(LifeSiteNews) — As many as ten percent of unmarried Americans are having less promiscuous sexual activity because the June 2022 overturn of Roe v. Wade reduced their ability to dispose of any babies they might create in the process, according to a long-running survey.
The 2023 edition of pro-abortion dating app parent company Match Group’s annual Singles in America survey of more than 5,000 unattached Americans finds that 87% said Roe’s overturn “has impacted their dating and sex life,” with 15% of “active daters under 50” now “afraid of getting pregnant or getting someone else pregnant,” and 14% saying they have “less casual sex now and/or less sex overall.”
A comparable percentage also say they discuss abortion and contraception earlier in a relationship. Overall, more than half of singles (54%) said they “did not have sex in the last 12 months.”
These findings are among a politically-lopsided sample; 60% said they are “pro-choice” compared to just 23% calling themselves pro-life (other polls show general support for and opposition to abortion being much closer).
The Guardian quotes one survey respondent who said the abortion question “has become a litmus test for people that it’s too much trouble to date” and another as saying, “I’m bisexual, so it makes me think I should strictly date women.”
Kinsey Institute executive director and Match Group adviser Justin Garcia framed it as traumatic that people now had to consider the potential consequences of their sexual activity: “Not only is it impacting behavior, it’s also impacting the meaning and the quality of the experience that people are having. It’s really remarkable that legislation is making people feel more nervous or worried or less comfortable with their sexual lives.”
Neither the survey nor The Guardian’s coverage of it expressed any recognition of the living human children killed by abortion in the name of “quality experiences” for the sexually promiscuous.
Nevertheless, the findings help undermine a persistent pro-abortion claim that making abortion illegal would not meaningfully reduce it because the demand would remain the same.
Fourteen states currently ban all or most abortions, with available data so far indicating that now-enforceable pro-life laws could effectively wipe out an estimated 200,000 or more abortions a year. On top of the direct result of making abortions unavailable in those states, the Match survey indicates that, contrary to abortion defenders, eliminating the option does have a deterrent effect on the behavior that conceives “unplanned” abortion victims in the first place.
At the same time, the abortion lobby is working feverishly to cancel out those deterrent effects by deregulated interstate distribution of abortion pills, legal protection and financial support of interstate abortion travel, constructing new abortion facilities near borders shared by pro-life and pro-abortion states, making liberal states sanctuaries for those who want to evade or violate the laws of more pro-life neighbors, and embedding abortion “rights” in state constitutions.
But while those efforts have had an impact (especially abortion pills), Charles Lozier Institute scholar Professor Michael New stresses that “there is still very strong statistical evidence that newly enacted pro-life laws are preventing abortions and savings lives. Three separate analyses of Texas birth data have found that the Texas Heartbeat Act saved over 1,000 lives a month. Also, a study published by the Institute for Labor Economics saw increased birth rates in many states that enforced strong pro-life laws shortly after the Dobbs decision.”