BY ALEX STORY
The goals of Progressivism are “continually receding ones”, which is, to paraphrase Mussolini, “like a trodden road leading on and on to the land of heart’s desire, which though it grows closer and closer, will never be reached”.
To advance towards the mirage, progress must convince. Indeed, one needs to emancipate oneself from the past and its many thorns. Complexity, you see, slows down progress. Data, when it is used, must tell an irrefutable story. Whatever our current situation, we are, it is said, materially better off now than we were then. We are admonished to look straight ahead, not to see what we have lost. To reminisce is, in a way, to conspire.
To that effect, few pieces of data tell us more clearly about progress than that of Infant Mortality. Humanity, technology and progress have materially changed the world for the better, it is routinely said. In the 16th century, Infant Mortality stood at around 250 deaths per 1,000 live births. In cities, from the Black Death in the 1340s to the 1740s—colloquially known as the “urban graveyard” period—infant mortality sometimes shot to 400 deaths per 1,000 live births. By 1909, astoundingly, infant mortality fell to 109. It is now 3.1. A tragedy for the mother and father when it happens, but, overall, an indisputable fall of around 98% in a century.
In that period, though, birth rates have plummeted. In 1911, 11 million women across Great Britain and Ireland aged between 15 and 44 gave birth to 1,140,000 children; today 13.2 million women managed 647,000. More women, fewer children. The total fertility rate plunged by 55%—from 3.07 children per woman then down to 1.39 now, far below the replacement rate—in three generations. Potential reasons abound, not least the combined use of the pill and condoms. As an example, 208 per 1,000 women took the pill and over 205 per 1,000 used condoms in 2023.
The elephant in the room, though, is abortion. There were 278,000 of these that same year, and it is set to grow. The ratio of births versus abortions in Great Britain, at 42%, is getting very close to an incredible one in two. Being born today (and making it to adulthood) is nothing short of a miracle.
Further, the Progressive might wish to look at infant mortality numbers as they are and reassure himself that life is getting better because technology has taken the randomness out of life. In modern Britain, it must be said, if you are pregnant and want to keep the baby, the likelihood of having it has never been better. However, the separation between infant mortality numbers and abortion is artificial. After all, an aborted foetus is a dead infant. To get a true picture of the situation, we must combine both the infant mortality numbers with that of aborted ones. The combined figure will henceforth be known as the Total Infant Mortality Rate. In the United Kingdom today, the Total Infant Mortality Rate is close to 300 infant deaths per 1,000 births—far from today’s official 3.9 figure—taking us back to the Black Plague and the “Urban Graveyard” period of King Edward III.
Progress, and its mirage-like appeal, uses euphemisms like a shield, the truth being detrimental to it. Abortions and termination for the purposes of “reproductive health” are cases in point. These must be dealt with frontally. Senator John Kennedy from Louisiana obliged, describing the procedure during a congressional hearing. The procedure is called a “Dilation and Evacuation”, said Kennedy, pointing to the picture of a 21-week-old unborn baby on a screen a few feet behind him. He explained: “The doctor would dilate the cervix and then take… a sofur clamp. It’s really a pair of pliers with sharp teeth on the end and without giving the baby any pain medication”. “The doctor would go through the vagina, through the uterus and start tearing the baby apart.” He continued: “She might start with the legs and pull them out and the arms and pull them out. And then she might go for the heart or the spine and just pull the baby out piece by piece”. Before being interrupted, he added, “But then you got to get the head out, which is hard. So then the doctor would go in and use those pliers to crush the baby’s head”.
In short, an abortion is not just a termination or reproductive care. It is something much darker. It is, to some, nothing short of a cultural reversal towards the most antediluvian Paganism, for the god of convenience, that has raised child sacrifice to a quasi-human right, while hiding its cruelty behind a combination of the practitioner’s reassuring white coat, elevator music and a civilisational laisser aller.
The results are out. There have been over 11 million such “procedures” across Great Britain since the Abortion Act was passed in 1967. In the same period, there have been 66 million in the United States of America. In addition, 400 million “births were prevented”, celebrated the Chinese Communist Party in the four decades to 2016 as the suicidal one-child policy was dropped. “For Mother Earth” shouted the Chinese anti-birth slogans, known to the Ancient Romans as Tanit, the Punic goddess and primary recipient of ritual infant sacrifices. Seemingly inspired by such recognisable slogans, Darrel Bricker and John Ibbitson wrote “the solution to producing less carbon dioxide might ultimately be producing fewer humans”, in Empty Planet published in 2019. John Carey, for his part, in The Intellectual and the Masses, was much clearer, much earlier: “Given the state of the planet, humans, or some humans, must now be categorised as vermin”. Global demographer Wm. Robert Johnston reckons that 2.6 billion children have been aborted since the mid-1960s, that is 43 times more dead than the Second World War managed.
Gone are the likes of King David, eighth son of Jesse; Thomas Aquinas, ninth out of eleven children; Nelson, sixth out of eleven; and so many more, such as Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Gandhi and Orwell, among so many others. Their genius, developed in the crucible of large families, with their unseen but real networks and their messy freedoms, have been erased. We, in contrast, are making way for a quasi-Zombie generation in which every child is a single one, with all that comes with it.
For our country and our civilisation, the facts are indubitable. First, the mass immigration story has an abortion root. We reached our civilisational apex when we exported our people, and through them our world view. Not the opposite. We are now in thrall to the short-term benefits of sexual liberation, control and “economic freedom” whatever that might mean, and as a result are enervated to the point of no return, like the proverbial frog, boiling slowly in a pan of our own choosing. As a result, in the UK, we have imported as many people as we have terminated. As Bricker and Ibbitson noted, “for immigration to work, each side has to adapt; each side has to give”. In short, the disappearance of Churchill from the £5 note is only the beginning.
Second, technology is not improving us. Quite the contrary. Though it helps in a multitude of cases, it has stopped us doing the simplest, most natural thing: reproducing. By choice. Like a caged animal, we are trapped by an ideology that stops us from “going forth and multiplying” and “hardens our hearts” until, like Pharaoh and his army, we sink in the Red Sea as our entire philosophical edifice drowns under an unwavering reality, shaking our fist in anger, convinced of our own righteousness as we breathe our last.
The further back you look, it used to be said, the further forward you see. Today, we, as a civilisation, though, look to the present, focused on our own comfort and distractions. Implicitly, we know there is no future unless something meaningful happens. Culling ourselves has become a sign of progressive thought as we march towards an Aldous Huxley state-sponsored suicide. Convinced that we are right, as “every man did that which was right in his own eyes”. We have turned good into bad and bad into good, and have chosen erasure, which is the only destination for a Progressive. And progressives we, unfortunately, all are.
Alex Story is an Olympian, entrepreneur and writer on economic and social issues.