I also loved Raquel Welch's brassy column, KLo, but I do think most folks overrate the power of the Pill as a technology shock. The separation of sex from reproduction was a great technology shock, but what was that technology?It wasn't technology which gave rise to the (imaginary) disconnect between the sex act and reproduction, it was the social attitudes about sex and reproduction, and that happened long before "The Pill" arrived on the scene.
If you think the answer is the Pill, ask yourself: Why is it that less than ten years after the introduction of the Pill and the creation of a constitutional right to contraception by the Supreme Court, that same Court created a right to an abortion?
If we had truly separated sex from reproduction, why would we need abortion?
It was the failure of the Pill to reliably separate sex and reproduction that led quickly to Roe v. Wade.
With or without "The Pill," it was inevitable that a society composed of men who insist that they have the moral right to use women as masturbation machines will soon insist that they have the moral right to commit abortion, and to "free" women to "choose" abortion. For, after all, when the ethos is "I didn't sight up for this" -- never mind that "this" is the inevitable consequence of what one did "sign up for" -- then "this" must be eliminated.
Now, I have no truck for feminism, as Gentle Reader surely understands. But, likewise, I have nothing but scorn for most of the "men's rights advocates" (and certainly absolute scorn for the "Game" folk), who want at most for the loud-and-brassy feminists to just go away -- for they assuredly do not want to correct the real issue, which is their own impossible and absurd desire of consequence-free sexual activity.
update:
Maggie Gallagher (on 2010/05/25): Sex Makes Babies
The problem is not the Pill. The problem is the idea, which promoters of the pill introduced and promoted with great fanfare, that we have separated sex from reproduction.
We teach the young to think of pregnancy as a rare emergency, an unexpected side effect of engaging in sexual acts. This disconnect produces a great deal of lunacy in our culture, and suffering for children, too.
Yes, contraceptives will dramatically reduce the likelihood that any given sexual act will create a new life. If we had preserved the sexual mores of, say, 1968, we would have had a drop in the out-of-wedlock birth rate as a result. (To refresh your memory, there was quite a lot of unmarried sex going on, much of it between the affianced, and, most importantly, the average length of time of a premarital sexual career was considerably shorter than it is today.) Instead, we have a 41 percent unmarried birth rate, in part because we have sexual mores predicated on an untruth. We have not really successfully severed sex from reproduction.
What are the odds that that a young woman will get pregnant during her first year on the Pill?
The answer is: At typical rates of contraceptive failure, nine out of 100 of these young women will get pregnant. (Actually, that's the average for all Pill users; young users probably have higher failure rates.) Among condom users, 17 young women will get pregnant for every 100 who rely on this method (IUD's and implants are the most successful methods in "typical use"). That's just the risk in the first year. If you spend ten years being unmarried and sexually active, the odds you will get pregnant, or get someone pregnant, are quite substantial.
Newsflash: Sex makes babies.
11 comments:
I seen your post and thought you may be interested in this information, I've posted it on another blog before, talking about this same topic, after researching into these topics for university.
George Akerlof's view on contraception and its affects, with links to articles discussion his work and interpretations of it:
Akerlof's ideas attracted the attention of some on both sides of the debate over legal abortion. In articles appearing in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, The Economic Journal, and other forums Akerlof described a phenomenon that he labeled "reproductive technology shock." He contended that the new technologies that had helped to spawn the late twentieth century sexual revolution, modern contraceptives and legal abortion, had not only failed to suppress the incidence of out-of-wedlock childbearing, they had actually worked to increase it. According to Akerlof, for women who did not use them, these technologies had largely transformed the old paradigm of socio-sexual assumptions, expectations, and behaviors in ways that were especially disadvantageous. For example, the availability of legal abortion now allowed men to view their offspring as the deliberate product of female choice rather than as the chance product of sexual intercourse. Thus it encouraged biological fathers not only to reject any supposed obligation to marry the mother, but to reject the very idea of paternal obligation.
