Breakthroughs in ‘Birth Control’: the Illusion and Failure

All of the old social taboos and stigmas about premarital sex and out-of-wedlock pregnancies and births are mostly gone.  Numbers of babies available for adoption have severely dropped off because of the availability of legal abortion, and because illegitimate children are no longer a source of shame or as much of an economic burden for single women.  Instead, for the poor, they are more likely to be a source of increased income.  Not to mention, the greatly increased educational and professional opportunities for women brought by the sexual revolution and feminism, diminishing the economic hardship of single motherhood.

So now we have a situation where we as taxpayers are forced to fork over millions and millions of our earnings for an organization known as “Planned Parenthood,” based on the lie that Planned Parenthood exists for the purposes of “family planning.”  I already spent much of earlier today arguing with Democrats online about Planned Parenthood, so suffice it to say here that, contrary to what a certain powerful, jive-talking advocate of infanticide claims, Planned Parenthood is mainly a eugenics-oriented murder mill that rakes in billions by aggressively marketing abortions to women.

What to do?  That’s where I part ways, completely, with the above mentioned authors at Brookings.  

Their prescription is, in terms of public policy, increased access to abortion and increased welfare payments for women.  They really see no point in trying to put in place policies which encourage responsible behavior.  Instead, their approach is oriented toward mitigating the deleterious effects of promiscuous, haphazard practices by subsidizing them more, and killing more unborn babies!  I was astonished to read the ending of their article, after digesting the intelligent assessments preceding it. 

I argue the opposite — that voters must be persuaded, by reasoned discourse, to vote for candidates who remove the incentives for irresponsible behavior:  If women have easy access to the newest forms of contraception, fine — it is up to them to apply the brakes wisely as they venture out onto the sexual superhighway.  They are much more likely to do so if dire consequences and social stigmas await poor choices.  And if men want access to the tunnel of love, they have no incentive to ease back off the throttle unless they have to first stop and pay a steep toll at a well-kept gate.  

It is partly up to us in the new media to re-introduce stigmas for irresponsible behavior into society, by reclaiming the language and the culture.  It is about control, after all.  Mother nature has her own agenda, and our technology and policies can really only just channel it, at best.