Category: Contraceptive Culture

Fertility Delayed Is Fertility Denied

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The Census Bureau issued a new report yesterday about the increase of childlessness among American women and, although they provide only a press release and XLS data (rather than a full report), the highlights of the data are perhaps ominous:

The percentage of U.S. women in their 30s and 40s who are childless is rising, new data from the U.S. Census Bureau show.
Some 15.3% of U.S. women aged 40 to 44 were childless in June 2014, up from 15.1% in 2012. . . .
For women in their late 30s, the rise in childlessness is sharper. Around 18.5% of women 35 to 39 were childless last June, up from 17.2% in 2012.
All told, 47.6% of U.S. women aged 15 to 44 were without children last year, up from 46.5% in 2012.
The data are the latest to show that childlessness is on the rise in the U.S. as more women (and their partners) delay marriage and childbearing.
Because fertility declines significantly for women in their 40s — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention define a woman’s child-bearing years as 15 to 44 — demographers carefully watch these women to get a sense of how many children Americans are having, or not. . . .
With more women having their first child in their mid 30s, late 30s and early 40s, American families may be shrinking: The number of women aged 40 to 44 who had only one child roughly doubled between 1976 and 2014, Census said.

 

A more in-depth Census report on the 2012 numbers shows that, in 1976, 10% of women 40-44 (a cohort born 1932-36) were childless, whereas in 2012, 15% of women 40-44 (a cohort born 1968-72) were childless. An ethnic breakdown of the 2012 numbers shows important differences:

White (non-Hispanic)
0 …………………. 16.4
1 …………………. 19.2
2 …………………. 36.6
3 or more ……. 27.8

Hispanic
0 …………………. 10.0
1 …………………. 15.5
2 …………………. 28.7
3 or more ……. 44.9

Non-Hispanic white women were 64% more likely to be childless than Hispanic women, whereas Hispanic women were 61% more likely to have at least three children. Notice when you break it down this way:

White (non-Hispanic)
0 or 1 ………….. 35.6
2 or more ……. 64.4

Hispanic
0 or 1 ………….. 25.5
2 or more ……. 73.6

Considering so-called “replacement level” fertility (2 children per woman), we see that Hispanic women are 14% more likely to be at or above this level, whereas non-Hispanic white women are 40% more likely to be below replacement level. And if we look at the Census report’s data comparing U.S.-born women to immigrants, we find these numbers:

U.S.-born women, ages 40-50
Lifetime births (average) ….. 1.93
Childless ………………………….. 17.2%

Immigrant women, ages 40-50
Lifetime births (average) ….. 2.24
Childless ………………………….. 11.4%

So, immigrant women on average had 16% more children, and U.S-born women were 51% more likely to be childless. Now let’s break down the numbers by educational achievement:

Not a high school graduate
Lifetime births (average) ….. 2.6
Childless ………………………….. 11.6%

Bachelor’s degree
Lifetime births (average) ….. 1.8
Childless ………………………….. 19.9%

High-school dropouts, on average, had 44% more children than women who had college diplomas. Childlessness was 72% more common for college graduates than for high-school dropouts.

If you’ve studied population demographics, you realize that trends like these generally take decades to develop, and that finding cause-and-effect correlations is difficult. That is to say, people’s beliefs developed in childhood, their behavior as teenagers and the prevailing cultural trends in their young adult years will have an effect on whether they eventually have children. Today’s 40-year-old woman was born in 1975 and turned 18 in 1993, so if she is childless now, this necessarily implicates her choices and behaviors in the 1990s, as well as the belief system with which she was raised in the 1970s and ’80s.

Women’s behaviors are necessarily affected by men’s behaviors. If men are avoiding marriage and fatherhood — as Dr. Helen Smith’s Men on Strike documents — it will be more difficult for women to become wives and mothers. It may also be the case that men who might want to be husbands and fathers lack either the social skills or the financial resources needed to attract wives. Alternately, we may theorize that a general social climate of distrust and hostility between men and women make marriage and parenthood more problematic.

Studying demographic trends involves the complex interaction of multiple variables over time. However, it is important to note this: People make trends and not the other way around. That is to say, the individual is always free to act independently of the larger social trend, to swim against the demographic stream. You can make your own high-fertility subculture within a low-fertility society. My being a father of six is the result of beliefs and choices in the same way that other people become childless as the result of their own beliefs and choices.

