by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

Few dare to discuss one of the great political, moral, demographic, economic and legal crises that we face, one which is caused by men who unadvisedly ejaculate into women’s vaginas.

Men have been going for that last great thrust forever, but in the past it resulted in families of 19 children. In recent decades, guys who launch their seed to a woman’s egg have caused their girlfriends to march among feminists with protest placards and later head en masse for a medical procedure fraught with weird moral implications.

Quebec’s low-birthrate/high-abortion culture threatens all those sacrifices we’ve made to promote and perpetuate French culture in North America. We’re not replacing ourselves, so it’s on to Plan B, where we save our provincial culture by trying to persuade suckers from poorer countries to move here and enter into our schools, our stores without apostrophes and movie theatres for Elvis Gratton sequels.

Our abortion rate is right up there with impoverished developing countries. Our 2002 abortion rate was 42.6 abortions per 100 births—over four times that of Holland, over twice that of France and well ahead of the rest of Canada and the States.

It’s an unpopular, somewhat taboo subject for discourse. University scholars keep promising to decipher this trend as soon as they solve the problem of wicker expansion in underwater basketweaving.

But it’s been a real revolution. Anybody born prior to 1974, when the abortion rate was about one-sixth of what it is today, should ponder whether they’re only alive because there was no abortion clinic three metro stops away from their mom’s place back then.

If you’re born in the abortion era, you’re at least secure in knowing that you were actively wanted. Rapper the Game explicitly thanks his mother in one of his songs for choosing to keep him. Thanking your mom for not aborting you is essential, it’s the new normal. Look for the tastefully embossed Mother’s Day card.

The pre-abortion era coincided with the non-divorce era, which means that miscalculated sexual activity would often force people into an entire life sentence with somebody they couldn’t stand. How such incompatible couples coped is one of those historical questions nobody can ever answer, right up there with the question about how myopics got around before glasses were invented.

Some abortions happened long ago, but the alternatives were sufficiently unpleasant to serve as a major disincentive. You could opt for the dangerous coat-hanger home-abortion kit, or pretend you just got fat and then drown your baby in a river.

One fashionable academic theory is inspired by the joke about Crimestoppers funding abortions among (insert ethnic group here) to keep a criminal off the streets. This theory links the decline in the crime rate to the rise in abortions. Thus women who have abortions are often eliminating future criminals. Those Hells Angels assassins and violent criminals were children of mothers who tragically got to the abortion clinic five minutes after it closed.

About 29,000 abortions are performed annually in Quebec. There are 50 different free clinics. Why? One otherwise intelligent French language magazine article I read implausibly theorizes that downtown Montreal immigrants were inflating the totals.

Another article on the issue looks authoritative, until it sneaks in the suggestion that Montreal’s women are going through a depression crisis caused by guilt of having abortions earlier in their lives.

I suspect young Quebecers reject parenthood for a bunch of reasons. It’s considered less prestigious than before. We live in a culture of excessive worry that has us wringing hands over polluted rivers, government debt and violent cartoons. We’re undervaluing and underpaying young adults, including potentially breadwinning fathers. Our most fertile citizens are constantly in hock to student loans and hired on contract rather than a full-time position.

It requires a certain discipline to resist the temptation to panic over every new trend, but we need some babies to be born, otherwise nobody will be around to pay our pensions and bag our groceries when we’re in our fading dotage.

Comments? kgravy@openface.ca