"Did they miss the last fifty years?"

Over on the American Spectator site, Daniel J. Flynn takes a hard look at what grave ills the Pill hath wrought:

 "Critics warned that The Pill would spawn generations of loose, immoral women; what it spawned was generations of empowered women who are better equipped to make rational choices about their lives," explained Letty Cottin Pogrebin, a founder of Ms. magazine, in a CNN.com  symposium on the anniversary. She continued, "Since wanted children are often better cared for than unwanted children it meant that more kids were wanted, grew up healthy, supported, and loved." Playboy's Hugh Hefner contended that The Pill "separated sex and procreation and gave women control over their bodies."

Did they miss the last fifty years?

The Pill was going to eradicate abortion, illegitimacy, and divorce. All of these social ills exploded in The Pill's wake, as did several venereal diseases unknown when the FDA approved The Pill. Certainly, as countless testimonies note, The Pill enabled individual women to plan pregnancies, pursue careers, and enjoy more sex. Who's to gainsay the belief of many American that The Pill did indeed improve their lives? But from the standpoint of reproductive responsibility, The Pill has been, in aggregate, a disaster.

Like so many social panaceas, The Pill unleashed a slew of unintended consequences. More so than Playboy, The Kinsey Reports, Roe v. Wade, or any other postwar development, The Pill offered the Faustian bargain of more sex, fewer children; more partners, less heartbreak; promiscuity without disease. But rather than the theoretic dreamworld for women, The Pill has spawned an adolescent male's fantasy made real: easy sex, pleasure minus the responsibility, and the cad replacing the gentleman as the social ideal.

The Pill provoked men and women to partake in an act of permanent consequences with the most transient of acquaintances. The result, predictably, was generations of children unwanted by their parents, who in many cases demonstrated this sad reality by abandoning or aborting them. The Pill reduced a serious act to frivolity.

Read the entire piece, "Pew vs. The Pill".

None of this is news, I suspect, for most (many? some?) readers here, but the news, as Flynn notes, is that it would be news to so many hip and super-enlightened denizens of the cruising, hooking up, love-'em-and-leave-'em culture—that is, if they would ever hear it or see the evidence.

Related Ignatius Insight Articles, Excerpts, & Interviews:

• The Truth About Conscience | John F. Kippley
• Marriage and the Family in Casti Connubii and Humanae Vitae | Rev. Michael Hull, S.T.D.
• Viagra: It's Not Just for Old Guys Anymore | Mary Beth Bonacci
• Practicing Chastity in an Unchaste Age | Bishop Joseph F. Martino
• Kinsey: Dedicated Scientist or Sexual Deviant? | Benjamin Wiker

Comments

[Richard Bruce]

In at least one, no doubt many, of the recent articles they argue that the sexual revolution started before the pill. The revolution really started roaring after the pill but antibiotics helped and they came out before the pill. So we can say it was the two p's the pill and penicillin that really got the sexual revolution of the 60's roaring.

When herpes came out in the 70's that should have ended the matter, but like the plagues of Egypt we have suffered VD plague after VD plague and we still do not understand that the logic of the sexual revolution no longer applies.

What we need is abstinence until stable happy marriage. One way to increase your chances for a stable happy marriage is met your mate in a church singles group. My parents met in a church singles group. The married couples formed their own group that still exists more than 50 years later. Of the couples that were active in the second group none divorced. Read more about it at my web site. Click on my name to get to my site.