People want to “fit in,” to have the approval of their peers and of the societ around them, and so being “conformed to this world” is the usual way of life. There is a prejudice I call “middle-classness,” which encourages young people to believe that they must have the credentials and accoutrements of middle-class life — college education, professional career, new cars, home ownership — or else be considered failures. This kind of concern for social status is perfectly understandable, yet in our striving for status (and encouraging our children to do the same) we can easily succumb to the kind of mentality that has produced the trend toward childlessness manifested in the latest Census Bureau report.

Did all these women decide to be childless? No.

If you could go back to 1993 to interview the 18-year-old who today is a childless 40-year-old, she likely would say she wanted to be a mother “someday,” under certain circumstances. However, those circumstances did not arise and thus “someday” never arrived.

The Contraceptive Culture encourages women (and men) to believe that fertility is entirely a matter of personal choice, but any fertility specialist will tell you this is a myth. The woman who has not become a mother by age 30 will have a significantly higher risk of experiencing infertility if and when she does try to become pregnant. And even if she has no medical problems with her reproductive health, the woman who delays motherhood past 30 will on average have fewer children in comparison to women who have their first child before they are 30.

Fertility delayed is fertility denied. Demographics is ultimately a matter of arithmetic, although the numbers involved represent human lives and the choices we make based on our own beliefs.

“See, I have set before thee this day life and good, and death and evil . . . I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.”
— Deuteronomy 30:15, 19 (KJV)

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Your Future (or Lack Thereof)

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“Male and female created he them” (Genesis 5:2) seems obvious enough. “Be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:28) is not a difficult commandment to understand or obey. However, in the modern world, so many people actually think they’re smarter than God that they manage to persuade themselves that extinction is “progress”:

A survey by the Japan Family Planning Association reported that over a quarter of men aged 16–24 “were not interested in or despised sexual contact.” For women, it was 45 percent…
Forty-nine percent of women under 34 are not in any kind of romantic relationship, and nor are 61 percent of single men. A third of Japanese adults under 30 have never dated. Anyone. Ever. It’s not that they’ve stopped “having sex”… It’s bigger than that: It’s a flight from human intimacy. . . .
The Japan Times . . . quotes the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research as saying that the country’s population is expected to decline between 26% and 38% by 2060.

That information comes from Mark Steyn, whose ancestors were on a first-name basis with the author of the commandments previously cited, and here’s more of the same:

“See, I have set before thee this day life and good, and death and evil . . . I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.”
— Deuteronomy 30:15, 19 (KJV)

It’s really simple, but some folks think they’re smarter than God.

 

 

Progressives Cheer: Sterilizing Poor People Is Totally Awesome!

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Long-acting reversible contraception (LARC) was the primary weapon to prevent poor people — mainly black and Latino teenage girls — from reproducing in the Colorado Family Planning Initiative (CFPI). Funded by a “confidential private donor” and operated through the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment’s Title X Family Planning Program, CFPI not only paid for LARC — contraceptive implants and intra-uterine devices (IUDs) — but also paid up to $675 for each vasectomy and $2,600 for each tubal ligation (female sterilization) performed in Colorado’s Title X clinics since 2009.

Well, guess what they found out? You shove enough free contraception at poor teenage girls, and you get fewer babies:

Fertility rates among low-income women aged 15–24 were compared with expected trends. Abortion rates and births among high-risk women were tracked, and the numbers of infants receiving services through the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) were examined. . . .
By 2011, caseloads had increased by 23%, and LARC use among 15–24-year-olds had grown from 5% to 19%. Cumulatively, one in 15 young, low-income women had received a LARC method, up from one in 170 in 2008. Compared with expected fertility rates in 2011, observed rates were 29% lower among low-income 15–19-year-olds and 14% lower among similar 20–24-year-olds. In CFPI counties, the proportion of births that were high-risk declined by 24% between 2009 and 2011; abortion rates fell 34% and 18%, respectively, among women aged 15–19 and 20–24. Statewide, infant enrollment in WIC declined 23% between 2010 and 2013.

Conclusion: Evil is more effective when it’s free — and the progressives at Daily Kos think this is totally awesome!

