Counting The Cost: A World Shaped by Abortion | January 18, 2026

What happens to a country when the value of life is negotiated instead of protected? In this episode, we take a hard, honest look at how abortion has reshaped law, culture, and conscience from Roe to Dobbs, and why the arguments on both sides have stayed fixed even as methods and numbers shift. With clinics declining and chemical abortions rising, the data reveal a sobering reality: legality moves, but the practice persists, and the ripple effects stretch across families, faith, and the fabric of public life.

************

Father Don Wolf is a priest of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City. Living Catholic also broadcasts on Oklahoma Catholic Radio several times per week, with new episodes airing every Sunday.

Transcript

Setting The Stage: Roe To Dobbs

SPEAKER_01 0:03

This is Living Catholic with Father Don Wolf. This show deals with living the Catholic faith in our time. Discovering God's presence in our lives and finding hope in his word. And now, your host, Father Don Wolfe.

Legal Shift To The States

Unchanged Arguments And Moral Lines

Abortion Numbers And Pill Usage

Measuring Cultural Effects Over Time

Demographics, Birthrates, And Immigration

A Society Afraid Of Children

Institutions Erode Without The Next Generation

SPEAKER_00 0:20

Welcome, Oklahoma, to Living Catholic, Father Don Wolfe, pastor of Sacred Heart Parish and rector of the shrine of Blessed Stanley Rother. And we've come to that time of the year in which we focus again on abortion. The Roe v. Wade decision of the Supreme Court in 1973 was announced on January the 22nd, and thus that date has become inscribed in our culture as the time in which this issue comes to the fore. While the court decision has shifted weight in the intervening years with the Dobbs decision, abortion is still a part of our national political dialogue, as well as a gigantic moral challenge in our culture and our country. It's an issue that won't go away. The Dobbs decision took the question of abortion legislation and returned it to the states. Each individual state now has the capacity to pass laws restricting or permitting abortion in its jurisdiction, all of which is disallowed by the Roe v. Wade decision. To this end, about half the states now outlaw abortion and the other half permit it. What the meaning of this practice portends for us as a people is pending. We certainly can make some predictions based on what some of the outcomes have been so far, but as Yogi Berra said so pointedly, predictions are hard, especially about the future. Arguments for and against abortion haven't changed a whit in these intervening years. The drama of the question has now moved to individual states, but the language of argumentation has remained pretty much the same. If you picked up a bulletin from a Catholic Church from 50 years ago, adverting to the Church's position about abortion, it would be identical to one from last year. And the same could be said about a flyer from Planned Parenthood. The moral stakes are straightforward. Abortion is wrong because it takes the life of an innocent. This is the Church's stance, and it has been for millennia. In our society, on the other hand, abortion has been promoted as a right in which women can take control of their circumstances, which includes having absolute control over the life growing in the womb. These positions are at odds with one another and are not open to compromise. Neither side can afford to hold its position and at the same time carve out exceptions or limit the foundational principle. Thus, when it comes to the conversation, the sides have drawn their lines and are not giving way. Perhaps it was inevitable the states should be drawn up with a more or less 50-50 when it comes to the issue. It's either all or nothing. And as we look at the situation at present, the opportunity to change the law has not produced as positive an outcome as proponents had hoped. The number of abortions have remained about the same over the last couple of years. There are about as many now as there were before the laws changed. There are many fewer in clinics than in previous years, but the total number has not greatly decreased. This seems mostly to be due to the great expansion of chemical abortion pills, the use of which has gone up dramatically. In the states where there are no allowable abortions, the rank number has decreased, but this seems to have been evened out by the sums in the other state. It's a depressing reality. Abortion seems to be written into society. It's going to be a part of what people choose to do in whatever form they can accomplish it. This has been one of the talking points among those who continue to promote access to abortion, especially those who promote abortion pills. Their insistence on the need for access highlights the interest and the practice of the many hundreds of thousands of women who opt for abortion each year. All these elements of the practice of abortion have been hashed out over the years. Nothing much has been added to the contest between the positions. Other than improving imagery of the child in the womb, everyone can see in the technology that in the womb, nothing much changes except the contest between the positions, other than improving the imagery of the child in the womb that everyone can see, and the technology that's moving the date of a viable birth farther and farther back. It's not very helpful to talk about the actual procedure or the moral weight of the decision to carry the child or to terminate the pregnancy. It's all been done. In our time, while people still refer to the child in the womb as a clump of