In This State, Chickens Have More Rights Than Babies

Joe Biden has left the building, but Bidenflation has not completely abated. A lot of us are still feeling the inflationary pain at the grocery store. Eggs, for example, went up a whopping 37%. To be fair, this was mostly due to negative supply shocks driving up the actual cost of producing eggs.

That sticker shock was recently compounded by a new “cage-free” law that officially went into effect here in Michigan on January 1, 2025. Farms with more than 3,000 egg layers can no longer confine their chickens in cages, but must give them room to “roam unrestricted in indoor environments.” 

The large egg producers that supply grocery stores have had to take a giant step backwards and rebuild their egg operations at a significantly higher cost structure. On top of that, according to the USDA, bird flu recently killed off over 20 million hens. The combination of bird flu and cage-free mandates have pushed egg prices to all-time highs.

I’m not here to complain about egg prices, though. Bird flu outbreaks are terrible bad luck, but chicken flocks will recover. Farmers will adapt to the cage-free mandates and the price of eggs will subside.

The egg crisis, however, did reveal a grotesque contradiction in our public policy: In Michigan, chickens now have more legal protections than some humans. I’m talking about unborn babies, who can be killed through all nine months of pregnancy in this state, and in a quite inhumane manner, might I add. This is thanks to some of the most radically pro-abortion policies in the country, enacted in recent years under Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s leadership. Michigan voters ensconced a right to “reproductive freedom” into our state constitution in the 2022 election, which led to the repeal of nearly all abortion restrictions by the state legislature during 2023. According to the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute, Michigan now ranks as “very protective” of so-called abortion rights.

Ironically, just after signing the bills that repealed abortion restrictions, Governor Whitmer established the “Growing Michigan Together Council” to “develop a statewide strategy aimed at making Michigan a place everyone wants to call home by attracting and retaining talent, improving education throughout the state, upgrading and modernizing our transportation and water infrastructure to meet 21st century needs, and continuing Michigan’s economic momentum.” Michigan, you see, ranks 49th in population growth, and even leftists realize that’s not good for the economy. So the state formed a commission to come up with comprehensive solutions to get Michigan growing again.

I’ve got one: Let’s stop killing babies.

Whitmer and her ilk are right that our near-zero rate of population growth is a major problem with massive social, economic, and political consequences. Conservatives have been tracking declining trends in fertility and population growth for years, sounding the alarm about the potential for demographic collapse. Awareness of population decline and its frightening ramifications is finally going mainstream, perhaps thanks to Elon Musk proclaiming that population decline is a much bigger existential problem than climate change. He’s right, of course, and serious people are catching on. Outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and even CNN are getting wise to the bitter implications of declining birth rates and population collapse.

When people have fewer babies, everyone is worse off. Economically, we get a smaller workforce that produces less output, generates less innovation, and results in lower incomes and fewer opportunities. Politically, we get a shrinking tax base that makes it harder for the government to fund and provide public goods like infrastructure, police, and defense. The population pyramid becomes inverted—more old people than young people. Each working-age person is now financially responsible for a larger number of retirees’ government-funded pensions and healthcare, putting even bigger strains on the welfare state. At a personal level, childless (and typically unmarried) people find themselves increasingly alone and unhappy. The disease has advanced so far that we now have a generation of older folks lamenting that they’ll never see grandchildren.

Several countries are entering a “demographic winter,” with more deaths than births and rapidly falling headcounts. Japan, whose population has been in freefall since 2009, offers a sad and tragic cautionary tale on population decline. Old people rent stand-in grandkids. In lieu of big supportive families, lonely elders rely on emotional support robots. Young people, men, in particular, are losing interest in sex. The trend ends in civilizational annihilation.

So how do we prevent Michigan, and the United States, from going down the demographic drain? Birth rates in America have been below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman since around 2008. We’ve been able to make up for declining births with massive immigration, which has kept population growth positive. You may have noticed, though, that large-scale immigration—most of it of the illegal variety — is falling out of favor. With a new administration actually enforcing immigration laws, it’s unlikely that foreigners will continue to make up for our birth dearth.

Policy wonks have all sorts of ideas for incentivizing people to have more kids. Many GOP legislators favor boosting child tax credits. Leftists who acknowledge the problem usually want more government-funded daycare or more generous parental leave. The nonpartisan Growing Michigan Together Council thinks the answer is a better statewide education system and more accessible public transit.

Any of these things might have some benefit at the margin, but interestingly (and sadly) I noticed in the Growing Michigan report exactly zero references to the direct solution: more babies. And there’s a really straightforward policy solution to a huge aspect of that problem, which is to just stop killing them. According to state data, from 1982 to 2023, Michigan lost 1.3 million children to abortion. This is surely an undercount since it does not track babies terminated at home via the abortion pill. For the country as a whole, we’ve lost 63.5 million people to the abortion holocaust since legalization in 1973. 

Numerically speaking, abortion is the primary problem when it comes to demographic decline, and it is entirely symptomatic of the root cause of all our problems: We are sacrificing the next generation on the altar of personal freedom, convenience, and hedonism. Too many people view marriage as a spirit-crushing trap and babies — even live ones kicking the womb — as a call option: If you’re not “in the money” with financial success or self-confidence, you can simply let it expire, and toss out that tiny helpless human like last week’s leftovers.

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No policy tweaks or monetary incentives will change people’s deeply held values about babies, families, marriage, and the meaning of life. Well-meaning members of the Growing Michigan Together Council are completely deaf, dumb, and mute regarding the actual problem here: we are killing babies, and we need to stop. The real problem is spiritual. It’s good vs. evil. It’s in our hearts. Now that killing babies is grotesquely enshrined as a “right” in many states, it’s going to take a huge shift in cultural values to turn the tide. Recommendations for “improving education” here or “increasing incentives” there just aren’t going to cut it — they are putting band-aids on a tumor.

America needs people. It’s good, right, and proper (and fun) for young men and women to get together, form families, and have kids. We need to return to a basic set of shared cultural values that recognizes and promotes the old normal: get married, have kids, and enjoy the good old family life. Ending abortion would be a huge step towards that shift in values, but it will most likely come as a result, not a cause. While we should keep fighting hard for the unborn and keep seeking legislative wins to protect tiny vulnerable humans, we should also realize that winning hearts and minds will take decades of commitment, personal leadership, and sacrifice. Animal rights activists fought long and hard to enact cage-free laws for the “humane” treatment of chickens — surely we who cherish human life can work even harder to build a culture that protects and values the lives of children, whatever their stage of development.

In the meantime, let us lead by example whenever possible. Get married, stay married, and have kids. Go to church, and pray: for your family, your kids, your friends’ kids, etc. Help the people around you as much as you can, especially with unplanned pregnancies and relationship strife. In the end, a large family and a long marriage are worth far more than any level of career or financial success. With God’s help, we can rebuild a culture of life and family that puts mothers, fathers, and babies at the center of everything. It’s the right thing to do, and it will even be good for the economy.

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Tyler Watts is a professor of economics at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan.

The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.