Category: Contraceptive Culture

Let’s Talk About Sex, Professor

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Professor Glenn Reynolds talks a lot about sex, but he’s actually thinking about politics:

I’m not much of a Santorum fan — to me, he seems like Mike Huckabee without the charm or political talent — but it’s hard not to notice the narrative jiu-jitsu here.

The “narrative jiu-jitsu” involves something I explained yesterday: It is actually a libertarian position to defend the Catholic church in this ObamaCare fight over mandatory contraception coverage. Liberals are accusing conservatives of wanting to ban contraception because conservatives are against forcing Catholic institutions to pay for contraception.

As far as the professor’s disdain for Santorum as “Huckabee without the charm”:

A. Santorum’s got a law degree. He’s never been a Baptist preacher (or a Baptist anything else);
B. Huckabee never led Ohio by 18 points; and
C. Nobody in Megadeth ever endorsed Huckabee.

Also, Huckabee never promised to make me the first U.S. Ambassador to Vanuatu, which is kind of important.

Update (Smitty): linked at Daily Pundit. I’ll reply on Stacy’s post that for those who are truly grasped by Christ, preaching is about the highest possible calling. I happen to worship in a Baptist church. Thus I’ll allow that, while it is not by any means impossible that Huckabee is in fact carrying out God’s will (and I certainly can’t judge that) the whole politics/entertainment thing strikes us knuckle-dragging fanatic Baptists as just a trifle odd. No one in the New Testament became an un-Disciple. Except Judas.  I view with skepticism any ordained person who segues into politics or entertainment, or, in Huckabee’s case, both.

Obama’s Contraceptive Disinformation

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Some readers may wonder why I haven’t published anything about the battle over mandatory contraceptive coverage under ObamaCare. Basically, it’s because every time I try to do it, I tend to write a couple of thousand words before discarding the draft.

However, yesterday I was CC’d on an e-mail that some crazy woman sent to multiple recipients at National Review. Given that I’ve never had anything to do with National Review, my inclusion on the CC list was somewhat mysterious, but the entirety of the crazy woman’s message was in the subject line:

Good to know that you agree that Muslim employers can impose Shari’a restrictions on their employees, dumbass

Crazy, right? No one who actually understands the issue would make such a comparison. This issue isn’t about employers imposing anything on anybody. It’s about whether the federal government can mandate certain types of insurance coverage for private employers, even to the point of requiring Catholic organizations to pay for insurance that includes full coverage — no deductible, no co-pay — for contraception, sterilization and abortifacient “morning after” drugs.

In this battle, the defense of Catholic organizations is actually a libertarian position, and the only people who could possibly take the side of the Obama administration are . . . well, crazy people, or perhaps well-meaning people who have been deliberately misinformed about the issue.

Believe it or not, a CBS News poll claims that 61 percent of self-described Catholics support the Obama administration, and that the crazy, ignorant and misinformed are an actual majority of Americans. A few headlines:

Reid to Allow Vote on Rescinding
Contraception Rule
— National Journal

Birth Control Amendment ‘Dangerous,’
Obama Spokesman Says
— Huffington Post

Palin on contraception flap:
“An un-American act”
— Real Clear Politics

Can we at least admit that there is an important difference between (a) not covering something on a health insurance policy, and (b) “denying” something or “imposing” something? And are people too stupid to understand that having government mandate certain types of coverage represents a gigantic intrusion into the insurance marketplace?

But if I let myself get worked up about this, I’ll spend a couple of hours on it and end up with another unpublished 2,000-word draft, so I’ll just quit now.

Fertility Facts: ‘It’s Not That We’re Stupid. It’s That We’ve Been Misinformed.’

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At last, intelligent women are starting to speak out about how they’ve been misled about basic facts of reproductive science:

From the outside, Holly Finn certainly looks fertile.
With shoulder-length dark hair, smooth skin and a slim but curvaceous figure, the San Francisco-area writer could be any young mom with a baby on her hip.
But at 43, Finn says, her ovaries know better — and she would have, too, if not for what she believes is society’s widespread ignorance about infertility.
“I really feel that there are important pieces of information that don’t get passed along,” says Finn, who has now tried for four years to conceive through in-vitro fertilization. “I actually think it’s quite a brutal dishonesty.”
Most women aren’t taught — and don’t learn — basic facts about fertility and aging, says Finn, author of the e-book “The Baby Chase.” Instead, celeb moms the likes of Salma Hayek (a baby girl at 41), Marcia Cross (twins at 44) and Mariah Carey (twins at 41) make being an older mom look easy — and glamorous.
“It’s not that we’re stupid,” she says. “It’s that we’ve been misinformed.”

