Oh, my goodness. Anti-marriage-equality idiocy may have reached its highest, most distilled form with this one. Brace yourself:
In a nutshell: 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.
That's appellate attorney Gene Schaerr writing at the Daily Signal, if you want to dig up the link for yourself. I just ... I don't even know what to do with this. Marriage equality means more abortions? Because marriage equality undermines opposite-sex marriage and if there are more unmarried straight women there are more abortions?
No such argument would be complete without cherry-picked data. For instance, Schaerr insists that marriage rates declined immediately in the early marriage equality states (a questionable claim to begin with), "Yet, from 2009 (the first year of genderless marriage in Iowa and Vermont, and the second in Connecticut) until 2012, the overall U.S. marriage rate remained stable." Hmm. Since the overall U.S. marriage rate has generally been declining for quite a while, couldn't we argue that the fact that it remained stable in the years marriage equality began advancing showed that equality stabilized the overall marriage rate? (That would be a stupid and innumerate argument, but no more so than Schaerr's, which is my point.)
There's a lot going on with marriage rates in the U.S.—class and education levels are a huge factor in whether people will marry—and Schaerr is interested in none of it. Save that he believes that my neighbor being able to marry will make me less likely to marry for some obscure reason, and then I will begin aborting away. Just like that:
In short, forcing states to convert the traditional gendered marriage institution into a genderless institution will very likely reduce man-woman marriages by undermining some of the norms that encourage heterosexual couples to marry, which will in turn increase the number of unmarried women and, hence, the number of children aborted.
"Very likely." Uh-huh. Though there's an interesting implicit admission here. "Undermining some of the norms that encourage heterosexual people to marry," i.e. allowing that strict, traditionalist gender roles are not completely necessary for healthy relationships or a healthy society, is worse for marriage, according to people like Schaerr, than is broadening marriage rights and saying that all consenting adults should have access to such an important institution. In short, Schaerr isn't just worried about marriage equality. He's worried about gender equality, too.