Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert wrongly blamed abortion for the United States’ declining birth rate during a congressional hearing on immigration legislation this week.
On Wednesday, the far-right congresswoman took a moment while speaking during a House Oversight Committee hearing to argue that the nation’s birth rate is falling because of “nearly a million abortions” a year — ignoring the prevailing financial and social factors linked to the decline.
“My colleagues just asked if our birth rate is going down here in America and the answer was yes,” said Boebert, 37. “Well, of course it is. We have almost a million abortions in our country every year.”
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Lauren Boebert.
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Boebert’s comments came during a House debate on US immigration law, after Democratic committee members argued that immigration spurs economic and employment growth and can help provide much-needed population growth as Baby Boomers leave the workforce in droves.
Boebert, who is outspokenly anti-choice, argued that to see birth rates rise, we should “look at our own country first,” though politicians have historically had a hard time convincing people to have children — not for lack of trying.
The data also showed that even as the abortion rate fell in the modern era, the birth rate continued to fall.
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According to Vox, larger factors, including economic problems, could be behind the country’s declining birth rate: Americans have been having fewer children since the Great Recession, and the overall rate fell by nearly 23% between 2007 and 2022. Other factors include people marrying later marriage (or not getting married at all), wider access to contraception, and the lack of family-friendly policies like paid leave and subsidized childcare.
Philip Cohen, a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, told Vox that the “opportunity cost” of having a child has risen in modern times. “People, especially women, have more lucrative things to do,” he said.
Meanwhile, according to a survey he conducted The New York Times In 2018, about a quarter of participants said they had or planned to have fewer children than they would ideally like. Of those, 64% said childcare costs were behind their decision.
Categories: Trends
Source: HIS Education