While Akerlof did not recommend legal restrictions on abortion or the availability of contraceptives, his analysis seemed to lend support to those who did.
http://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/stith/abortionwomenvulnerable.pdf
President Obama has recently reiterated that we “need fathers to recognize that responsibility doesn’t end at conception.” (“President Delivers Exhortation to Fathers,” N.Y. Times, June 20, 2009) His and our problem is that in a very real sense male responsibility does in fact end at conception. Men can now choose only sex, not fatherhood. Mothers alone determine whether children shall be allowed to exist.
Easy access to abortion has increased the expectation and frequency of sexual intercourse (including unprotected intercourse) among young people, making it more difficult for a young woman to deny herself to a man without losing him, thus increasing pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections.
Furthermore, if she attempts to choose birth instead of abortion, she may well find him pushing the other way. Her boyfriend’s fear of fatherhood would once have been focused on intercourse itself, and could have led him either to be careful to avoid conception or else (overcoming that fear) to commit himself beforehand to equal responsibility for the child in case of pregnancy. His fear now will turn to getting her to choose abortion. One investigator found that 64% of American women who abort feel pressed to do so by others. (Vincent M. Rue, “Induced abortion and traumatic stress: A preliminary comparison of American and Russian women”
Medical Science Monitor (2004)(10) Another discovered that American women almost always abort to satisfy the desires of people who do not want to care for their children (Frederica Mathewes-Green, Real Choices (1994).
When birth was the result of passion and bad luck, parents and friends could easily sympathize with a young woman who was going to need help with her baby. If money or a larger place to live were going to be necessary for her to stay in school, a sense of solidarity would beckon. All the more so in the case of the boyfriend, for he was as responsible as she for the child. He might offer to get a second job or otherwise to shoulder a part of the heavy burdens she could anticipate.
But now that continuing a pregnancy to birth is the result neither of passion nor of luck, but rather of her deliberate choice, some of those who would have helped may have second thoughts. After all, she can avoid all her problems by just opting for abortion. So if she decides to take those difficulties on, she must think she can handle them. (Even if others offer to help, she may refuse. It is one thing to accept help when one is desperate and something quite different when one has an alternative. She may feel selfish letting her boyfriend take a second job when she can entirely avoid being in need by opting for abortion.)
Birth itself may be followed by blame rather than support. Since she was the only one with the right to decide whether to let the child be born, the responsibility of caring for the child can easily seem to the boyfriend likewise to be hers alone. Especially if he favored an abortion, and offered to pay for it, he will think that her choice not to abort is the sole cause of the child coming into this world. The baby is her fault.
It may also seem unfair to him that she is given a way to escape from motherhood (by not being legally required to give birth) while he is denied any way to escape from fatherhood (by still being legally required to pay child support). If consenting to sex does not entail consenting to act as a mother, why should it entail consenting to act as a father? Paternity support may seem to him quite unjust, and he may resist compliance with his legal duties.
continued...
Prior to the legalization of abortion in the United States, it was commonly understood that a man should offer a woman marriage in case of pregnancy after intercourse, and many did so. But with the legalization of abortion, men started to feel that they are not responsible for the birth of such children, and consequently not under any obligation to marry a woman who refused to have an abortion. In gaining the option of abortion, many women have lost the option of marriage. The number of families that are headed by a single mother has thus grown considerably with abortion, resulting in what some economists call the “feminization of poverty”. George A. Akerlof, Janet L. Yellen, and Michael L. Katz, “An Analysis of Out-of-Wedlock Childbearing in the United States”
, 111 Quarterly Journal of Economics 277
(1996).
The mother is even worse off if, during pregnancy, tests show that the child will have a disability: It is common for doctors to press for abortion, in order to be sure that she does not later blame and sue them for the costs of raising her special child. Some have suggested that health care plans should provide no post-birth coverage for a handicapped child whose mother knowingly refused a paid abortion. If she does not abort, after all, she will be causally responsible for the costs and the alleged burdens that this kind of child brings for the father and for society. Even her friends and neighbors may make her feel guilty or ashamed of not choosing to abort her child (Erika Bachiochi, ed.,
The Cost of"Choice": Women Evaluate the Impact of Abortion 46-47, (2004).
