The European right has missed one critical factor in the debate against abortion. Specifically, casualizing sex has casualized the pursuit of abortion in a post Christian Europe. In order to address the casualization of abortion, the pro-life movement must deal with the casual sex phenomenon. Bolstered by hedonism, self-indulgence, and inconsequential pleasure, the Eurocentric casual sex crisis continues to gain legal traction, but the right must disentangle the faithlessness, hedonism, and meaninglessness gripping Europe.
From 2015 to 2019, there were 3,310,000 abortions across Europe as a consequence of unwanted pregnancies.
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was the holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?
Killing God was easy, as Nietzsche claims, but not without dire consequences. It was one thing to kill off God, but it had another unintended effect: it killed Christian ideas like marriage, procreation and the family unit. Since 1964, marriage within the EU has declined by 50%; the current birth rate is a record low of 1.5 children per woman; and there has been a marked decline in church attendance.
Now, meaninglessness masks itself as pleasure. Sex is, in the minds of many Europeans, not the means that creates meaning; instead, the satiation of sexual desire has become meaning itself. The psychoanalyst Viktor Frankl was right: “When a man can’t find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure.” Europe decided to adopt ‘festivals of atonement’ driven by hedonism, pleasure, and self-interest.
The European states most distant from Christianity are the ones where casual sex and support for abortion are the highest. A 2023 Pew Research Center study found ‘that ‘support for legal abortion was higher in countries where people place less importance on religion’—Sweden, France, Hungary, Germany, The Netherlands and Spain. Moving towards a culture of sex in a transitory world of sexual experimentation enjoyed at the whim of impulse, pleasure, hedonism, and experimentation, the European youth has been sold wholesale on the idea. In a Scandinavian study, 40% of Swedish women reported having ‘casual sex’ within the past 12 months. In one study at Utrecht University, 78.6% of Dutch female university students had casual sex within the past 12 months. In Germany, 33% of 15-year-old girls have had sex, and 22% of 15-year-old boys have also had sex by the same age.
Spain prides itself on being the most ‘sexually liberal nation in Europe’. But this ‘sexual liberalism’ has produced a generation of sociopathic, self-interested, pleasure-obsessed individuals who have pursued hedonistic aims at all costs. The nation’s support for abortion has nearly doubled between 1995 and 2021, as 40% of Spaniards support abortion, according to one study. But when you consider that 63% of Spaniards say they have engaged in casual sex, we cannot deny the ripple effects of liberalizing, commodifying, and casualizing sex. The gravity of aborting ‘unwanted pregnancies’ becomes blurred by the mask of hedonism.
Spain’s right-wing Vox party has spoken out against this pervasive social trend. Vox Party’s Juan Garcia Gallardo highlighted the various consequences of taking this path. He went on to state that young people are “in a state of eternal adolescents,” as they have dedicated “their existence to satisfying their sexual desires.”
To make things even more challenging, 95% of women in Europe can have an abortion on ‘ request or on broad social grounds’, with only Poland and Malta implementing strict laws against the practice.
France recently became the first nation to enshrine abortion as a constitutional right for women, the polyamory prayers of the 1970’s abortion movement have been answered. It was sold by Macron, feminists, and the radical left as the ‘emancipation of women’, but the idea first emerged in the infamous Manifesto of the 343. Led by French feminist philosopher Simone De Beauvoir, the manifesto argued, ‘Just as we demand free access to contraception, we demand free access to abortion’.
Thus began the ‘death of wish’ of abortion, which struck a chord in the minds and impulses of mainland Europe. It sold a message of rights, yet it masked the insidious right to kill. And so it happened in 2024: France constitutionalized women’s right to abortion as the national assembly approved the ‘right’ in a landslide victory. 493 MPs voted for the bill, while 30 voted against it.
Now polyamory has become a legalized part of Frenchness. ‘Emancipated women’ according to the left can now partake in hedonistic ventures of casual sex and lay claim to the ‘right’ to abort an unborn life. Even before the vote was passed, 80% of French people supported enshrining the right to abortion as a constitutional right, but the sexual landscape of France enabled such a view to proliferate. For a long time, the French viewed sex as an inconsequential, pleasure-laden, hedonistic pursuit, as 20% of Parisians report having over 19 sexual partners, while the national average of sexual partners is 11. But even outside the bounds of France’s polyamorous social norms, French monogamy has also fallen under a cultural acceptance of polyamory, as studies revealed it is the least judgmental country in terms of infidelity.
Abortion rates have skyrocketed from 33,454 in 1975 to consistently over 200,000 from the early 2000’s onwards.
Following suit, the EU then moved to enshrine abortion rights into the EU rights charter, with 373 voting for and 163 voting against it.
What can the right learn from all of this? Quite a lot. The pro-life movement finds itself recapitulating arguments around the ‘dignity of unborn life’ in the abortion debate against a left that relies on hyperbole, rhetoric, and deceit. After the EU enshrined abortion access into its fundamental rights charter, left wing MEP Manon Aubry took to embellishing the move. She stated: “The right to abortion is not a question of opinion; it is a human right”. She continued : “The right to abortion does not kill. On the contrary, it saves lives.”
But even the way the right responds to the embellished antagonisms of the left is equally problematic. It’s almost as though the right isn’t seeing past the juvenile immaturity of half-baked arguments. Rather than staunchly taking the left to task, the President responds with a regurgitation of bygone arguments around the dignity of life, which, while valid, have done it no favors when battling the far left’s ideological commitment to pro-abortion.
For example, when the president of the pro-life group, Maria Cassini, pointed out the dangers of the EU resolution.
“It is deeply concerning to witness the European Parliament prioritize radicalized political agendas over the fundamental rights and values that underpin our societies. This resolution not only disregards the dignity of human life but also undermines the sovereignty of Member States in addressing such sensitive matters.”
So what was the problem with Casssini’s response, and what is the right doing wrong? For one, the far left does not appear to respond to rational arguments with rationality, nor, as Aubry proved, does it tackle the issue in good faith. Second, if the right is to discuss the dignity of life, it cannot separate it from a discussion about the dignity of sex in European society. Rather than focusing the locus of attention on purely ‘pro-life arguments’, the right must explore the role of casual sex, atheism, faithlessness, decline in marriage, and birth rate if they are to have any real impact on an increasingly left-wing-dominated Europe.
Although the tide of pro-abortion has swept across the continent, the right has an opportunity to sell the European public a new idea, namely, that there is nothing casual about casual sex, nor is there anything ‘casual’ about abortion. While the subject is complex, convoluted, and liberalized, the right ought to pose some serious questions to the European public: Why is Europe finding meaning in ‘casual sex’? Why is Europe sacrificing having children for casual sex? Under what conditions ought sex to take place? How has casual sex bolstered abortion? Is a population decline in the name of casual sex a good thing for Europe?
Doing away with God succeeded in one way: abortion symbolizes a metaphorical denial of God’s re-entry into the European psyche, and we may be in the midst of a revelation. There’s more to sex than a mere physical union of temporary self-gratifying pleasure, and if the industrialization of abortion is to be tackled, the wisdom of casual sex must be re-considered. But as long as Eurocentric casual sex culture remains, God will remain dead, and abortion will remain the backbone of Europe.
