The Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) reported this week that just over 3.8 million babies were born in the U.S. in 2017. The number is a record low since 1987. It continues a decades-long trend of America’s graying.

National Public Radio’s (NPR) Bill Chappell covered the report on Thursday. So did NPR’s WAMU affiliate in Washington, D.C. Host Mary Louise Kelly and Pew Research Center Senior Researcher Gretchen Livingston discussed several important fertility factors — but they ignored the major culprits in the decline: widespread use of contraception and abortion which prevent births.

Fertility Isn’t The Problem: Abortion and Contraception Are

Livingston said two factors have played major roles in declining U.S. fertility. The first was greater education. The second is the delay of marriage among Americans — and, thus, delays in bearing children. She also suggested that many people delay having children due to recession-based fears of economic instability.

The discussion transitioned to how many first-world nations are having similar or worse issues when it comes to low fertility rates and birth rates. (Fertility rates are the number of children per woman of childbearing age, while birth rates are births per year. More on the differences here.) Kelly and Livingston agreed that high birth rates among immigrant women have kept the U.S. fertility rate and birth rate higher than they would otherwise be. Livingston said that more restrictive immigration policy could change that.

For a segment under four minutes long, Livingston and Kelly covered a lot. However, they did a disservice to listeners by dodging America’s contraception and abortion problems.

According to the Guttmacher Institute, there were 926,000 abortions in 2014 — compared to nearly four million births that year. This means that there were 4.9 million recorded pregnancies in 2014. Almost 19 percent of those pregnancies ended in abortion.

While abortions have been on a two-decade decline, the murders of over 900,000 babies remains morally horrifying. It’s also concerning when it comes to birth rates. America wouldn’t have a population problem if the 60 million-plus babies aborted since 1973 had left the womb alive.

Contraception may be even more harmful to U.S. birth rates. Huge swaths of the American population use various methods. This means people who have sex are blocking the primary reason for sexual intercourse — the creation of children. Additionally, several popular contraception methods double as abortion-inducing drugs and devices. These include the intrauterine device and the morning-after pill. This means America’s actual abortion rate is likely much higher.

America’s Fertility Problem is a Separate Issue

Simply put: the CDC’s report has little to do with fertility. It’s about birth rates. American men and women conceive plenty of children. We just abort a lot of them. And women put their health and lives at risk to stop sexual intercourse from its natural conclusion.

That doesn’t mean America doesn’t have a fertility problem. Men’s sperm counts are dropping across the Western world. The CDC reports that many men and women are voluntarily sterilizing themselves. And side effects of abortion and contraception include unintended sterilization.

Abortion, contraception, sterilization, low sperm counts are America’s fertility issues. Until we fix these through a return to traditional sexual ethics, we will continue to see an aging U.S.