Are We Weimar?

“How lonely sits the city that was full of people! How like a widow has she become, she that was great among the nations!… Her children have gone away.” — Lamentations 1:1, 5

Alright, everybody, time for a pop quiz: What were the four leading causes of death in the United States from 2022 to 2023?

Time’s up. Put down your pencils. The answers are, in order:

1. heart disease
2. cancer
3. COVID-19
4. abortions performed by Planned Parenthood

Surprised by number four? You shouldn’t be. Planned Parenthood (PP) is a genocidal juggernaut, a mighty slayer of the unborn. Its “business is abortion, abortion and more abortion,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, reminds us in a statement issued to the media (April 17). And yet, PP’s annual report for 2022-2023, titled Above & Beyond, still “shocks the conscience,” Dannenfelser says, showing that it “ended nearly 393,000 American lives in a single year.” This “puts abortions performed by Planned Parenthood in the top four leading causes of death.”

Every year, the National Center for Health Statistics of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) releases a Data Brief on “Mortality in the United States.” If it had included figures from Above & Beyond in its most recent release (Dec. 2022), abortions performed by PP would have ranked fourth, behind only heart disease (695,547 deaths), cancer (605,213), and COVID-19 (416,893).

In fact, more Americans died at the hands of Planned Parenthood than died from strokes (162,890), Alzheimer’s disease (119,399), and diabetes (103,294) combined.

As Dannenfelser says, abortion is PP’s business. And business is booming. PP received $700 million in taxpayer funding (one-third of its total revenue), closing the fiscal year with $2.5 billion in net assets — a pretty penny. And it’s made good use of that money. “Nearly one in four women has had an abortion,” PP proclaims, and “demand at Planned Parenthood health centers in states where abortion is protected has soared by up to 700%.”

This is a remarkable statistic. It means that Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (June 2022), the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that essentially rendered abortion illegal at the federal level, hasn’t had the net positive effect pro-lifers presumed and even promised it would.

Indeed, abortion data post-Dobbs is decidedly depressing for pro-lifers. According to the pro-abortion Society of Family Planning (SFP), the average number of abortions per month in the United States has actually increased. “In the year since the Dobbs decision,” SFP says in its #WeCount Report (Oct. 24, 2023), “compared to the average monthly number of abortions observed in the pre-Dobbs period of April and May 2022, there were 2,200 cumulative more abortions during the 12 months July 2022 to June 2023” (italics added).

Strangely, rather than stemming the tide of abortions in America, Dobbs seems to have had the opposite effect. The pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute, in its Monthly Abortion Provision Study for March 2024, estimates 1.026 million abortions in the United States in 2023 — the highest number in over a decade. That would make abortion the number one leading cause of death among Americans — by an overwhelming margin. (PP performs an estimated 40 percent of all abortions.)

Americans have an insatiable bloodlust; they just seem to love killing their babies, and it appears that nothing will stop them.

There is an obvious but oft-overlooked corollary to this spike in abortions. Another report from the CDC, Birth: Provisional Data from 2023 (April 25), found that the U.S. fertility rate has fallen to its lowest point ever. Only 3.59 million births were recorded in 2023. That’s a decline of only two percent from 2022, which doesn’t seem like a big deal, but it’s a decline of an alarming 15 percent since the most recent high of 4.26 million births in 2006.

The American child might soon be an endangered species.

Abortions rates are sky high. Birth rates are at rock bottom. Obviously, that’s not great for the health of our nation — or its future. What can we make of it?

We can observe, on the surface, that Americans are rejecting parenthood on a scale not seen in our nation’s history. This suggests a turning point, a widespread cultural embrace of negation, of nihilism — in other words, a crystallization of the culture of death, a culture that revels in death (not only via abortion but in all forms) and seeks toward the terminus of all things, including that of its own self.

The West’s so-called demographic winter, when the population fails to produce progeny in numbers sufficient to ensure its survival, has been addressed in certain corners for years. For a prime example, see the work of the Population Research Institute, founded by Fr. Paul Marx, O.S.B. (1920-2010), a longtime friend of the NOR, and led by Steven W. Mosher, a Catholic convert.

Even Pope Francis has weighed in, saying, “The birth rate is the first indicator of a people’s hope. Without children and young people, a country loses its drive for the future” (May 10).

But sometimes the “natalist” commentary comes from surprising sources. Billionaire Elon Musk (no paragon of family virtue: he’s sired 11 children with three different women, at least one via surrogacy) told an audience at a Wall Street Journal forum in December 2021 that “one of the biggest risks to civilization is the low birth rate and rapidly declining birth rate.” As principal owner of the social-media site X (formerly Twitter), Musk can be found “tweet-storming” fairly frequently about America’s declining birth rate.

More recently, the left-leaning Atlantic published an article titled “A Culture That Kills Its Children Has No Future” (May 26, 2022). The title alone is telling. Author Elizabeth Bruenig, who has a master’s degree in Christian theology from the University of Cambridge, appears to have her finger on the weakening pulse of our popular culture. She writes:

Any culture debased to vacillating between violent struggle and idle nihilism is shuddering toward its end as a culture of death. And a culture of death is like a prophecy, or a sickness: It bespeaks itself in worsening phases. Right now, we find ourselves foreclosing upon our own shared future both recklessly and deliberately — and perhaps, gradually, beginning to behave as if there is no future for us at all…. Moral decline of this kind produces strange and grotesque effects as it works its way, acidlike, through a society.

Bruenig is writing here about school shootings (another tragic characteristic of our culture of death), but she very well could have been writing about America’s obsession with abortion. Both are what Bruenig calls “morbid symptoms of a society coming undone.”

