Thanks for writing this. You might want to connect with Black Tea News, and Feminists Choosing Life of New York, which are both on YouTube, if you haven't already. The key demographic you have identified, white, college-educated men, have multiple vested interests in the supply-side of abortion, as tax payers, employers and as careless reproducers. This is why the media class has very little to say about the demand-side, and why technologically advanced societies have millions of unwanted pregnancies each year.
Thanks for the comment and for the recommendations. I've bookmarked the websites of Black Tea News and Feminists Choosing Life of New York.
The fact that technologically advanced societies have millions of unwanted pregnancies each year is the focus of a research project of mine. During 2024 I put several hundred hours into the quantification of unintended pregnancies in the United States. In 2025 I've switched to using my free time to do weekly Substack articles because trying to do quasi-academic work on nights and weekends is pretty exhausting. I'll get back to it eventually.
It's always struck me as a fundamental flaw of modern society that we can put a man on the moon, but can't figure out how to live without impregnating millions of women every year who don't want to be impregnated. That is why I always described my research project as "reproductive responsibility."
I had the same thought: the mechanics of conception are well understood, but there has been remarkably little advancement in contraception technologies since the 1960s.
My belief is that because abortion is available as a backstop, its cost-effectiveness compared to the state raising a child is beyond doubt, and men don't have to have one, it has been an impediment to resolving the epidemic of unwanted pregnancies at source.
I'm planning a series of articles on abortion as the driver of international migration, which will upset just about everyone. I'm just following the facts where they lead.
Exactly that. There has been no novel contraceptive technology since the 1960s (just a repackaging into different modalities). Before I did my statistics degree, I tried to do a lab biology research career with a focus on contraception. There is little demand, just some basic science research here and there. There is certainly not the kind of funding that it takes to bring a new product to market (which is currently in the billions of USD).
A friend of my wife's who works in pharma said there is a widespread perception in pharma that the contraceptive technologies we have now are "good enough." This is despite how ineffective they are, how many side effects they come with, and how prone they are to user error. "Good enough" was caused by the destigmatization of abortion in the 1970s.
I suspect if we ever see innovations in contraceptive technology, they will come from India or Thailand or somewhere. Of course, countries outside the U.S. in particular and the Western world more generally spend a lot less money on R&D, so we shouldn't hold our breath.
I look forward to reading your articles on abortion as the driver of international migration.
Thanks for your reply. Unfortunately I don't anticipate better contraception research being funded in Asia because sex-selective abortion guaranteeing male births is widely used there. I believe this is a 'push' factor in global migration because there are now tens of millions of males (according to United Nations estimates of femicide) who don't have marriage potential in their local communities as a result of this practice.
In societies which are structured by family and being a single man or gay is considered a failure, this is a straightforward matter of supply and demand. I recently spoke to a Sri Lankan man who joined the priesthood and migrated to Europe for this exact reason; he just couldn't find a wife at home.
The 'pull' factor in migration is that abortion has biased Western demographics in favour of those born before abortion liberalisation, the so-called 'baby boomers'. As there were more people born than normal from 1945 to 1960, that should result in native populations continuing to grow over successive generations, but it seems abortion liberalisation stopped that.
Using a generational cycle of 28 years and an average of 3 children per straight couple without abortion being available, we could estimate an opposite sex pair of abortions in 1967 meant three fewer children by 1995 and perhaps five fewer grandchildren by 2023. That's ten people who don't exist in the post-boomer generations. This estimate is crude, of course.
People seem to think that being single is a choice, but my estimate illustrates that there are just fewer potential long-term partners of family-forming age to choose from in a typical Western community. Demand is also reduced, of course, but because the pool is reduced in size, individual choice is limited, particularly in depopulated rural areas. Hence the phrase "I wouldn’t marry you if you were the last man on Earth".
However, cities have significantly higher abortion rates (in the United Kingdom data I have looked at) and so moving to the city to find a partner doesn't necessarily result in a live birth. I have looked into correlations between annual gross domestic product and abortion rates which suggest that in the UK, women have more abortions when companies are hiring, not because those women lack income. The economy and nature compete for access to women's bodies.