cells, the truth of 3D ultrasounds make the pretense that this isn't a child as foolish as those who insist the earth is flat. No one can truly say the scrumped up the scrunched-up faces of that creature in the womb isn't a baby's visage. So those who are in favor of abortion do acknowledge it as killing a child, but they acknowledge it as necessary and important, an expected and integral part of postmodern society. Not to have access to this right, they say, is to be deprived of what it means to live in such a society. But what we haven't done much of is to talk about its effect. We're now more than 50 years into this societal experiment. It is certainly time for us to consider what this change has wrought among us. One of the truths of social experiments is that those who propose them almost never live to see the results, and therefore can never be proved wrong or be justified as right. By the time society sees the result of the changes implemented, those who did the changing are all gone. However, we who have watched these changes become a part of our common society, we're still here, and we've remembered enough of how things used to be to be able to measure how things have become. It's not illegitimate to take our yardsticks and begin to measure. In fact, we owe it to everyone to be as accurate and detailed as we can be, describing how things used to be and how they are now. As has been pointed out over and over, the prophets of the Old Testament were not those who looked into a crystal ball and saw the handwriting of future headlines. The prophets were those who looked around to see what was really going on in their societies and had the courage to write about it about their ultimate outcomes. That's what's required for us as we look around to see what we've become. The world since Roe v. Wade has changed. Part of this change has come from the reality of abortion enacted some 65 million times in our society over these last 50 plus years. It's made a difference. The first thing to notice is that we are now a population of 330 million people in our country. That number grew by something like 10 million over the previous four years. And this growth was not an accident. It was prompted by unprecedented immigration across the borders. While immigration has been going on these previous 50 years, this surge was something different. It was a huge number of people in just a few years. And it was prompted and promoted by those who are convinced we have to grow the country of we have to grow the country of those we have to grow the number of those who occupy our country. This is not subversive or even partisan to say. It's been more or less our policy for generations. The social safety net and the future of our economy is based on growth. The birth rate in the U.S. has fallen to its lowest level ever and shows no sign of rebounding. Immigration from outside our border is the only source of growth if there is no growth among those between the borders. And this phenomenon has taken place amid the 65 million of those in our society who've never been born. While no one moved by the tragedy of killing the unborn wants to resort to numbers, especially the raw numbers about economic growth and sustaining the burdens of Social Security, those numbers are a part of the common dialogue about our national future. And since it's no coincidence that they're thrown about continually when laws and policies are discussed, we are a people who have decided not to have children. Not providing for a succeeding generation has consequences. Abortion is woven into those decisions. When I was first ordained, 45 years ago, I heard young women tell me that they didn't want to have children because it would be a burden on the world. They didn't want to bring new life into a world of misery and blight. It would be cruel to those children and to the world at large. That's what they said. Even though they actually had no idea of what real misery really was. I doubt most of them had even spent one summer in Oklahoma without air conditioning, much less had gone a day without the prospect of a meal. They were convinced that misery was just around the corner if another child might be born. They thought little that their aversion to children would produce the misery that they wanted to avoid. It would seem these fears have only become more intense. But it is the case. When we refuse to grow, we refuse to embrace the future. This refusal has consequences. And like the consequences of all of our decisions, many of them lie outside of what we can foresee. Certainly, they often lie outside of what we want. Abortion has changed our future. This takes place within the wider truth that we seem to have become terrified of children. It sounds odd to say this given how careful we are about the needs of children in our time. Just investigate what it costs to install a children's playground with all of the necessary safety equipment. Setting up jungle gyms, monkey bars, and swing sets, by the time they're equipped with the correct mats and soils is almost as expensive as building a small house. But in just about every context, children are isolated, segregated, and held apart. It's safe to say they're scarcely a part of common society at all. A while back, I was looking at some home movies taken in the 1940s in Iowa that had been posted on YouTube. There's nothing much remarkable about them, they're short reels of the town parade, of a couple of guys harvesting oats, and of Saturday morning in the town square. It's all pretty tame, except that in these movies, there are children everywhere. They're part of everyone's life and they fill every frame. It reminds me of when I was a