Do Democrats Save more Babies?
Debunking David French.
Like many of you, I have been triggered more than once by David French. His recent sit-down with Allie Stuckey was no exception. One claim from this recent interview is worth taking up in full. It is worth it because, anyone who has been around the pro-life movement has no doubt heard a version of it. French argued that conservative Christians who are serious about saving babies should vote for Democrats, because abortion numbers fell under Obama and rose under Trump. In his own words:
“Something that’s really surprising to a lot of people: the largest drop in abortions actually occurred during the eight years of the Obama administration… The first president really since Carter who ended with more abortions and a higher rate than when he started was Trump.”
French’s causal story runs through Trump’s personal character. “America is a lot more libertine,” he told Stuckey. “And Donald Trump is a very libertine man. He does what he wants… libertinism, doing what you want, is incompatible with a pro-life ethic.”
From Webster: Libertine, a person (especially a man) who leads an immoral life and is mainly interested in sexual pleasure
What has to be conceded will be conceded. President Trump’s personal life, role in removing the right-to-life plank from the Republican platform, and embrace of taxpayer-funded IVF is all horrific. I will not carry that policy water nor will I defend his sexual ethics. On those points French has an easy and obvious target.
His argument, though, has a specific audience in mind. It is aimed at one specific group equally disgusted by Trump’s personality but whose pro-life ethic runs so strong they will hold their nose and vote anyway. This new argument about fewer abortions is targeting them, giving them permission to give up what has, for decades, been an all-or-nothing issue. The REAL data, he claims, will show you that democrats are the ones saving babies, if you knew the truth you would see it cuts against Republicans and the vote that actually saves children is the Democratic one.
For that argument to work with thoughtful people, it has to carry a kernel of truth or at least sound plausible enough to persuade those unwilling to check and it does. Abortions fell through Obama’s two terms–that is true. AND under Trump’s first term they rose roughly eight percent to about 930,000 in 2020. That is the number French wants the reader to hold in mind. What French conveniently did not mention is that under Biden the climb got steeper, increasing 16% from 2020 to roughly 1.124 million in 2024 (an increase of 21% since Biden took over in 2020). On French’s own theory that Democratic compassion reduces abortion, the Catholic Democrat who ran on “healing the soul of the nation” should have been the reversal. He was the acceleration. That single fact should have killed the theory before it left French’s mouth, but I digress.
So if Trump’s libertine personality didn’t increase abortions, was it just an Obama era policy that Trump stopped? We need to press French on this specific question. Who is to blame for the sudden sustained increase in abortion?
Cultural messaging moves reproductive behavior
To answer this we need to first pause and consider how cultural messaging can influence all kinds of behavior but most specifically reproductive behavior. The best evidence for this sits in a 2015 American Economic Review paper by Melissa Kearney and Phillip Levine. They found that MTV’s 16 and Pregnant caused a 4.3 percent reduction in teen births in the eighteen months following the show’s June 2009 debut, accounting for roughly a quarter of the total teen-birth decline over that window. This was chalked up to the fact that so many young people saw the reality of raising a child alone. They recognized that sexual promiscuity could have a terrible impact on your life. All this was accomplished by one reality show that produced a quarter of a national decline of teen pregnancy in just a year and a half. Case closed. Effective messaging can influence even the most personal decisions.
What Democrats actually did
Now, back to the rise in abortions, which the data shows took off in 2017. If you look back starting around 2012 and culminating in 2016, Democrats began pushing all their chips in on messaging around abortion. It ran on two parallel threads.
The first lane has been a long running attempt to rebrand the procedure. We went from abortion being “Safe, legal, and rare” being dropped in 2012 to Hyde Amendment repeal being pushed by 2016 (that attempted to legalize taxpayer funded abortions). In just a few years it went from a regrettably necessary option to something everyone needed to pay for. By September 2023, NARAL even renamed itself “Reproductive Freedom for All.” Planned Parenthood’s president posted publicly that “abortion on demand” was right-wing language. Shout Your Abortion and Cecile Richards’s 2014 Elle disclosure built an influencer apparatus that treated the procedure as worth celebrating. In March 2024, Kamala Harris became the first sitting vice president to visit an abortion clinic. Democratic groups spent nearly a half billion dollars on abortion-related advertising across the 2022 and 2024 cycles. 12 years, from regrettable to a cause for celebration. Talk about a brainwashing campaign.
The second messaging thread looked to pathologize pregnancy. The multi-year campaign peaked in the Post-Dobbs media coverage of tragic maternal death’s being depicted as somehow a failure of abortion access. The narrative sought to flip the victim from the unborn child to now the mother. “Abortion Bans Will Result in More Women Dying” ran a headline from the Center for American Progress. The coverage was one-sided and non-stop. Women were at constant risk, the pieces said, leaving out the fact that none of those deaths were failures of abortion access, and further forgetting the small matter that the silver bullet solution of unfettered abortion access involved ending the life of the baby (who was notably absent from the conversation). “Pregnancy can kill you” became standard campaign messaging and if that wasn’t enough they even began floating the theory that women would be prosecuted for natural miscarriages. I’m not joking. This fear-based messaging was designed to push women toward abortions and it had been occurring for years.
