The Emperor has no Clothes…and no Condom

…sorry, couldn’t resist.

A common line of thinking that’s all the rage these days is that we can reduce abortions through greater access to contraception.  This has never sat right with me.  The argument looks fair, but smells foul.

oops

Here’s one of the many reasons why.  New York Times columnist William Saletan, himself no frothing-at-the-mouth pro-lifer, recently wrote:

Eight years ago, the Alan Guttmacher Institute surveyed over 10,000 American women who had abortions. Nearly half said they hadn’t used birth control in the month they conceived. When asked why not, 8 percent cited financial problems, and 2 percent said they didn’t know where to get it. By comparison, 28 percent said they had thought they wouldn’t get pregnant, 26 percent said they hadn’t expected to have sex and 23 percent said they had never thought about using birth control, had never gotten around to it or had stopped using it. Ten percent said their partners had objected to it. Three percent said they had thought it would make sex less fun.

In other words, only 10% of the women surveyed didn’t use birth control due to lack of access.  This blows a big hole in the “greater access” argument above.  As Saletan goes on to say, “this isn’t a shortage of pills or condoms. It’s a shortage of cultural and personal responsibility.”

By attacking an irrelevant detail (lack of access to birth control, and, I add, education about why and how to use birth control), we leave the root cause (a “shortage of cultural and personal responsibility”) untouched.  This will make the problem worse…it’s the law of unintended consequences.

Granted, Saletan defines “cultural and personal responsibility” to include use of contraception, and his definition is much different than mine–chastity.

My response to Saletan: starting a fire outside the fire place, even if you use mitts to handle the hot coals, is not responsible…catch my drift?  When we implicitly send the message that one can sever sex from it’s intended purpose–especially with government policy–the consequences will be dire.

By the way, I am not here making the case for abstinence only sex education…that’s a subject for another post.

Despite  the above gem, the rest of his column is confusing.  He offers a “compromise” on abortion that he thinks will help.  One proposal is to legalize same-sex marriage…I’m not clear on how that would help.  Two of his other proposals, strangely, turn on contraception…and this despite what he just said about lack of access.  As Public Discourse writer Michael New notes, true blue pro-lifers won’t find much to like in the column.  However, the above admission is striking.  New quips:

While most pro-lifers will find little to like in his proposals, Saletan does the pro-life movement an extremely valuable service by effectively debunking the notion that better access to contraceptives will significantly lower abortion rates. In so doing, he inadvertently succeeds in making the case that a more chaste culture is the only way for pro-lifers to achieve their long term objective of assuring that every unborn child sees the light of day.  Given all the already existing programs, it is by no means clear that there are policy instruments that could increase contraceptive use among this subset of women.

Right now the pro-life movement is having a crisis of thought.  Because the perception is that pro-life political policies were not working (not true…see here), many, I think, have suffered a loss of hope and have been wooed by a bunch of claptrap.  It’s all the rage these days, but few pause to consider the real consequences.

The woods are a-teeming with contraception fans, but they’re gonna end up burning down the forest.