child. Now, more and more, children are absent from everything. When was the last time you drove through a neighborhood and saw three boys together riding their bikes on the sidewalk? When did you last see a bunch of kids playing baseball in a vacant lot? Or when have you seen a family in church all lined up in the pews together? Children have practically ceased being an integral part of our lives together. What would have been the norm of our national life in every part of the country is now as rare as the zoo animals we look at behind bars and fences. We've become afraid of kids. And this fear has extended to those who have every right to expect and to welcome children into their lives. It's not uncommon for newly married couples to be disappointed that they might become pregnant right away, as if such a thing was unprecedented or unexpected. And certainly having more than a few children is regarded as adventuresome at best, reckless at worst. Mothers have told me their doctors advised against them having more than three children because it might damage their health, which would have been an odd bit of medical advice for my grandmother, who had 13 children and lived to be 92. But in a society fearful of children, any child, much less many children, is a threat. While this may seem to be a silly trend, a kind of societal oddity, like the French and their obsessions with food, or the Germans and their reputation for order, it's actually a destructive aspect of life. When a society chooses not to think of itself in terms of its children, when the next generation is not woven into the normative life of a people, it sets itself on the path to destruction. If there is a distinct aversion to the ones who come after us, what future will there be for us? And if there is no future and we want it that way, then there'll be no plans for the future. At least there will be nothing much done to make the future a place of goodness and hope. This seems to describe a good many of our deliberations over the last generation. There's no need to worry about our own stewardship if there's no future to worry about. If we're not concerned about the welfare of those to come, the institutions built to provide for the welfare of those who come after us are deliberately weakened. Things begin to collapse in on themselves, especially those institutions that were originally oriented solely for the future. Allergy to children begins to cause irritation to the whole body. There's a lesson written into history. When King Henry VIII began to take apart the legacy of the Catholic Church in England, he was anxious to get out the money and the property the Church had stewarded for the education of children. Education at the time was not a governmental function, but an ecclesial one. But in order to create the semi-modern state that he had in mind, the king needed money to satisfy his nobles and to accomplish his agenda. With this in mind, he confiscated the legacies dedicated to schooling, especially the endowments left to monasteries. The effect was notable. Within ten years, there was almost no one qualified to go to university, since so few had been able to go to grade school. The interruption lasted for generations, since so little money was forthcoming to provide for the average smart kid to learn to read and write. Subsequently, the University of Oxford entered a period in which it graduated fewer than 10 students a year. Thinking only of the present helped to collapse the future. We're not far off. But the institutions of education are only the merest example. Our tolerance of fiscal irresponsibility, the corporate focus on immediate profits, the starving funds, the starving of funds available for long-term research, the denigration of entry-level access to younger people, all have their impact on making way for those who are to come after us. Plus, there is a general disinterest in society of those who are not us, who are not concerned about the same problems and anxieties that we are. Focus on the future is to appreciate the next generation for what they can be and what they will become. And we seem to do little of that. Our allergies affect the whole society. But the most significant of all the impacts of abortion is to wonder what this level of killing has on our society as a whole. Apart from what we think of children or any particular policy, when it comes to government decisions, what does it do to a people who know that 65 million of their brothers and sisters have been sacrificed in order for the society to function? What does killing do to how we think and feel? It almost certainly makes a difference. The only thing left to consider in any serious examination is what it might be, because it certainly does matter. Think of the numbers. Sixty five million children whose lives have been ended means that there are a hundred and thirty million parents involved. That also means there are two hundred and sixty million grandparents whose lives have been deprived of the grandchild. At a minimum, there'd also be sixty-five million others who have been shorted a brother or a sister. Add those figures, all those figures, and it sums to five hundred and twenty million who have been touched by abortion in the last 50 years. The population of the country is 330 million now. Over the last 50 years, another 100 million had died, not including abortion, which is an oddity that is not considered since abortion is killing, but I guess that's part of the story. Add all that together, you get to 430 million people. The larger number of those affected by abortion dwarfs the number of those who have lived and died and are living now over this last half century. Which is to