 

Feminist Attacked by Feminists After Telling the Truth About Birth Control

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Holly Grigg-Spall (@hollygriggspall) is a British feminist who last year published a book called Sweetening the Pill: or How We Got Hooked on Hormonal Birth Control. The term “hormonal birth control” includes not only The Pill, but also Depo-Provera and Yasmin/Yaz, the latter of which is the target of lawsuits that blame side effects of the drug for causing nearly two dozen deaths.

It would seem to be just common sense that the long-term use of artificial hormones — for birth control or for anything else — could have harmful side effects. When I was in college, a guy who was into weight-lifting called me over to his dorm room one afternoon and asked me to read the very detailed warning included with the steroids (Dynabol, as I recall) he had somehow obtained on the black market.

These warnings were written in a lot of scientific jargon that my buddy didn’t understand, and he asked me to translate them into plain English. So I was reading along through this lengthy list of potential side effects and reached the phrase “testicular atrophy.”

Oh, hell, no.

Do you see what I mean about common sense? You don’t have to be a research scientist to figure out that if “testicular atrophy” is a potential side effect of a guy injecting himself with synthetic male hormones, maybe it’s not such a good idea for women to be gobbling down a daily dose of synthetic female hormones. Even if it weren’t for my other concerns about the Contraceptive Culture (see “Sex, Science, Nature and ‘Choice’“), I would still be dubious about hormonal contraceptives on the basis of common-sense health issues.

But don’t take my word for it. Let a radical feminist explain:

My own experiences with HBC began in my teens when I began taking it for acne. I remember that once I started taking it, it took me about a month for my over-the-top emotional hormone swings to lessen. . . .
Once my emotions leveled out, I was very good at taking the pill once per day at the same time every day. . . .
I stayed on the pill for a decade at least.
I discovered radical feminism in 2011 and, like so many of us, it changed my life. . . . About that same time I decided to go off the pill. The last straw came when doctors thought I had had a pulmonary embolism, which is a condition made more likely by HBC. A CT scan indicated that it was actually pneumonia, but that was a very scary experience for me. I decided to finish my pack and be done with the pill.
Over the next year as my body detoxed from the pill I developed acne all along my jaw/chinline that hadn’t been there before. Large bumps protruded on my face, which was embarrassing as I was well past adolescence. I also experienced weight gain, which I was told wasn’t a *real* side effect of going off the pill. It was frustrating not to [be] believed when I reported my symptoms.

Think about it: If the Pill is powerful enough to prevent pregnancy and relieve adolescent acne — i.e., to make a woman’s body stop doing what it normally does — what kind of less noticeable changes does it also cause? What are the potentially harmful side effects of using these synthetic hormones on a daily basis for 10 years or more? Holly Grigg-Spall started asking questions about this and guess what the reaction was from the feminist establishment?

Liberal feminists have called her book “dangerous” and use name-calling techniques in attempts to push Griggs-Spall to the margins of feminist discourse. As many of us know, being insulted and told to keep quiet are tools used to keep us away from discovering truths and maintain the status quo. Grigg-Spall is referred to as a “crank” (how feminist!), and potential readers of her book are warned that discussing female biology and women’s experiences is inherently “essentialist”. . . . There are several critiques of this book that have similar tones and I found the pro-pill apologism quite transparent.

Why is this?

My belief is that the pharmaceutical industry is threatened by Griggs-Spall’s book and that discrediting her is a way to maintain the status quo. I also contend that rejecting the pill goes against sex-positive/mainstream feminism, which is why there’s push-back as well from its representatives.

Hmmm. So the radical feminist believes that the arguments of “sex-positive/mainstream feminism” are just coincidentally aligned with the interests of the pharmaceutical industry that promotes hormonal birth control. I’d bet that if a diligent researcher looked closely at the financing behind institutional feminism, they would discover that this alignment is not entirely coincidental, like how “mainstream feminism” sold out to the porn industry in the 1980s. People need to be more skeptical. Not everybody who says they’re your friend is actually your friend.

 

Sex, Science, Nature and ‘Choice’

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Four years ago, I wrote a 4,000-word essay called “The Pill at 50: Unhappy Un-Birthday,” which included this observation:

The Pill fostered a prevalence of the belief that sex without pregnancy is normal. This utterly unnatural idea is the foundation of the Contraceptive Culture.
Throughout human history, recognition of the natural connection between sex and procreation was fundamental to society’s laws, customs, attitudes and behaviors in regard to relationships between men and women. These traditions had varied from place to place, and shifted slowly from time to time, but in all times and all places, social norms had been founded on the understanding that sex and pregnancy were intrinsically linked. Indeed, from a strictly biological perspective, reproduction is the sole purpose of sex.
The Contraceptive Culture, by contrast, is based on the negation of what we may rightly call natural sexuality. . . .

