On matters of life and death, it has been a bracing month of March. Whatever term one uses to describe it, the excursion or war in the Middle East has had mortal stakes.

In the United Kingdom, debates over life-and-death matters have seen mixed results. Scotland has rejected a proposal to legalize assisted suicide, while the British Parliament has adopted a policy one opposing member called a “form of infanticide,” only the latest phase there to eliminate all understanding of our unborn offspring as human beings. On the obituary page, two of the most prominent figures in the battles over population control and abortion — Paul Ehrlich and Kermit Gosnell — have gone to meet their Maker. Both of them enjoyed longer-than-expected life expectancy, one of those ironies in this world that evades our limited understanding.

With all these events cascading around us, another statistical report on abortion from the Guttmacher Institute has drawn barely a ripple of attention. The report discusses estimated U.S. abortion totals for 2025, and it is a sadness of great magnitude. As scholar and statistician Michael New has summarized the report, total abortions in the United States grew in 2025 to 1,126,000.

The increase continues a trend dating back to 2017, that is, through the first Trump administration, that of Joe Biden, and now the first year of the second Trump administration. The trend predates the Dobbs decision by five years and now seems well-established. One can debate the impact of the Dobbs ruling on abortion rates, but the truth is that the defining issues regarding abortion policy during this period have themselves been stable for nearly a decade: abortion is now largely a phenomenon of isolated women or third parties securing pills via the mail under conditions of minimal legal regulation or medical oversight.

Abortion is health care, say some activists. But abortion as practiced today, with self-administration of mifepristone and misoprostol turning the home into a killing field for the newest of our brothers and sisters, bears no resemblance to true medicine. Pill producers typically seek minimal medical or social information from their clients, dismiss the need for common tests to ensure maternal safety, disguise the ramifications of the drugs they dispense, and often urge clients to lie about their consumption of drugs designed to attack their children.

A number of states are engaged in efforts to forestall the distribution of these drugs within their boundaries, but, as Guttmacher calculates, the net impact of these efforts has not been favorable to life. The truth is hard but real: that states now have the ability to address abortion, an idea championed by a weary GOP under the Trump administration, is a fiction. Abortion is in the stream of national and international commerce. We have gotten used to it.

New points to Guttmacher’s analysis of the interstate dealing of death. In 2025, in states that had some form of abortion ban in place, 62,000 women and girls obtained abortion in other states, a 16% decline from the previous year. This welcome decline was more than offset, however, by a 26% increase in the number of telehealth abortions obtained in these states. Among certain elements in our culture, including leading political and intellectual figures who engage in chin-pulling about the world’s declining birthrates, bewailing our depleting natality has become performance art — expressing galactic-level worries while declining to elevate the status of the child and continuing to embrace eugenics-laced ideology. Preliminary data for 2024 suggests that the U.S. total fertility rate reached the lowest ever at 1.6 children per woman, with a possible “slight” decline again in 2025.

Advocates for abortion in the mail do not openly celebrate population demise these days, but the ethos of the Planned Parenthood Federation, heir to the social philosophy of Margaret Sanger and patron of the anti-human ideas of Ehrlich — the ideas that have long drawn billions of dollars in investment from people like Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, and George Soros (not to mention Uncle Sam) still rely on the bleakest evaluations of the human future.

Even ventures into outer space, which stirred the blood of my generation in the ‘50s and ‘60s, are now mostly portrayed as desperate attempts to flee dystopian calamities on Earth. One walks into a supermarket today and sees an array of goods and foods our parents and earlier generations would have swooned to encounter — and one wonders, how did we ever get so dark a view of our present and future? The answer is obvious in a way: such a disjunction in prospects and attitude is a spiritual crisis, a turning away from our Judeo-Christian heritage and what it has taught nation after nation about the permanent things of love, charity, and justice.

Not being given to quoting the late Senator Ted Kennedy very often, I am nonetheless reminded of his 1983 comment about what he regarded as the proliferation of nuclear bombs. “The United States has the capacity to make the Soviet rubble bounce all the way from Moscow to Vladivostok — and the Soviets can make our rubble bounce all the way from Providence to the Pacific,” he said. Guttmacher’s matter-of-fact calculations on the destruction of innocent human life have a similar feel. Planned Parenthood, you said you wanted every child to be a wanted child, and now you seem to want next to none.

How best should more hopeful Americans respond in this heyday of the culture of death? There remain bright spots in a cosmos of debris that we can celebrate and seek to expand. The stories of women and girls successfully reversing the lethal impact of abortion pills are among the most thrilling. In February, Heartbeat International reported that documented cases of successful abortion pill reversal (APR) have reached 8,000 to date — that is at least 8,000 babies born who were nudged to the brink of destruction by practitioners indifferent to the ancient standards of the Hippocratic Oath. States can continue to attempt to ensure that women seeking these pills are aware of APR. Better still, as the Trump administration reviews the FDA’s greenlighting of mifepristone, it should adopt, among other good ideas, a requirement for APR information to be included in any patient packaging and website information regarding the drug. Abortion champions want women to lose hope. We must never go along.

At the same time, the pro-life movement as a whole can take its own polls seriously and demand more from leaders in Congress and the federal government regarding the right to life. In nearly five decades in Washington, D.C., where I attended countless meetings and many a debate, I cannot remember a time when voices of conscience regarding women and the unborn were cheered as the fair-haired children of the partisan political classes. For the most part, good members and staffers in Congress engaged on life issues prompted by profound concerns for morality and social goods, but they knew that it was second nature for elected officials to prefer to spend their time on things like bridge openings and building dedications.

In recent months, the voice of conscience does seem to be awakening. Consistent leaders like Senators Josh Hawley of Missouri (R) and Bill Cassidy, M.D. of Louisiana (R) have pressed hard on the mifepristone front, recognizing that the future of abortion does not lie in Planned Parenthood clinics but in brown-paper bags in our pill-saturated society. In such a battle, there will be no path to progress and protection that does not have women firmly on its side. The treatment of women by political powers in both parties must be a prime issue for our cause.

I mentioned above the spiritual crisis we are in. The Easter Season, which calls to mind the loss of so many of the people we treasure over a long life, accentuates the fact that every resurrection is preceded by a death, every Easter Sunday morning by a way of the cross and three days in the tomb. The toll celebrated in the Guttmacher report suggests we are a long way from turning our nation back to life, but the gospel makes clear how quickly reliance on Jesus Christ can overcome evil.

Thirty-five years ago, my colleague Robert Marshall and I wrote a history of the social policy of Planned Parenthood that we called “Blessed Are the Barren.” Those are the stark words Jesus Christ spoke (Luke 23:29) to a crowd of grieving women who approached him on the Via Dolorosa. “But Jesus turned to them and said, ‘Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for Me, but weep for yourselves and for your children. Look the days are coming when people will say, ‘Blessed are the barren women, the wombs that never bore, and breasts that never nursed!’ At that time they will say to the mountains, ‘Fall on us!’ and to the hills, ‘Cover us!’” I struggled to understand the full import of those prophetic words but they struck us then as capturing the hideousness of rejection of the most basic of all goods in the best of times — the green wood embodied by our young.

Can we turn away from this season of weeping and despair that takes such a massive toll, especially among women? Must more sorrow come in the approaching dryness? The answer of Easter is no, and the answer for us is to embrace anew the God who gave us life and wills for us to have it in abundance.