The Draper World Population Fund and the International Planned Parenthood Federation defended and advanced the practices of the People’s Republic of China, where coercion reigned for decades, and women were forced to have intrauterine devices inserted or to undergo late-term abortions at the hands of the cadres chartered by Beijing to enforce its one-child policy. In the United States, the voluntary policy initiatives have been almost as effective. Beginning in 1970, with federal aid, Planned Parenthood facilities were installed in nearly every low- or middle-income neighborhood in the country. U.S. funds were distributed overseas to promote population control. Sexual mores that honored the family were displaced by education that emphasized sexual varietism, provided no “unwanted” children emerged from these relationships. Some of the largest foundations in the country committed huge sums of money to programs to reduce population and train new generations of abortionists. Supporting fertility-damaging puberty blockers and practices like polyamory came naturally to these groups.

Today, the means are more indirect. Planned Parenthood disclaims eugenics but markets abortion pills and advocates no in-person medical care for expectant mothers. The Guttmacher Institute vociferously backs abortions on grounds of race, sex, or fetal anomaly. Climate change (since rising sea levels and melting ice caps have not worked out so far as compelling cases for action) is back in the news as every environmental blip is celebrated as yet another reason for humans to feel discouraged and fearful about bringing children into the world. Above all, the abortion toll is rising again. Over 1.1 million were estimated to have been committed in 2026. Planned Parenthood’s carefully measured total was a record 434,450 abortions in the 2023-24 fiscal year, an increase of 8% from the previous year. Meanwhile, the Centers for Disease Control, already mediocre in its collection and publication of abortion statistics, has gone silent.

Will America have a new birthday for freedom — an ordered liberty that values every child equally — irrespective of race, disability, or sex? Or will it continue, even under Republican majorities in Congress and a once-allied president in the White House, to fund and accelerate its own demise? The celebration that erupted in the Massachusetts governor’s office this week gives us fresh reason to wonder.

Chuck Donovan served in the Reagan White House as a senior writer and as Deputy Director of Presidential Correspondence until early 1989. He was executive vice president of Family Research Council, a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation, and founder/president of Charlotte Lozier Institute from 2011 to 2024. He is now co-president of the Science Alliance for Life and Technology (SALT). He has written and spoken extensively on issues in life and family policy.

This article originally appeared here.