You can (and certainly I wish you would) read the whole thing, because so few Americans now have any memory of life before the advent of the Contraceptive Culture, the origin, history and goals of which are generally distorted by academics and the media. For example, it is often claimed or implied that the development and promotion of oral contraceptives in the 1960s was undertaken in order to “liberate” women; in fact, this project was funded by billionaires (especially David Rockefeller) who were fanatically devoted to a eugenics-influenced vision of population control. (See Donald L. Critchlow’s excellent 2001 history, Intended Consequences: Birth Control, Abortion, and the Federal Goverment in Modern America.) The arguments that sold The Pill as a particular blessing to women — and which, by obverse correlation, portrayed pregnancy and motherhood as traumatic burdens to be avoided if at all possible — was promulgated by public-relations specialists hired by Rockefeller and other soi-disant “philanthropists” who shared his population-control agenda.

Because this history is so little known, and because the beliefs of the Contraceptive Culture have become so widely accepted, people are often shocked to be told the truth and sometimes become furiously outraged by those of us who dissent from the now-common way of thinking. Consider liberals’ insane reaction to the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision, and also how they have reacted to conservatives’ responses. Here is what Rush Limbaugh said Wednesday:

We had a caller yesterday that asked me this question: “When did birth control pills become so important to the human condition the federal government requires every insurance policy to cover them?” Eye exams, dental exams, dental work are not mandated by Obamacare, but contraception is, birth control pills are. Which is worse, to go blind from lack of regular eye exams or to get pregnant? . . .
[I]n the normal, everyday flow of events, pregnancy requires action that has consequences. Yet we treat it as a great imposition that women need to be protected from. It’s a sickness, it’s a disease, it’s whatever, and there’s gotta be a pill for it. Yet they wouldn’t have the problem if they didn’t do a certain thing. It’s that simple.

Limbaugh then went on to talk about Democrats and their dishonest “War on Women” rhetoric, but what he said about pregnancy being the result of an “action that has consequences” was the lead quote in Caitlin MacNeal’s article at the liberal site Talking Points Memo, which cited Limbaugh as an example of “conservative slut-shaming.”

What you see is how something artificial becomes perceived as “normal” simply by being common, and how the New Normal is then taken for granted as, with the passage of time, people simply forget that it was ever any other way. Interstate highways, air conditioning, cable TV, the Internet — my kids can’t imagine life without any of those things, although these are all relatively recent developments.

The Interstate highway system began construction in the 1950s, yet as recently as the late 1970s — when I was a senior in high school — I-20 had not yet been completed between Atlanta and Birmingham. People my age (54) and older are able to remember what long-distance auto travel was like before the Interstate system existed, and we’re also able to remember when you made such trips in a car that didn’t have air-conditioning. Until the 1970s, if the motel or restaurant you stopped at had air-conditioning, this was a feature that the proprietors were certain to advertise on the marquee, along with “Color TV” (a novelty introduced in the 1960s.)

Nobody wants to go back to the days of black-and-white TV, nor is anyone proposing to ban artificial contraception. Yet the influence of the Contraceptive Culture is such that some people seem to have entirely forgotten that the biological teleos of sex — its natural and organic result, its scientific purpose — is reproduction.

After four decades of rhetoric about “choice,” and two decades of lectures about “safe sex,” younger Americans apparently assume that it is normal for sex to be sterile, and that for sex to produce its natural result (pregnancy) is something weird.

As Limbaugh said, people now think of fertility as a “sickness,” a “disease” that requires medical treatment. So deeply ingrained has this view become among some young people that a sex educator in Massachusetts found herself accused of being “unintentionally heteronormative,” which made her realize that her college students had “never thought about sex in terms of biology or reproduction”!

