Last week, another piece of the vaccine mythology unraveled.

In a new examination of the CDC’s study on the effects of the Covid-19 vaccine on pregnant women, two doctors from New Zealand found the shot caused 82 to 91 percent of women in their first trimester to experience a “spontaneous abortion,” or miscarriage. This figure is seven to eight times higher than the average rate of pregnancy loss for women in the first 20 weeks of pregnancy.

The original CDC study claims only 12.6 percent of the vaccinated pregnant women had a spontaneous abortion during the course of the study, on par with typical early pregnancy loss. However, the majority of women studied—between 700 to 713 of 827—were exposed to the vaccine after the first 20 weeks of pregnancy, the most vulnerable stage. Of those who were early in their pregnancy, the miscarriage rate was far higher. Doctors Aleisha Brock and Simon Thornley concluded not only that the original CDC study is misleading, but that the vaccine should not be recommended for pregnant or breastfeeding women, as well as children and anyone in the general population of childbearing age, due to this high incidence of miscarriage.

The vaccine vector is just the latest episode in the greater series of female fertility problems. While women in their 20s are getting paid to get their eggs harvested (resulting in ovarian cysts, endometriosis, and infertility, among other ailments, for a staggering number of the women who undergo this procedure), those on the waning end of fertility compose a lucrative market for those eggs, encouraging the cycle to continue.

And still, at least 10 percent of women in the United States between the ages of 15 and 44 wish to have a child but cannot; the percentage is surely higher when we examine only the women who are over the age of 35. For this demographic, the question is no longer how not to have children but, incredibly, how to have them. Infertility galls them—not because every woman secretly wants to birth a quiver full, but because most women, in most cases, assume that at some point down the road they’ll probably have a family. As always, women want options, even if they refuse all of them. Says one woman, after her egg harvesting procedure left her infertile, “on one hand, I never intended to have children, but I didn’t want biology to force that on me.”

It’s not just that we’ve failed to teach young women about fertility, as many have pointed out, but that we are trying to do things backwards, out of accord with nature: fun now (while you’re fertile), babies later (when you’re not). We should know how that will go. Only 11.5 percent of American women will become pregnant before they are 30, a record low. After 30, at record highs, the childbearing rate for women is still a sparse 7.3 percent. In part due to choice, and in part because decades of social and economic pressures have come to bear on the American woman, the downward trajectory of birth rates seems, to activists, either irrelevant or precisely the point.

In the “choice” category, we have women like Emily Holleman, who wrote recently for The Cut about her radical decision to have a child in these “apocalyptic times,” and how she almost repented of doing so. The hackneyed line, “I couldn’t imagine bringing a child into the world as it is today,” with its historical blindness that believes ours is unquestionably the Worst of All Eras, is the mantra of this crowd. Climate change, Covid-19, racism, Donald Trump, you name it—these women use any and every reason to claim ham-fisting autonomy from nature is really an act of selfless love toward the next generation that will never be; to gift, as it were, human extinction. This crowd is small, typically confined to magazine writers and 30-somethings with little talent for self-reflection (saith another young magazine writer, with perhaps a little reflective talent).

But in the other category are normal women: They want children—probably sooner, though they’ll always profess “later”—yet remain captive to strong social forces and, increasingly, biological ones outside their control. These are the ones for whom the inheritance of birth control and job expectations were taken for granted; they grew up believing an unwanted pregnancy would be far more of a common problem, and didn’t worry about it until they came of age not “thirty, flirty, and thriving,” but single, lonely, and on anti-depressants.

The anti-natal forces on such women are both biological and societal. Aside from the modern diet, whose effect on both male and female fertility is about as difficult to prove and easy to intuit as the water contamination in Woburn, Massachusetts, the hurdles to having healthy children in America today are numerous. While a career certainly demands a woman postpone her family, a whole generation of men in retreat and an epidemic of loneliness certainly compound the picture, while anything from acne medication to anti-depressants are probably suppressing either her or her husband’s ability to produce viable offspring.

Few will be fortunate and conceive a miracle baby; will we then sabotage even these, and choose political correctness at the expense of human life?

In all this, the progressive woman’s attitude toward pregnancy is disgust. Both incredibly optimistic about the female body’s ability to conceive and incredibly pessimistic about their own methods of preventing pregnancy, they are all horrified at the prospect of a child. When the latest Texas abortion law was passed, one doctor took to Twitter immediately, telling women to “Get on birth control. Now.”

Get on Birth Control

Now.

Any form that is reliable.

Oral Contraceptives, Nuva Ring, Norplant, IUD.

Something.

Now.

— Dara Kass, MD (@darakass) September 1, 2021

We don’t just ignore the fertility problem, we—certainly, Holleman and Kass do—encourage it. Having a baby is selfish, because of the ozone layer, or some such. Or worse, it’s the actual stuff of nightmares. Advising women to take pregnancy tests as frequently as they menstruate, Dara Kass concluded her thread by saying, “This is a horrific time, We are all scared, And we are sorry we let this happen.” Elsewhere on Twitter, women dreamt of the day they could get a hysterectomy so they could get off the pill. Nothing is worse for these women than the idea of children.

In light of that attitude, it’s no wonder the vaccine’s affect on pregnancy doesn’t bother them. But the mandates reach more than just these. The real battle being fought is by the women who do want to have children, and it’s uphill every step of the way.