So, with a trend towards city living caused by the mechanisation of agriculture and the current availability of food imports, there just aren't enough native-born people in the West to sustain economic growth or public services, and the effect is compounded in each generation.
In the UK, the Labour government of 1997 to 2010 perhaps understood this, and created a more or less open border policy for low-wage service workers. I believe the US Democratic administrations which have close ties to Labour may have done the same. A bonus was that new migrant voters were presumed to vote on the Left, to continue open border policies and thereby bring their relatives and new partners to join them.
Anyway, my current draft is 18 pages which I believe is too long for typical Substack readers, so I'm going to break it down into a series.
You definitely seem to be on to something here with this analysis.
The phenomenon of hundreds of millions of missing women primarily due to sex-selective abortion is one of those things that is going to have profound impacts on global society going forward. I started reading to write an article on the topic back in 2022, but gave up at some point.
I would humbly submit two complexities to consider for your analysis:
1. Abortions and births aren't (always) exchanged one-to-one in populations. Generally, you would think that more abortions implies less births and vice versa, but that didn't happen in the 1990s in the U.S. when restrictions on state Medicaid abortion funding were instituted.
This paper found there was among teens both a decline in abortions and a decline in births when abortion access decreased: Kane, T. J., & Staiger, D. (1996). Teen motherhood and abortion access. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 111(2), 467–506.
This report found that among all age groups there were less abortions, but the number of births stayed the same: Levine, P. B., Trainor, A. B., & Zimmerman, D. J. (1996). The effect of Medicaid abortion funding restrictions on abortions, pregnancies and births. Journal of Health Economics, 15(5), 555–578.
Because of these phenomena, conclusions about things like the effects of higher abortion rates in cities aren't as straightforward.
In the U.S., the unintended pregnancy rate and the abortion rate skyrocketed after Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton. I'm still in the process of understanding the effects on fertility, though the "party line" among demographers is that it was a net zero.
2. Sex-selective abortion rates vary wildly from place to place, even within the same country.
For instance, this paper found that within India, most of the sex-selective abortion was occurring in just a few states (Punjab, Haryana, Gujarat, Delhi, Maharashtra, Himachal Pradesh): Retherford, R. D., & Roy, T. K. (2003). Factors affecting sex-selective abortion in India and 17 major states.
States with low preference for sons expectedly had very low rates of sex-selective abortion. More surprisingly, there were states with high son-preference, but low sex-selective abortion.
Finally, this is a good point that is often overlooked.
> People seem to think that being single is a choice.
I would add to this that there is evidence that declines in fertility, even among married couples, is less intentional and more accidental. In fact, I'll add this to my list of data analysis projects.
Thanks for the reply, I agree that the availability of abortion could affect pregnancy risk-taking, and also that attitudes vary from place to place even within the same country. If I've understood correctly, you're saying that a high number of abortions does not directly equal the same number of missing persons because without abortion availability those conceptions would have been less likely. And yet the live birth rate is clearly way down since the liberalisation of abortion.
There could also be a counter-effect in which treating live birth as optional and family formation as unnecessary, as a cultural consequence of abortion availability rather than a direct effect, actively discourages pregnancy because conception is rendered as a pointless inconvenience rather than an aspiration. I mean that if someone has no intention of raising a child, and abortion would be the result of any conception, there is limited value in risking pregnancy.
And yet there is a high number of unwanted pregnancies, which suggests risk-taking is happening on a significant scale. I wonder if this is partly because of pregnancy risk ambivalence until the pregnancy occurs, and partly because at the peak age for young women having abortions, the risk-assessment functions of the brain are not fully mature. Because young men don't pay child support if abortion is the result, they are not discouraged from taking that risk either.
In the UK, the main divide in abortion rate is between multicultural urban areas and very white rural areas, with London the highest rate and the farming county of Suffolk the lowest, last time I checked the numbers. These places are just 90 miles apart. Black women in poorer neighbourhoods in East London have the highest repeat abortion rate of any demographic in the country.
However I suspect that pregnancy risk-taking varies differently in the case of sex-selective abortion versus abortion for other reasons. If a woman is determined to have only sons, and to abort any daughters concieved, I guess she will need to get pregnant roughly twice as often on average than a woman who has no preference for sons, allowing for slightly different rates of conception and survival to birth between males and females.