So here we have a court decision, brought about as a consequence of an ObamaCare mandate, which says simply that an employer may refrain from providing insurance coverage for certain types of birth control. That’s it — no one is being forbidden to purchase birth control, nor are any forms of birth control going to be outlawed by this decision. It is strictly a question of whether the federal government has the authority to mandate insurance coverage for birth control. Yet to judge from the reaction of some liberals, the Surpreme Court has unleashed the Sex Police upon us, and we are on the verge of a return to the Dark Ages, when people were expected to pay for their own birth control. It’s as if liberals believe birth control is a right guaranteed by the Constitution.

Now they’re protesting by handing out condoms in front of Hobby Lobby, defending your right to keep and bear no offspring.





 

The #HobbyLobby Hysteria

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Years ago, while reporting on federally funded research — the infamous “porn arousal” studies at Northwestern University — I developed what I like to think of as the Existential Theory of Liberalism: To a liberal, nothing exists unless it is mandated, subsidized and/or regulated by the federal government.

If you think it is a waste of taxpayer money to give a creepy psychology professor a federal grant to measure women’s sexual arousal to pornography, you will be condemned as “anti-sex.” If you want to reduce deficit spending by limiting tax money for the National Endowment of the Arts, you’re “anti-art.” Don’t agree with proposed EPA environmental regulations? You’re “anti-science.”

The reaction to today’s Supreme Court decision in the Hobby Lobby case — where a business objected, as a matter of religious liberty, to ObamaCare’s mandated insurance coverage for contraceptives — is a case in point: Liberals want us to believe that, unless businesses are compelled by federal law to provide contraception to their employees, contraception will cease to exist.

Their arguments are absurd, but if liberals were capable of understanding facts and logic, they wouldn’t be liberals, would they?

 

The Darwinian Dead End: Feminists Subtract Themselves From the Future

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“To live for the moment is the prevailing passion — to live for yourself, not for your predecessors or posterity. We are fast losing the sense of historical continuity, the sense of belonging to a succession of generations originating in the past and stretching into the future. . . .
“Narcissism emerges as the typical form of character structure in a society that has lost interest in the future.”
— Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (1979)

Earlier today, I mentioned Amanda Marcotte’s revulsion toward motherhood — “this homicidal impulse, this horrifying hatred of the mere thought of having babies” — as symptomatic of the mental illness that inspires much of feminism. Meanwhile, Melissa Langsam Braunstein calls our attention to still more symptoms:

Many adults can’t stand kids. The tragic thing is that some of them are already parents.
In honor of Mother’s Day, feminist website Jezebel scoured anonymous social media site Whisper for posts from parents who regret procreating. One parent shares, “I love my kids so much . . . but I regret having them every single day.” Some Whisper mothers miss their pre-kid social lives and others bemoan their post-birth bodies. There is also this incredibly jarring admission: “I hate my son. I didn’t want a boy. I wanted a girl.”
I can’t imagine ever saying anything like that. I’m thrilled I’m having a second girl, but having experienced a miscarriage last year, I’m over the moon to simply be carrying a healthy baby. . . .

Read the whole thing. Of course, no sane person can imagine saying such things about their children, but these are feminists, eh?

The swirling vortex of modern madness that makes some people envision a future of cannibalism manifests itself in other ways. Or maybe you didn’t hear the news about the Miley Cyrus tour.

“Every time you get in your car, you’re going to hear my fucking song on the fucking radio, you piece of shit. That’s right. And then I’m gonna take all my clothes off, I’m gonna sit on a big, giant dick . . . and then I’m gonna hold the record for the most-watched music video on Vevo . . . So then — you know, you can tell a lot about a person — I think you can tell how big their dick is by how much confidence they have usually, and if I was a dude I’d probably have a really big dick, ’cause I feel really good about myself now. So I’m gonna tell those motherfuckers that broke my heart — particularly one — to suck my fat dick and to enjoy hearing this song for the rest of your life.”
— Miley Cyrus, May 10

This obscene tirade — accompanied by Miley’s use of the, uh, interesting stage prop — was widely interpreted as a denunciation of her ex-fiancé, Liam Hemsworth. But let’s face it: Miley has been having a public nervous breakdown for the past year or so, and this was just her latest psychotic episode. Although she’s getting paid quite well to indulge her exhibitionistic perversion, one must wonder if her acts of self-degradation are somehow a cry for help.

Psychologically healthy people don’t do such things, and the unraveling of Miley Cyrus’s broken mind — she apparently no longer has any sense of personal dignity — is painful to watch. But this is just popular entertainment “in a society that has lost interest in the future.”