From another article (for some reason it isn't letting me post the links):
In his first article, published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 1996, Akerlof began by asking why the United States witnessed such a dramatic increase in illegitimacy from 1965 to 1990—from 24 percent to 64 percent among African-Americans, and from 3 percent to 18 percent among whites. He noted that public health advocates had predicted that the widespread availability of contraception and abortion would reduce illegitimacy, not increase it. So what happened?
Using the language of economics, Akerlof pointed out that “technological innovation creates both winners and losers.” In this case the introduction of widespread effective contraception—especially the pill—put traditional women with an interest in marriage and children at “competitive disadvantage” in the relationship “market” compared to modern women who took a more hedonistic approach to sex and relationships. The contraceptive revolution also reduced the costs of sex for women and men, insofar as the threat of childbearing was taken off the table, especially as abortion became widely available in the 1970s.
The consequence? Traditional women could no longer hold the threat of pregnancy over their male partners, either to avoid sex or to elicit a promise of marriage in the event their partner made them pregnant. And modern women no longer worried about getting pregnant. Accordingly, more and more women (traditional as well as modern) gave in to their boyfriends’ entreaties for sex.
In Akerlof’s words, “the norm of premarital sexual abstinence all but vanished in the wake of the technology shock.” Women felt free or obligated to have sex before marriage. For instance, Akerlof finds that the percentage of girls 16 and under reporting sexual activity surged in 1970 and 1971 as contraception and abortion became common in many states throughout the country.
CONTINUED...
Thus, the sexual revolution left traditional or moderate women who wanted to avoid premarital sex or contraception “immiserated” because they could not compete with women who had no serious objection to premarital sex, and they could no longer elicit a promise of marriage from boyfriends in the event they got pregnant. Boyfriends, of course, could say that pregnancy was their girlfriends’ choice. So men were less likely to agree to a shotgun marriage in the event of a pregnancy than they would have been before the arrival of the pill and abortion.
Thus, many traditional women ended up having sex and having children out of wedlock, while many of the permissive women ended up having sex and contracepting or aborting so as to avoid childbearing. This explains in large part why the contraceptive revolution was associated with an increase in both abortion and illegitimacy.
In his second article, published in The Economic Journal in 1998, Akerlof argues that another key outworking of the contraceptive revolution was the disappearance of marriage—shotgun and otherwise—for men. Contraception and abortion allowed men to put off marriage, even in cases where they had fathered a child. Consequently, the fraction of young men who were married in the United States dropped precipitously. Between 1968 and 1993 the percentage of men 25 to 34 who were married with children fell from 66 percent to 40 percent. Accordingly, young men did not benefit from the domesticating influence of wives and children.
Instead, they could continue to hang out with their young male friends, and were thus more vulnerable to the drinking, partying, tomcatting, and worse that is associated with unsupervised groups of young men. Absent the domesticating influence of marriage and children, young men—especially men from working-class and poor families—were more likely to respond to the lure of the street. Akerlof noted, for instance, that substance abuse and incarceration more than doubled from 1968 to 1998. Moreover, his statistical models indicate that the growth in single men in this period was indeed linked to higher rates of substance abuse, arrests for violent crimes, and drinking.
From this research, Akerlof concluded by arguing that the contraceptive revolution played a key, albeit indirect, role in the dramatic increase in social pathology and poverty this country witnessed in the 1970s; it did so by fostering sexual license, poisoning the relations between men and women, and weakening the marital vow. In Akerlof’s words:
Just at the time, about 1970, that the permanent cure to poverty seemed to be on the horizon and just at the time that women had obtained the tools to control the number and the timing of their children, single motherhood and the feminization of poverty began their long and steady rise.
Furthermore, the decline in marriage caused in part by the contraceptive revolution “intensified . . . the crime shock and the substance abuse shock” that marked the 1970s and 1980s.
http://www.slate.com/id/2389
Quote:
Does welfare spawn out-of-wedlock babies? The architects of the recently passed welfare reform believe it does. They hope that curbing payments for additional children and enforcing parental work requirements will reverse the 25-year trend that has brought large numbers of unmarried mothers onto the welfare rolls.
In 1965, 24 percent of black infants and 3.1 percent of white infants were born to single mothers. By 1990, the rates had risen to 64 percent for black infants and 18 percent for whites. Every year, about 1 million more children are born into fatherless families, at an enormously increased risk of growing up in poverty.
