The Messy, Messy Business of Birth Control

From "Sex, Drugs, and Reproduction: Birth Control Is a Messy, Messy Business," an article by Ken Brown in the Autumn 2008 edition of Salvo:

Today, about 70 percent of all teenagers have sex at least once before they turn twenty, resulting in more than 820,000 teenage pregnancies a year, just under a third of which end in abortion. These figures are down from their peak in the late 1980s, but they are still shockingly high. Meanwhile, casual sex and “serial monogamy” have become the cultural norms among college students and twentysomethings, among whom the abortion rate remains above 30 percent. Only 59 percent of the adult population is now married; only 35 percent consider children an important component of marriage; and fewer than a third of all marriages reach their 25th anniversary.

Yet, rather than recognizing a tragic degree of sexual immorality in all this, the response from many quarters has been to turn these facts on their heads: Since casual sex has now supposedly been freed of negative consequences, it no longer qualifies as immoral. If it is pointed out that even “safe sex” is anything but safe—that despite widespread condom usage, there are nearly 19 million new STD cases a year in the U.S. alone, more than half of them among 15- to 24-year-olds—this is no longer seen as proof that we might need to learn sexual restraint after all, but merely as evidence that we need better methods to reduce those risks. Ignored is the fact that near-universal acceptance of contraception is what established casual sex—ostensibly free of consequences—as normal and acceptable, and thus created this situation in the first place.

Now that sex has become recreational and “safe,” it shouldn’t surprise us that when pregnancy does result, more and more men deny their responsibility and either press for an abortion or disappear. Nor are such pregnancies as rare as the media would have us believe; a year’s worth of “typical” Pill usage results in one to eight pregnancies per 100 women, while typical condom usage results in ten to eighteen pregnancies per 100 women. The end result is that about twenty percent of all US pregnancies now end in abortion (also down from twenty years ago, thankfully), and more than a third of all children are now born out of wedlock (36.9 percent, a new high, up from just 8.2 percent in 1930). It is noteworthy that more than half of the women who seek abortion (54 percent) claim that they were using birth control when they became pregnant. Contraception alone cannot be blamed for all the sexually illicit elements of our society, but its availability did make such a culture possible.

Read the entire article. Visit the Salvo website and blog for more articles and commentary.

Comments

[Stohn]

Pope Paul VI's 'prophecy' (if you will) is looking more accurate every day...

[Mark Chardin]

If the Smithsonian had any commitment to truthful telling of history these days, surely they would reference these appalling failure statistics in their exhibit on history making women of the 20th century. Margret Sanger is a major figure in the exhibit. I'll stick to the Air and Space museum.