A higher proportion of conceived children are born today than ever in the past. It’s even starker if you look at the proportion of children surviving to age 5. Pregnancy, delivery, and early childhood are dramatically safer now than they used to be.

The best way to push that proportion higher still is via education of girls and women (and career prospects for them), universal high-quality sex education, high quality women’s healthcare, easy access to birth control, generous parental leave policies, and state-subsidized childcare and other public assistance programs for the poor. Empirically, illegalizing and restricting access to abortions has very slight impact on the number of abortions, but serves to make them dramatically less safe and more expensive.

In places where there has been a regression in women’s health and teenager’s sex education (e.g. Texas), we have seen a rise in unwanted pregnancies an increase in infant and mother mortality, and worsening conditions for small children.