by Edward Ring
For an estimated two-thirds of America’s unmarried, childless women, the November 5 election was about rejecting a candidate who exuded “toxic masculinity,” along with rebellion against a Supreme Court that overruled their right to “reproductive health care.” And while these childless women and their candidate lost the election, they’re winning a bigger war. They are leading us to extinction.
We now have tens of millions of American women who think unrestricted access to abortions is more important than prosperity, security, freedom, and world peace. And in alarming percentages, these women are not having babies. What this portends transcends politics and strikes to the very future of civilization.
According to a 2024 study by Morgan Stanley, by 2030, around 45 percent of women between the ages of 25 and 44 are projected to be single and childless. That’s more than 21 million voters. Overall, single women of voting age make up 25 percent of the electorate—more than 40 million voters. And according to exit polls, 60 percent of single women voted for Harris.
The overwhelming rejection of Trump by single and childless women stands out because in their hands rests the future of Western civilization. What Trump represents to them are traditional sex roles, including marriage, family, and motherhood, and they find this repugnant. As a result, we are a dying nation.
We’re not alone. The increasingly popular decision by literally billions of women to opt out of motherhood is happening throughout the developed world and most of the developing world. The only continent still experiencing rapid population growth is Africa. The population of Africa in 1960 was 250 million. Since then, within one lifetime, it has increased six-fold to 1.5 billion. Within the next 25 years, the population of Africa is projected to grow by another billion people, to more than 2.5 billion inhabitants. And while the rate of population growth in Africa is expected to decline by 2050, even then it is expected to still be well above replacement rates.
The best way to gauge population growth (or decline) is to look at the total fertility rate per woman. In Niger, on average, each woman will bear 6.64 children. In the United States, that number is 1.84 and dropping. A rate of 2.1 is considered necessary for a population to remain stable.
Meanwhile, in response to Trump’s victory, liberal American women are embracing the “4B” movement. This is a feminist movement originating in South Korea, where “4B stands for the four ‘B’s or ‘Nos’ in Korean. They are ‘bisekseu’ (no sex with men); ‘biyeonae’ (no dating men); ‘bihon’ (no marrying men); and ‘bichulsan’ (no having children).”
It’s easy to imagine how this movement resonates with liberal American women who are horrified and angry at Trump’s victory, but South Korea is not a nation we should emulate. The projected fertility rate of South Korean women this year is down to 0.68. At that rate, their population is going to decline by 90 percent within two generations. At this rate, Koreans are doomed.
This is the nihilistic consequence of any culture that rejects marriage, family, and motherhood. Whether mindful of the ultimate impact of their choices or not, this is the fate liberal women are imposing on America. It is self-inflicted genocide, occurring in what may appear to be slow motion from the perspective of our short lives, but in the context of human civilization, this is happening at a pace that is stunning and unprecedented. No culture in history, lacking any other destructive variable such as mass starvation or pestilence, has ever just voluntarily dissolved itself into oblivion. But, with the exception of Africa, that’s what’s happening right now throughout the world.
In a guest opinion column written for Al Jazeera on November 4, Julie Bindel, “journalist, author, and feminist campaigner,” characterized the election as “Trump vs. Harris: American misogyny on the ballot.” Bindel’s essay, because it is so typical, is a useful example of how liberal American women have been trained to view sex and society. It is a comprehensive rejection of everything that might embrace traditional masculinity, but it has no answer to the prevailing question that must address her entire movement: if American women are to be liberated from traditional sex roles, how in the more perfect society that she envisions will women continue to have children? And if a huge percentage of women no longer have children, how will we survive as a nation?
Without presuming to speak for Julie Bindel, it would not be surprising if her answer were immediate and unequivocal. To care about your nation is racist. If we need more people, open the borders and let them in. We are privileged beneficiaries of an imperialist legacy, and everything we have is stolen. As a result, giving our nation away to the destitute millions migrating out of Africa and every other pocket of human fecundity left on earth is our moral obligation. As for the appalling treatment of women within these cultures that remain fertile? Never mind. Let them come.
As we fitfully navigate the transition from a Biden/Harris presidency that threw open the borders and celebrated every lifestyle imaginable so long as it didn’t involve having babies, and adapt instead to a Trump/Vance administration that will control the borders and end the demonization of masculine men and motherhood, it’s important to recognize the connectivity. The options for a nation confronting a crashing birth rate are clear and non-negotiable.
You either start having babies again, or you import people, or you die. If we rule out option three and choose to live, the two choices remaining are equally clear. You stop celebrating a culture that stigmatizes masculinity and motherhood, and to the extent your population remains in decline, you screen every single aspiring immigrant to America for character, intelligence, work ethic, and cultural compatibility and only admit the best.
America’s die-hard liberals, men and women, find Trump’s victory terrifying. Rediscovering our collective respect for masculinity and motherhood and screening immigrants for merit is going to scare the liberals even more. But not doing these things is not merely a matter of politics. It’s a matter of life and death. We must find a way.
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Edward Ring is a senior fellow of the Center for American Greatness. He is also the director of water and energy policy for the California Policy Center, which he co-founded in 2013 and served as its first president. Ring is the author of Fixing California: Abundance, Pragmatism, Optimism (2021) and The Abundance Choice: Our Fight for More Water in California (2022).
