Let’s not be the kind of people who won’t take “yes” for an answer. It is patently excellent news that the abortion rate has declined. As The Daily Caller notes:

The number of abortions in the U.S. is at a 40-year low, according to a new study published Tuesday by the pro-choice Guttmacher Institute.

The report counted 926,200 abortions in 2014, down by 12.5 percent from Guttmacher’s previous survey in 2011, which tallied 1.06 million abortions across the country. Only 14.6 abortions occurred per 1,000 American women between the ages of 15 and 44, which is the lowest rate since abortion was legalized nationally in 1973 by the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision.

Of course, the Guttmacher Institute, an offshoot of Planned Parenthood, gives much of the credit to expanded access to contraception — while grudgingly admitting that pro-life legislation has played a role.

First of all, let’s celebrate progress. If the rate of drunk driving had fallen by almost 13 percent in three short years, Mothers Against Drunk Driving — and frankly mothers of teens everywhere — would be doing a merry jig. Abortion is the single ugliest phenomenon in American life, full stop. It turns women against their children, destroys relationships, disproportionately affects the poor and minorities, and — oh, did I forget to mention it, kills more than a million Americans a year. That’s roughly the number of people we allow in as legal immigrants, almost as if we were trying subconsciously to replace those tiny casualties.

Does Contraception Prevent Abortion?

There is really no way to quantify how much of the drop in the abortion rate can be attributed to more contraception. There is no reason to think that contraception became almost 13 percent more accessible between 2011 and 2014, though don’t put it past President Obama to claim that his plan to force nuns to distribute abortifacients played a major role, somehow. The fact is that women have had ready access to contraception since the early 1960s, even as the rate of pregnancy out of wedlock and abortion skyrocketed, year after year, until recently. The one thing that did change in the past few years was the growth of incremental protections for unborn children in certain states.

That’s the right way to talk about such things, FYI. We should never call abortion laws “restrictive.” Good laws are “protective,” while bad laws are “lax” and “permissive.” Keep the focus on the vulnerable Americans we’re looking out for, not the options of money-grubbing doctors.

The Thick Callous Growing on America’s Heart

It’s important to counter the pro-choice talking point that it’s somehow objectively “pro-life” to push contraception on young people, even in schools and without their parents’ approval. First of all, every contraceptive has a failure rate. But young people, especially teenagers, are naturally rash. They feel like they are immortal. That’s why they take dangerous “dares,” use risky drugs, and are well-suited to combat.

Step back and remember your first passionate teenage love-crush. Now imagine that you and that person had conceived a child together, and stayed together to raise it.

Youthful rashness is one reason why people need to mature before engaging in activity which is meant to forge a lifelong bond and result in the next generation of citizens. Step back and remember your first passionate teenage love-crush. Now imagine that you and that person had conceived a child together, and stayed together to raise it. Chances are, what you’re thinking right now is not “Oh, what a missed opportunity!” Instead, you’re probably hearing the sound of a whizzing bullet you dodged.

So by telling the young and the reckless that there’s this scientifically guaranteed medicine, or technology, that will stop you from getting pregnant, we are telling their hormone-addled brains: “This is safe, go ahead and do it!” That removes the key disincentive that has always held young people back from the brink of intercourse — the risk of pregnancy. But some risk remains, and we have goaded millions more young people to take that chance — and the chance of disease — who would otherwise have held back. That is why abortion rates climbed for decades, even after the Pill was almost universally available.

Worse, we are endorsing the cheapening of love, which has reached what seems like its nadir in the school-based “hook-up” culture, which pressures young women to abandon their natural desires — to link emotional with physical intimacy — and defer to the basest cravings of hapless teenage boys. Curiously, this is the one area of culture where male norms and preferences aren’t being battered, punished, or socially engineered out of existence — although the media-driven panic about an alleged “rape culture” on campus may be a crude attempt by women to move the needle back in their direction. A thick callous is growing on America’s heart.

Should we really be surprised at the decline in the marriage rate, or the rise in single motherhood, when our society enthusiastically participates in severing sex from love, marriage, and children? We have gone a long way toward creating the nightmare future of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World — a book which it’s helpful to remember was not originally intended as an instruction manual.

Is the Answer to Alcoholism … Driverless Cars?

Let’s go back to drunk driving. Imagine if as a society we were riven by alcoholism, with all its awful side-effects: Liver disease, depression, domestic violence, et cetera. But some wise social engineers came along and offered a plan for reducing drunk driving deaths — by providing each alcoholic with his very own driverless car. That would indeed cut the number of deaths caused by drunk driving. And statistics reflecting a lower death toll on the highways would be something worth celebrating. But the much deeper problem of alcohol addiction would still afflict us.

That’s about where we stand with sex and love in America.