Sex is naturally about the future.

Procreation is the biological purpose of sex, after all, and as the Contraceptive Culture encourages us to have unnatural sex — to thwart the natural purpose of sex — it also disconnects sex from love, marriage and parenthood, so that sex becomes a meaningless recreation of no more ultimate consequence than a video game.

Like the pornographic career of “Belle Knox,” the weirdly sexualized performances of Miley Cyrus in some sense express the inherent nihilism of what sex becomes when it is treated like a commercial commodity, a leisure amusement or — as with Miley’s “suck my fat dick” gesture — a competitive sport with winners and losers.

Feminism encourages and celebrates this meaningless kind of sex, telling women that motherhood is oppressive and that abortion is therefore a “right” essential to women’s “liberation.” At the pro-abortion feminist Web site RH Reality Check, Chanel Dubofsky commemorated Mother’s Day with a rant about the “childfree” lifestyle:

Mother’s Day is a great time to remind ourselves that language matters. We already know this; the difference between a “baby” and a “fetus,” between “reproductive rights” and “reproductive justice,” among other terms, are vital to pro-choice politics and the movement. Corporate media outlets misfire with regard to language all the time, and this has created a deep sense of confusion between the terms “childless” and “childfree.”
Recently, in a piece for The Telegraph, writer Sarah Rainey featured actress Helen Mirren discussing her decision to not have children, and the implications of that decision for Mirren and for other women like her in a society obsessed with having children.
“Motherhood holds no interest for me,” said Mirren.
She is referred to in Rainey’s piece as “childless.”
Here’s the problem: While “childless” means the condition of being without children, it implies that everyone who does not have children would like to have them. However, being “childfree,” like Mirren — and like me — means that one does not want to have children at all. . . .
As a woman who’s childfree, I’m not experiencing reproductive challenges. I’m not waiting for the right partner, or enough money, or the perfect geographic location. I don’t feel like something is missing from my life because I don’t have children. I don’t want to have kids. . . .
The experience of not wanting children in a world where women are defined by their reproductive desire and potential — where women are expected to structure their lives around babies — is very different than being a woman who would like a baby or would like to be a parent some day. . . . A cisgender, straight woman who doesn’t want a baby is transgressive, subversive, pathological, a perpetual mystery to be solved.

Certainly, we should not encourage feminist lunatics to procreate. If Chanel Dubofsky wants to become a Darwinian dead end — to subtract herself from the future — far be it from me to attempt to dissuade her from embracing her own extinction. She thinks she’s being “transgressive” and “subversive”? Whatever. Her delusions of significance are of no consequence, but it’s important to recognize that this is just another symptom of feminism as a mental disorder.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!

 

The @AmandaMarcotte Birth Control ObamaCare Fear-Mongering Crusade

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Donald Douglas points out that everyone’s favorite baby-killing enthusiast has found a new focus for her feminist lunatic rage, namely a pending Supreme Court case about the ObamaCare mandate that insurers must provide free contraceptive coverage.

Before addressing Amanda Marcotte’s irrational claims directly, let me ask: Does anyone else remember the Iraq War military draft conspiracy theories spread by the Left during the Bush administration?

One of the dirty little secrets of the Bush-era antiwar movement was how the Left cynically exploited the vast ignorance of American youth to foment antiwar sentiment on college campuses: The 9/11 “Truthers” were the most gaudy example of this, but there was also the claim that the Iraq invasion was a “War for Oil” conspiracy to enrich Halliburton and fatten U.S. oil company profits, and arguably the antiwar Left’s most blatant lie was that neocons in the Bush administration were secretly plotting to reinstitute the military draft. It wasn’t just crackpots at the Daily Kos promoting this, either. Howard Dean said it in a 2004 speech at Brown University: “I think that George Bush is certainly going to have a draft if he goes into a second term, and any young person who doesn’t want to go to Iraq might think twice about voting for him.”

This kind of irresponsible fear-mongering builds on the mythmaking success of the academic Left and the liberal media. Nobody under age 50 remembers that it was a Republican, Richard Nixon, who ended the military draft on the advice of free-market economist Milton Friedman, nor have the young ever been told how Democrats branded Ronald Reagan a warmonger who would lead us to nuclear Armageddon, when in point of fact, it was Reagan who successfully negotiated the elimination of nuclear weapons and ultimately ended the Cold War.

