According to an amicus brief submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court with the signatures of 100 scholars, a conference at the Heritage Foundation (a Conservative think tank), and an article published on the Foundation’s online publication The Daily Signal, the legalization of same-sex marriage could lead to 900,000 abortions. Gene Schaerr, who penned the article and presented his conjecture to Heritage on April 20th, is a former law clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia and the lawyer for Utah’s failed case against same-sex marriage. He presents a simple argument: “A reduction in the opposite-sex marriage rate means an increase in the percentage of women who are unmarried and who, according to all available data, have much higher abortion rates than married women. And based on past experience, institutionalizing same-sex marriage poses an enormous risk of reduced opposite-sex marriage rates.”

Schaerr attempts to back his stance with statistics, noting the decline in opposite-sex marriage rates in both the Netherlands and Spain after the two countries legalized same-sex marriage before presenting similar declines in Vermont, Iowa, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. In a brief analysis of Schaerr’s argument for The Washington Post, Dana Milbank presents the actual statistics from 2002 to 2011 -- while every one of these states did see a decline in marriage rates over this period, the true declines were mere fractions of the ones that Schaerr claimed to have occurred.

Standing on already shaky ground due to dubious statistics, Schaerr moves on to how this widespread decline in marriage will lead to an increase in abortion rates. By applying the supposed reduction in Vermont over three years (5 percent) to “marriages among U.S. residents aged 15-44,” he extrapolates that there will be 85,000 fewer marriages per year. “Over a 30-year fertility cycle, that amounts to 2.55 million fewer marriages.” After assigning half of that decline to “women who permanently forgo rather than delay marriage,” Schaerr concludes that 1.275 million women in the next generation will never marry. According to his statistics, unmarried women “average 0.87 abortions over their lifetimes” -- and thus “nearly 900,000 more children of the next generation would be aborted as a result of their mothers never marrying.” He also asserts that this number is a low estimate: “the actual increase in abortions would likely be much higher, as most women who would have married will cohabitate rather than live singly, and cohabitating women are three times more likely to have an abortion than a woman living singly.

As Milbank points out, “Schaerr’s argument has the useful purpose of switching the debate away from same-sex marriage -- on which public opinion is shifting decidedly against conservatives -- and toward abortion, where positions are hardened.” This is nothing more than a last-ditch effort -- a grasping at straws -- to sway the public and the Supreme Court and get them to turn back from all of the advances made toward marriage equality across the country. It is doubtful that Schaerr’s argument will gain any traction, regardless of his backing from 100 “scholars of marriage” and the Heritage Foundation, because it is too easily dismantled by the fact that his statistics are grossly exaggerated.