My argument runs 16 and Pregnant backwards. That show made teen pregnancy vivid as hardship and reduced teen births. This messaging made women afraid of pregnancy and trained them to hear abortion as safe, responsible healthcare. Abortions have been climbing ever since.
To make things worse, the abortion industry’s infrastructure also caught up with this messaging and the increased demand for easy access. The Biden administration approved abortion pill access in 2021, which allowed for online prescribing and delivery in the mail. This pill-based abortion delivered often with no medical oversight, grew from 1 percent of all U.S. abortions in 2000 to 63 percent by 2023. Funny how French left that part out? Eight Democratic states passed shield laws protecting clinicians who mail pills into states where abortion is banned, and Aid Access alone shipped 118,000 pill packs into ban states between mid-2023 and late 2024. Plan B usage among sexually active women has also been rising with post-Dobbs sales spiking hard enough that some pharmacies rationed purchases. This all reads as a thermometer, measuring how thoroughly the messaging has worked: information (celebrate/pathologize) + access (abortion by mail) = massive increase.
A 44-year trend and five presidents
Now back to the Obama talking point. Abortion in America had been declining for 44 years. The rate peaked in 1980, not 2008, and has fallen under five consecutive administrations across both parties, from Reagan through Obama, with wildly different platforms and wildly different judicial philosophies. Cherry-picking Obama from inside a 44-year trend and crediting him with the slope is asinine. If the parties were driving the numbers, the slope would have moved when the parties moved. It did not.
What changed around 2016 (and a presidential election) was that Democrats made abortion their central cultural and electoral project. The rise began when the messaging campaign did. The increase is the return on nearly a half billion dollars of Democratic messaging across two cycles plus the coordinated partnership of the mass media.
If French’s libertine theory were remotely plausible, it should have stopped abruptly or slightly the moment a “Catholic family man” moved into the White House. It did not; it got steeper. Biden’s term produced the largest jump in clinical abortion in a generation while Trump was on a golf course in Florida. An argument that requires Trump to be the cause has to explain why his absence produced more abortions, not fewer. French does not explain it, because it cannot be explained.
One more thing…
I could stop here. But if you’ve read this far, I have a feeling you’ll stay with me. Despite the stats being dead wrong, I want to credit French and Democrats on one point where they are strong because it is an aspect of the argument being made. It goes something like, the increased social support and access to contraception that Democrats provide the poor gives single mothers the control and confidence to keep the baby. Republicans since they want to cut the welfare state and teach abstinence contribute to abortion.
Setting aside the fact the pro-life pregnancy centers (almost all founded by Christian conservatives giving time and money) outnumber abortion centers 4-1, there is again a kernel of truth when it comes to government policy. Increasing resources to single mothers can reduce abortions and contraception obviously assists in preventing pregnancies. But as you’ll see below, the government is famous for the unintended consequences of its policies – and this one is no different.
Anti-Child
One hallmark of the Obama-era was his march to expand contraception access (which he mandated become free in 2015). Hypothetically, that was one of the compassionate mechanisms that ultimately drove the lower abortion numbers. However, I’d contend it is also the mechanism that ultimately drove a generation of women into IVF. Put plainly, contraception enables women to delay childbearing without adjusting their sexual choices. The result of widespread contraceptive use over the years has seen women attempt their first to have a child roughly six years later than in 1970. Mean age at first birth has climbed from 21.4 in 1970 to 27.5 in 2023. The challenge with delay is that female fertility declines meaningfully in your 30’s. This means that a significant number of would-be parents who did delay now find themselves exploring IVF. And that has been devastating for embryonic life.
In 2021, American fertility clinics created about 4 million human embryos through IVF. Only 7 percent were ever transferred to a woman’s body. Only 2.3 percent became a baby. The other 93 percent were discarded, used for research, or frozen indefinitely in tanks of liquid nitrogen, where most will sit until their parents stop paying storage fees and a clinic eventually thaws them out. Run the scale. Roughly 3.7 million human beings per year never transferred. That is tens of millions over a decade. French credits Obama with 330,000 fewer abortions over eight years. The industry Obama’s contraceptive push funnelled women into will produce that same total in roughly five weeks.
The defense people usually reach for is that embryos die naturally too. It does not hold. Nearly all of these embryos never got the chance to try, only 7% are even placed in a womb. They were made in a dish, looked at under a microscope, ranked, and either thrown out or left in a freezer.
