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Not Personal, Not Political, But Social, by Jim Tonkowich – Brown Pelican Society of Lousiana

Not Personal, Not Political, But Social, by Jim Tonkowich

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By Jim Tonkowich, The Stream, January 22, 2025

James Tonkowich is a freelance writer, speaker, and commentator on spirituality, religion, and public life. He is the author of The Liberty Threat: The Attack on Religious Freedom in America Today and Pears, Grapes, and Dates: A Good Life After Mid-Life and serves as director of distance learning at Wyoming Catholic College. He also hosts the college’s weekly podcast, The After Dinner Scholar.

Jim TonkowichJust in time for the annual March for Life, several homes in my neighborhood have yard signs reading: “Pregnancy Is Personal, Not Political.”

That’s half right: Pregnancy is not political. Politics involves who we elect as president, governor, or mayor. It has to do with strategic energy reserves and borders, diplomacy, and national defense. Politics along with public policy and law are abstract and impersonal. Pregnancy is none of those things, and the countries that are attempting to make pregnancy a political issue are failing.

To maintain the population, each American woman would have to bear 2.1 children. In the United States, that rate is 1.7 and dropping — which isn’t good, but given, for example, the fact that South Korea’s birth rate is 0.8, it isn’t too bad. Since demography is destiny, countries with falling birthrates address the problem politically by incentivizing couples to have larger families with offers such as lifetime exemption from income taxes, inexpensive child care, and minivan subsidies, but nothing they’ve tried works. Why? Because they assume that pregnancy — or the lack thereof — is political and has a political solution. …

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