Thanks for writing this. You might want to connect with Black Tea News, and Feminists Choosing Life of New York, which are both on YouTube, if you haven't already. The key demographic you have identified, white, college-educated men, have multiple vested interests in the supply-side of abortion, as tax payers, employers and as careless reproducers. This is why the media class has very little to say about the demand-side, and why technologically advanced societies have millions of unwanted pregnancies each year.
Thanks for the comment and for the recommendations. I've bookmarked the websites of Black Tea News and Feminists Choosing Life of New York.
The fact that technologically advanced societies have millions of unwanted pregnancies each year is the focus of a research project of mine. During 2024 I put several hundred hours into the quantification of unintended pregnancies in the United States. In 2025 I've switched to using my free time to do weekly Substack articles because trying to do quasi-academic work on nights and weekends is pretty exhausting. I'll get back to it eventually.
It's always struck me as a fundamental flaw of modern society that we can put a man on the moon, but can't figure out how to live without impregnating millions of women every year who don't want to be impregnated. That is why I always described my research project as "reproductive responsibility."
I had the same thought: the mechanics of conception are well understood, but there has been remarkably little advancement in contraception technologies since the 1960s.
My belief is that because abortion is available as a backstop, its cost-effectiveness compared to the state raising a child is beyond doubt, and men don't have to have one, it has been an impediment to resolving the epidemic of unwanted pregnancies at source.
I'm planning a series of articles on abortion as the driver of international migration, which will upset just about everyone. I'm just following the facts where they lead.
Exactly that. There has been no novel contraceptive technology since the 1960s (just a repackaging into different modalities). Before I did my statistics degree, I tried to do a lab biology research career with a focus on contraception. There is little demand, just some basic science research here and there. There is certainly not the kind of funding that it takes to bring a new product to market (which is currently in the billions of USD).
A friend of my wife's who works in pharma said there is a widespread perception in pharma that the contraceptive technologies we have now are "good enough." This is despite how ineffective they are, how many side effects they come with, and how prone they are to user error. "Good enough" was caused by the destigmatization of abortion in the 1970s.
I suspect if we ever see innovations in contraceptive technology, they will come from India or Thailand or somewhere. Of course, countries outside the U.S. in particular and the Western world more generally spend a lot less money on R&D, so we shouldn't hold our breath.
I look forward to reading your articles on abortion as the driver of international migration.
Thanks for your reply. Unfortunately I don't anticipate better contraception research being funded in Asia because sex-selective abortion guaranteeing male births is widely used there. I believe this is a 'push' factor in global migration because there are now tens of millions of males (according to United Nations estimates of femicide) who don't have marriage potential in their local communities as a result of this practice.
In societies which are structured by family and being a single man or gay is considered a failure, this is a straightforward matter of supply and demand. I recently spoke to a Sri Lankan man who joined the priesthood and migrated to Europe for this exact reason; he just couldn't find a wife at home.
The 'pull' factor in migration is that abortion has biased Western demographics in favour of those born before abortion liberalisation, the so-called 'baby boomers'. As there were more people born than normal from 1945 to 1960, that should result in native populations continuing to grow over successive generations, but it seems abortion liberalisation stopped that.
Using a generational cycle of 28 years and an average of 3 children per straight couple without abortion being available, we could estimate an opposite sex pair of abortions in 1967 meant three fewer children by 1995 and perhaps five fewer grandchildren by 2023. That's ten people who don't exist in the post-boomer generations. This estimate is crude, of course.
People seem to think that being single is a choice, but my estimate illustrates that there are just fewer potential long-term partners of family-forming age to choose from in a typical Western community. Demand is also reduced, of course, but because the pool is reduced in size, individual choice is limited, particularly in depopulated rural areas. Hence the phrase "I wouldn’t marry you if you were the last man on Earth".
However, cities have significantly higher abortion rates (in the United Kingdom data I have looked at) and so moving to the city to find a partner doesn't necessarily result in a live birth. I have looked into correlations between annual gross domestic product and abortion rates which suggest that in the UK, women have more abortions when companies are hiring, not because those women lack income. The economy and nature compete for access to women's bodies.