Because young people are not taught about the long and sordid history of Democrat dishonesty, each new liberal lie is enthusiastically embraced by college kids who think it is always the “smart” thing to believe the worst about Republicans.

Thus we return to Amanda Marcotte, who sees the Hobby Lobby case as the first step toward a theocratic “breeder” dystopia:

Well, I have a theory and it’s that this case is about more than just getting the contraception mandate overturned or giving your boss rights to force you to abide by his religious dogma by manipulating your compensation package, though those are also important agenda items for the right. This case is also about manipulating the media, specifically to warm the mainstream media up to the idea that contraception is “controversial” . . . The idea is to get the mainstream media sources to say, “One side says birth control is abortion” over and over and over and over again, until the idea “birth control=abortion” is considered a normal one in American culture. And since abortion is controversial, then, they hope, they can make contraception controversial, too. Once contraception is “controversial” like abortion is, then it’s a hop, skip and a jump away to convincing Republicans it’s politically safe now to start passing laws restricting access to it.

This is one of those ideas that are so crazy only a feminist could possibly believe it. Not even the most devout Catholic or fervent evangelical “Dominionist” can really envision a scenario whereby laws “restricting access” to contraception would be enacted by Republicans or anyone else, even in the most conservative states. Like the deliberately false fearmongering about a return to the military draft 10 years ago, Marcotte and others on the Left are now trying to confuse women, to make them believe that if they vote Republican, the Pill and condoms will soon be outlawed. Witness how Amanda Marcotte begins her discussion of the pending Supreme Court case:

Arguments start this week for Hobby Lobby v. Sebelius, the Supreme Court case that will determine the fate of the contraception mandate put forth by the Department of Health and Human Services after the Affordable Care Act was passed into law. The contraception mandate is part of a larger mandate by the ACA to classify dozens of medical services, like wellness checks and vaccinations, as “preventive” care, which would then require insurance plans to cover them without a copay. The idea is that this will both make health insurance work better for enrollees and save money overall by encouraging prevention. Contraception was included after the Institute of Medicine recommended it for its well-known effects of preventing unwanted pregnancy, and thereby preventing unplanned child-bearing and abortion.

What this case is actually about (no matter what Amanda Marcotte or anyone else tries to tell you) is the attempt by Democrats to dictate the type of health insurance employers must provide. Everyone who isn’t on the payroll of the White House or the DNC agrees by now that ObamaCare is an unworkable scheme, a policy catastrophe that proves the truth of every criticism of central government planning ever made by Mises, Hayek, Friedman and Sowell.

Marcotte refuses to admit that ObamaCare is actually anti-choice, in the economic sense, as the various mandates limit the options of workers and employers in terms of the health insurance options available to them. ObamaCare requires employers to provide comprehensive coverage of contraception with no copay, that is to say, health insurance must cover 100% of the cost of contraceptives.

Well, why?

Marcotte and other Democrats endeavor to frame the argument in the euphemistic language of “women’s health,” but as always, it’s about the money, specifically about using the force of federal law to fund Planned Parenthood and to expand the influence of the radical population-control movement. It’s not about “health” (some forms of contraception involve serious health risks), and it’s not about “choice” (Hobby Lobby isn’t trying to prohibit contraception), it’s about control.

Amanda Marcotte wants Democrats in control of the federal government, and she wants the government in charge of everything.

Her ridiculous fear-mongering, which presents the Hobby Lobby case as the first stealthy step down a slippery slope to theocracy, is in fact the exact opposite of truth: Amanda Marcotte is an outspoken proponent of taxpayer-funded abortion, and one might more accurately see ObamaCare as moving in the direction of making “free” abortion a matter of compulsory federal law.

“Sex is about reproduction. This is the natural function of sex, biologically speaking, and it’s odd how the same liberal fanatics who enjoy endlessly lecturing us about Darwinism and global warming — ‘The science is settled!’ — are so unscientific about sex.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, Oct. 23, 2013

Neither facts nor logic support Amanda Marcotte’s claims, which are actually rooted in emotional abnormality on her part, representing her bizarre pathological fear and hatred of babies: “I don’t want a baby. . . . Nothing will make me want a baby. . . . This is why, if my birth control fails, I am totally having an abortion.”