say, every person in the country has been affected by this robust killing regime. Everyone has been touched by what has happened. It's not easy to describe a national spirit or a national ethos. We have a general notion of such things, but like a lot of sensibilities, it's hard to describe exactly, although it's common to talk about such things. Maybe jokes do it best. That is, when somebody describes an Englishman being non-plussed by a nonsensical rule, or a German who insists that he's in the right, or a Russian who's crude or uninformed, we're all ready to laugh because we know how the joke's setting up. National characteristics are obvious if we fly over them at exactly the right altitude. What does the open advocacy for killing the innocent do to a society? What does it do to our society? What does a half century of virtually unrestricted elimination of problematic pregnancy do to all of us together? It's not a foolish question. More than anything, it's a vital marker for the future. Who are we and what will we become if this aspect gnaws even more deeply into ourselves? More than anything, it seems we grow uninterested in the value of life. In many states there is now support for assisted suicide. Interestingly, the support for suicide is strongest in the places that also empowers abortion, in many cases up to the moment of birth. If killing is okayed for the youngest among us, it's hard to insist it not be available for the oldest as well. When human life can be snuffed out for any reason or for no reason, it's hard to advocate for its preservation in difficult situations or hard cases. Of course, in every place where assisted suicide has been allowed, there follows on very quickly an advocacy for assisted killing of those who have not yet quite decided on their own demise. Chosen quickly becomes unchosen. Or to be more precise, just as in abortion, one person presides over the decision to end the life of another, so also in a regime of medical aid in dying, there quickly devolves a system in which another decides to cause the death of another. Medical aid in dying quickly becomes medical aid in killing, almost automatically. And soon after that, medicine becomes an armarium of quick, succinct removal of those whose sicknesses are too complicated or too expensive to treat. In the novel The Lord of the World, written in 1890, there is a scene in which a flying machine has crashed. When the news reaches the authorities, they dispatch treatment personnel. To the site. The nurses who arrive go about identifying the injured and they begin killing them. After all, they are badly hurt. Medicine and treatment are for the well, not the wounded. It's only a short way from killing the innocent to killing the inconvenient. But the greatest impact the killing of million has on society as it touches its sense of limits is that the whole people formed in the ethos of measuring innocent life by whether it's convenient to the ones who founded it, is subject to two premier emotional responses. The first is to considerably expand the notion of convenience until it becomes anything that impedes or bothers. With so much writing on the value of convenience, any slightest thing, including any brief difficulty which all of humanity has been able to endure and overcome throughout all of its history, will become insurmountable without the most extreme response possible. People will begin to freeze at the slightest obstacle to their desire, no matter how ephemeral or temporary. With millions totted up in its category, convenience will become a weighty stone in life's balance. And the second is the dark shadow of guilt overhanging everyone. It is not possible to have participated in such horrors, the killing of sixty-five million, without there dwelling among us some measure of reproach. And while we might not have the courage to address the guilt we feel with any direct measure, like the rising tide, it's unavoidable. Guilt unaddressed and unnamed then becomes like an acid, eating away at the bonds of society, especially at that which provides for evaluating and acting in sensible ways. It won't take long, and there will be destructive and extreme and perhaps unconscious swings toward care and concern. Some have called this option suicidal empathy, and it will pervade everything, and it's not pretty. Abortion is still a vital issue throughout our politics. The reality of its effect of its effects are everywhere to be seen. On this anniversary, we should remain attuned to its impact, which continues among us, and we should pray for all of us who are affected by it. Back in just a moment. We have a poem today called The Photos Today. I saw the photos today. The house was stripped down to the floor joist and foundation. A sad sight, not war or famine or tragic moments, no, but it is a meditation. On the facile security we enjoy as we imagine our confidence and manage our trust, we're never sure of what's firm, never resolute in what need not be examined or discussed. Such revealing, taking the adornments away and bearing the place to its skin and more, seems indecent, shows us too much as we're left tracking the old place's spore. But it had to be done, they said, to guarantee integrity and keep it together for now. A kind of surgery to re knit for the years to come, that it may shelter all that time will allow. Which is how every part of life unfolds for all of us in all our parts. We're stripped, measured, saved, nailed, and fixed, given new hearts, so that as the years ahead move toward and then behind us we can embrace the hope, there will be walls and roof and floor, steady built and standing, to resist time's grope. That's the photos today.org.