I am sure French would acknowledge IVF destruction as morally serious. But he has not, in any published writing I can find, placed it alongside abortion numbers. He treats IVF as a separate issue to be reformed over there while telling pro-life voters to elect the party whose anti-family, anti-marriage, contraception-centered platform funnels women toward the lab and freezer, as if the two were unrelated industries. They are one industry, running across a woman’s reproductive life. The woman told in her twenties that pregnancy is a threat and fertility is a problem to be managed is the same woman sitting in an IVF clinic at 37 hearing that her ovarian reserve is depleted and that most of the embryos her body produces will never be transferred. At best she produces a family under precarious conditions with an embryonic body count. At worst she is broke, childless, heartbroken, and still with a body count.
That brings up a bigger issue, this sustained decline we’ve seen in abortion numbers does not include loss from IVF. The decreased number of abortions were a win, but the reality did not take into account the reshuffle. While some abortions stopped happening in clinics many more started happening in laboratories (somewhere between 500-800,000 more). The tracked number went down while the untracked number exploded.
Anti-Marriage
The other aspect of the Democrat strategy that French talked about is material support for mothers. Peer-reviewed evidence does show it can reduce abortion at the margin. Herbst found that a $1,000 increase in the maximum EITC was associated with a 7.6 percent decline in the abortion rate. French cited the Romney family allowance directly:
“I remember when Mitt Romney proposed his child allowance, which would begin prenatally — so it’d begin before you gave birth, you would get about, I think, $1,200 a month or something like that… There was an estimate that that policy alone could perhaps lead to 20 to 30,000 fewer abortions.”
Grant the number and grant the mechanism. Then notice what French’s framing assumes, and what it papers over.
Married women almost never get abortions. CDC data from 2020 show that 86.3 percent of abortions are obtained by unmarried women. The abortion ratio is 46 per 1,000 live births for married women and 412 per 1,000 for unmarried women. Unmarried women abort at nine times the rate of married women. Any honest conversation about “what reduces abortion” has to account for that ratio first.
The financial precarity French wants to solve with a $1,200 monthly prenatal transfer is largely the downstream consequence of that same family structure collapse. Census data for 2024 show the poverty rate for single-mother families at 31.3 percent and the rate for married-couple families at 5.5 percent. Single-mother households are roughly six times as likely to live in poverty as married-couple households. The insecurity French wants to solve with more government is, in most cases, the absence of a husband.
The welfare architecture Democrats built and Democrats want to expand, running from SNAP and Medicaid through housing assistance, child care subsidies, and universal paid leave, is designed to make the absence of a husband economically survivable. It rewards the family structure that produces the precarity. Material support without marriage education treats a symptom. We must treat the cause.
The policy conclusion, then, is not complicated. If you want fewer children killed in abortion and fertility clinics and fewer children frozen in nitrogen tanks, you have to vote for the party that celebrates childbearing as good and calls marriage best. Those are the two cultural commitments that move the numbers, and only one party defends them. Republicans have never been perfect on either, and nothing in this piece is a defense of Trump’s record. Imperfect, though, is not the same as openly opposed. Democrats campaign against both. They war against the idea that every child deserves a mother and a father, against the idea that delayed fertility has a downstream cost, against the idea that a baby in the womb is a baby at all. The party whose messaging campaign is the single largest driver of the post-2017 rise is the party French wants pro-life voters to elect. To call that a pro-life vote is to vote with your eyes closed.
The final, most essential command
In 1984, Orwell wrote that the Party’s final and most essential command was to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. French is asking you to do the same. He wants you to believe that the party that parked a mobile clinic dispensing free medication abortions one mile from its own convention, in 2024, beside an inflatable IUD and a sign reading “We are the pro abortion majority,” is somehow the pro-life choice.
You can make arguments for Kamala Harris. You can argue she would have handled Ukraine more steadily, avoided lawfare, impeachment, or gotten something else right. Fine. I am not going to litigate those here. But the party that deserves a vote from someone whose priority is protecting unborn life cannot be the party whose running mate signed legislation in May 2023 gutting the Minnesota Born-Alive Infants Protection Act, stripping the statutory duty to preserve the life of infants born alive after attempted abortion. It cannot be the party whose presidential nominee became the first sitting vice president to visit an abortion clinic. It cannot be the party that hosted a death van a mile from its convention doors. It can only be the party that put three justices on the Supreme Court who delivered the most radical transformation of unborn protection this country has ever seen.
Nothing better demonstrates Orwell’s line than this. French is asking you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears and trust his winsome words instead.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Currently, I serve as the Executive Director of Them Before Us, advocating globally for the rights and well-being of children.
I am also the co-founder of All The Good, a leadership organization helping non-profits do all the good they are called to do.
I studied Cross-Cultural Ministry and Humanitarian and Disaster Leadership at Messiah and Wheaton. I read a lot and sleep less than I probably should.
My wife and I live in Charlotte, North Carolina with our 4 kids.