So, with a trend towards city living caused by the mechanisation of agriculture and the current availability of food imports, there just aren't enough native-born people in the West to sustain economic growth or public services, and the effect is compounded in each generation.
In the UK, the Labour government of 1997 to 2010 perhaps understood this, and created a more or less open border policy for low-wage service workers. I believe the US Democratic administrations which have close ties to Labour may have done the same. A bonus was that new migrant voters were presumed to vote on the Left, to continue open border policies and thereby bring their relatives and new partners to join them.
Anyway, my current draft is 18 pages which I believe is too long for typical Substack readers, so I'm going to break it down into a series.
You definitely seem to be on to something here with this analysis.
The phenomenon of hundreds of millions of missing women primarily due to sex-selective abortion is one of those things that is going to have profound impacts on global society going forward. I started reading to write an article on the topic back in 2022, but gave up at some point.
I would humbly submit two complexities to consider for your analysis:
1. Abortions and births aren't (always) exchanged one-to-one in populations. Generally, you would think that more abortions implies less births and vice versa, but that didn't happen in the 1990s in the U.S. when restrictions on state Medicaid abortion funding were instituted.
This paper found there was among teens both a decline in abortions and a decline in births when abortion access decreased: Kane, T. J., & Staiger, D. (1996). Teen motherhood and abortion access. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 111(2), 467–506.
This report found that among all age groups there were less abortions, but the number of births stayed the same: Levine, P. B., Trainor, A. B., & Zimmerman, D. J. (1996). The effect of Medicaid abortion funding restrictions on abortions, pregnancies and births. Journal of Health Economics, 15(5), 555–578.
Because of these phenomena, conclusions about things like the effects of higher abortion rates in cities aren't as straightforward.
In the U.S., the unintended pregnancy rate and the abortion rate skyrocketed after Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton. I'm still in the process of understanding the effects on fertility, though the "party line" among demographers is that it was a net zero.
2. Sex-selective abortion rates vary wildly from place to place, even within the same country.
For instance, this paper found that within India, most of the sex-selective abortion was occurring in just a few states (Punjab, Haryana, Gujarat, Delhi, Maharashtra, Himachal Pradesh): Retherford, R. D., & Roy, T. K. (2003). Factors affecting sex-selective abortion in India and 17 major states.
States with low preference for sons expectedly had very low rates of sex-selective abortion. More surprisingly, there were states with high son-preference, but low sex-selective abortion.
Finally, this is a good point that is often overlooked.
> People seem to think that being single is a choice.
I would add to this that there is evidence that declines in fertility, even among married couples, is less intentional and more accidental. In fact, I'll add this to my list of data analysis projects.
Thanks for the reply, I agree that the availability of abortion could affect pregnancy risk-taking, and also that attitudes vary from place to place even within the same country. If I've understood correctly, you're saying that a high number of abortions does not directly equal the same number of missing persons because without abortion availability those conceptions would have been less likely. And yet the live birth rate is clearly way down since the liberalisation of abortion.
There could also be a counter-effect in which treating live birth as optional and family formation as unnecessary, as a cultural consequence of abortion availability rather than a direct effect, actively discourages pregnancy because conception is rendered as a pointless inconvenience rather than an aspiration. I mean that if someone has no intention of raising a child, and abortion would be the result of any conception, there is limited value in risking pregnancy.
And yet there is a high number of unwanted pregnancies, which suggests risk-taking is happening on a significant scale. I wonder if this is partly because of pregnancy risk ambivalence until the pregnancy occurs, and partly because at the peak age for young women having abortions, the risk-assessment functions of the brain are not fully mature. Because young men don't pay child support if abortion is the result, they are not discouraged from taking that risk either.
In the UK, the main divide in abortion rate is between multicultural urban areas and very white rural areas, with London the highest rate and the farming county of Suffolk the lowest, last time I checked the numbers. These places are just 90 miles apart. Black women in poorer neighbourhoods in East London have the highest repeat abortion rate of any demographic in the country.
However I suspect that pregnancy risk-taking varies differently in the case of sex-selective abortion versus abortion for other reasons. If a woman is determined to have only sons, and to abort any daughters concieved, I guess she will need to get pregnant roughly twice as often on average than a woman who has no preference for sons, allowing for slightly different rates of conception and survival to birth between males and females.