Efforts by social scientists to explain the rise in out-of-wedlock births have been unconvincing. Conservative Charles Murray, for example, blames overly generous federal welfare benefits. But as David Ellwood and Lawrence Summers have shown, cash welfare benefits rose sharply in the 1960s and fell in the 1970s and 1980s, when out-of-wedlock births rose most.
Liberals have tended to favor the explanation offered by William Julius Wilson, who, in a 1987 study, attributed the increase in out-of-wedlock births to a decline in the marriageability of black men, due to a shortage of jobs. But Robert D. Mare and Christopher Winship have estimated that at most 20 percent of the decline in marriage rates of blacks between 1960 and 1980 can be explained by decreasing employment.
A better theory might be called "Reproductive Technology Shock." In the late 1960s and very early 1970s (well before Roe vs. Wade in January 1973), the availability of both abortion and contraception increased dramatically. Many states, including New York and California, liberalized their abortion laws. In July 1970, the Massachusetts law prohibiting the distribution of contraceptives to unmarried people was declared unconstitutional. Many observers expected liberalized abortion and contraception to lead to fewer out-of-wedlock births. But the opposite happened, because of the decline in the custom of "shotgun weddings."
Before 1970, the stigma of unwed motherhood was so great that most women would only engage in sexual activity if it came with a promise of marriage in the event of pregnancy. Men were willing to make (and keep) that promise, for they knew that even if they left one woman, they would be unlikely to find another who would not make the same demand. In the 1970s, women who were willing to get an abortion, or who used contraception reliably, no longer found it necessary to condition sexual relations on a promise of marriage in the event of pregnancy. But women who found abortion unacceptable, or who were unreliable in their contraceptive use, found themselves pressured to participate in premarital sexual relations as well. These women feared, correctly, that if they refused sexual relations, they would risk losing their partners.
CONTINUED...
By making the birth of the child the physical choice of the mother, the sexual revolution has made marriage and child support a social choice of the father. And while only a few unmarried mothers once kept their babies, only a few put them up for adoption today, because the stigma of unwed motherhood has declined. Once shunned by their peers and whisked out of town, pregnant teen-agers now receive both encouragement and support to keep their babies, stay in school, and participate in other social activities.
The use of birth-control pills at first intercourse by all unmarried women jumped from 6 percent to 15 percent in just a few years, and probably much more among sexually active unmarried women. The number of abortions among unmarried women grew from roughly 100,000 a year in the late 1960s (compared with some 322,000 out-of-wedlock births) to more than 1.2 million a year (compared with 715,000 out-of-wedlock births) in the early 1980s. During the same period, births per unmarried woman roughly doubled for whites, while the fraction of white unmarried women rose about 30 percent. For black unmarried women, the birth rate actually fell by between 5 percent and 10 percent, but this was offset by an increase of about 40 percent in the number of unmarried black women. Meanwhile, fertility rates for married women of both races declined rapidly, making the out-of-wedlock birth ratio even larger.
The shotgun-marriage rate itself declined only gradually, but that is not surprising. Social conventions change slowly. It took time for men to recognize that they did not have to promise marriage in the event of a pregnancy in exchange for sexual relations. It may also have taken time for women to perceive the increased willingness of men to leave them if they demanded marriage.
One final puzzle, however, requires explanation. The black shotgun-marriage ratio began to fall earlier than the white ratio and shows no significant change in trend around 1970. Here, federal welfare benefits may play a role. Because blacks, on average, have lower incomes than whites, they are more affected by changes in welfare benefits. As a result, the rise in welfare benefits in the 1960s may have resulted in a decline in the black shotgun-marriage rate, and thus, in an increase in out-of-wedlock births.
Thats everything!!! There's a lot of information there but I thought it may be of interest.
Yes, legalized contraception and then legalized abortion led directly to the increase in bastardy and in abortions.
And the bastards have the nerve to tell us it's all about choice, well where is my choice not to fund abortions.
And, should one happen to be man enough to accept the responsibilities for another's life that one's own free choices and actions have placed upon one, where is one's choice to not have one's unborn child murdered?
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