The sense that our civilization is at risk, as Musk suggests, that our culture is “shuddering toward its end,” as Bruenig writes, is palpable. The chatterati are abuzz that the United States is on the brink of…something. Civil war? Collapse? Renewal?

Well, not renewal. Not too many are predicting that, or are even hopeful of it. Rather, many Americans are dogged by the unshakeable foreboding that our nation is passing over into a new era in her history — not a happy one but a dismal, even disastrous one. And the thinkers among us have been casting about for a historical precedent to help make sense of our present predicament.

For extra credit on our pop quiz, can you name one of those historical precedents?

If you said the Roman Empire, you get an additional point — but only one, because that’s the obvious answer. No matter how accurate, the comparison has become banal, at least since Cullen Murphy wrote Are We Rome?: The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America (2007).

If you said the Weimar Republic, you get a gold star.

The parallels between the contemporary United States and Weimar Germany (1918-1933) are multifaceted, though of course imperfect. Weimar Germany was host to a libertine culture, as is ours. Homosexuality was a prominent feature (the world’s first popular lesbian magazine, Die Freundin, ran from 1924 until the Nazis shut it down), as was anti-Semitism (which is rearing its ugly head yet again on U.S. college campuses, as pro-Palestinian protestors fail to distinguish between Zionists and Jews). Drug-dealing, prostitution, and organized crime were rife in Berlin and other major cities while organic farming and holistic health techniques rose in popularity (Joseph Pilates developed his system of exercise in those years).

Sound familiar?

Politically, the situation in Weimar Germany was chaotic: the parliamentary democracy was under intense pressure from fractionalization and extremism. In a foreshadowing of our top-down COVID-19 restrictions, Article 48 of the newly devised Constitution allowed the president to suspend civil rights and operate independently in the event of an emergency.

Economically, inflation was endemic, and the cost of living steadily rose, eventually giving way to a depression. The government, too reliant on foreign investments (for them, American; for us, Chinese), printed excessive amounts of money, devaluing its currency.

Are you getting a sense of déjà vu yet?

Most significantly, for our purposes, Weimar Germany was distinguished by “the lowest birth rate in the Western world,” writes Cornelie Usborne, professor emerita of history at Roehampton University in London, in Cultures of Abortion in Weimar Germany (2007). Between the world wars, Germany experienced a steep population decline: Those who married prior to 1905 averaged 4.7 children per family; those who married in 1925-1929, only two. With this fall in birthrate came “a new hedonism in women’s sexuality.”

Abortion was illegal based on Article 218 of the penal code, a holdover from the Deutsche Reichsgründung (1871), but a pro-abortion groundswell arose. In February 1931 two doctors, along with 300 of their patients, were charged with violating the abortion ban. That sparked over 1,500 protests across Germany on International Women’s Day — a precursor of the pro-abortion Summer of Rage protests in 2022 in reaction to Dobbs — and the Federation of German Women’s Organizations demanded a repeal of Article 218.

And just like the recent #ShoutYourAbortion social-media trend, in which women were encouraged to announce with pride that they’d aborted their babies, the Committee of Self-Incrimination Against §218 encouraged German celebrities to come forward and admit to having had, or having aided in, an abortion (Albert Einstein was among those who did so). Gradually, the laws were loosened, and abortion was eventually decriminalized in cases of danger to the life of the mother.

As history proved, the Weimar Republic wasn’t long for this world. For a number of reasons — economic, cultural, and political, some unique — it was superseded by the Third Reich. But Germany then presents a cautionary example for us now. “The Weimar Republic was a society committing suicide in slow motion. It could neither stop the killing of its unborn children nor control the degrading hedonism that accompanied this practice,” wrote the late, great Anne Barbeau Gardiner in her review of Usborne’s book (NOR, Dec. 2009). “In retrospect, one might call Weimar a very weak form of the culture of death, a preview of what now prevails in much of the Western world. It was so weak it easily caved in when confronted with a fiercer form of that same culture.”

When Adolf Hitler wrested control of the government, first by popular vote and then by the aforementioned Article 48, he “made abortion virtually inaccessible for German women of supposedly superior ‘stock,’” Gardiner wrote, and he “legalized it and sometimes made it (along with sterilization) compulsory for women of what he called ‘inferior races.’” Thus, she concluded, “did Weimar’s ‘cultures of abortion’ usher in the Holocaust…. The road to Hitler was paved with abortions.”

Could our present problems likewise lead to a new tyranny in the United States — a “fiercer form” of what we already know?

Looking back to the past to try to puzzle out the future can be a salutary exercise. Another is to heed the warnings of literary prophets of doom, in this case, author P.D. James.

In The Children of Men (1992), which takes place in 2021, James envisions a world in which mankind stopped reproducing over two decades earlier. Nobody knows why — even the scientists can’t figure it out — and James offers no definitive answer. Declining sperm count is suggested, and — not coincidentally — that’s another one of our problems today. Male sperm count declined 62.3 percent worldwide from 1973 to 2018, according to a study published in Human Reproduction Update (March-April 2023).

That’s not all. In James’s future world — specifically England, the novel’s setting — sex is “the least important of man’s sensory pleasures.” And though people still marry, they often unite with members of the same sex. As was Weimar Germany, and as is the United States, the fertility-phobic society James portrays is committing suicide in slow motion.

Not surprisingly, the England of James’s imaginings is ruled by a tyrant: a warden named Xan who enjoys absolute power. Xan’s government pursues a policy of aggressive euthanasia (abortion, obviously, is not necessary).

Population decline and tyranny are strange bedfellows, in both history and literature.

America is on a collision course with its future, and the future looks grim. The signposts that fly by as we careen forward aren’t exactly clear, but they offer fair warning of what could be to come.

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