Whenever I write about this topic, I get outraged reactions from feminists who seem to think that explaining procreative biology is an insult to women. Postponing childbearing past age 30 involves a significant risk of infertility. And because the risks of birth defects (especially Down’s Syndrome) are much greater for pregnancies after age 35, delayed motherhood reduces a woman’s chances of having healthy children.

When a man says this, however, he will immediately be attacked as if he were advocating the kind of patriarchal dystopia described in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. It is therefore encouraging to see women like Finn calling attention to this kind of survey data:

Most women simply don’t realize that at 30, a healthy woman has about a 20 percent chance of conceiving per month and by the time she reaches 40, her odds drop to about 5 percent . . .
Instead, many of those surveyed thought that a 30-year-old woman would have a 70 percent chance of conceiving and that a 40-year-old’s chances could approach 60 percent.
They also believed that a 20-year-old woman might get pregnant in less than two months of unprotected sex, rather than the five months that is the average.
“It’s basic biology and basic knowledge of how age impacts your fertility if you’re a woman,” says Collura.
But most women aren’t getting those basics until it’s too late, said Dr. William Schoolcraft, medical director of the Colorado Center for Reproductive Medicine in Denver and two other locations.
“They don’t even come in for fertility treatment until they’re literally in their 40s,” he said. “Some come in and they have run out of time.”

Finn’s 50-page Kindle booklet, The Baby Chase, is available from Amazon for $1.99. I wish that all those otherwise smart young women who think, “Well, that won’t happen to me,” would wake up and realize: It just might.  And I also wish people would realize that nightmare dystopias come in many flavors:

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He’s 36, She’s 33

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“Most women who think they can wait until their mid thirties or later and have a baby without medical intervention really can’t. . . . If you’re a healthy woman, most likely your fertility will peak in your mid-twenties and start to decline at about age 27.”
— American Fertility Association, “Infertility Prevention Handbook”

This post has nothing to do with politics, and instead has to do with smart people out-smarting themselves. Rachel Birnbaum has written an article about her unwillingness to become a mother . . . right now:

I was confident that postponing parenthood now promised the two of us, and our unborn offspring, a brighter, more satisfying future. That waiting until I was ready to be a mother meant I’d be a better mother. I only hoped that when I finally was ready, my body and my husband wouldn’t tell me it was too late.

You really need to read the whole thing to get the full weight of her rationalization: She’s not ready for motherhood at age 33, therefore she will dismiss biological reality and common sense as irrelevant to her situation. And her defense of this attitude is sufficiently elaborate that you get the sense her glib arguments are covering up a good deal of emotional turmoil.

Her story begins when her husband, on his 36th birthday, says: “Ya know, I always thought I’d have a kid by now.” They had been married a couple of years, and he was ready for fatherhood. However . . .

It’s a delicate dance when a desire belonging to your significant other is entirely dependent upon your cooperation. The decision to, say, bring another human being into this world required my total support and collaboration. Not to mention the use of precious real estate. But our timing was off.  My partner tried pushing me forward, I pulled back. . . .
At 33, my biological age, slightly old for prime procreating, didn’t match my much younger state of mind. Although I possessed such grown-up attributes as a mortgage, a decade-long career and a medicine cabinet full of anti-wrinkle serum, I was a late bloomer who wanted off the conveyor belt traveling toward adulthood.

“Slightly old for prime procreating”? As a matter of scientific fact, she’s far more than “slightly old,” as prime childbearing age is 18-24.

It is strange that secular moderns, who constantly lecture us religious traditionalists about our alleged aversion to science, are themselves often ignorant of (or hostile toward) the actual science they claim to revere. Fertility begins to decline after a woman passes her mid-20s and, by the time she is 33, she has a much higher risk of infertility than she would have faced 10 or 15 years earlier. Continue reading He’s 36, She’s 33 →

More Sex, Less Babies?

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Reader Matt K. calls to my attention the compare-and-discuss juxtaposition of two items at Instapundit. Item One:

NOT SURE THIS APPLIES IF YOU’RE MARRIED: How the ‘price’ of sex has dropped to record lows.“Women are jumping into the sack faster and with fewer expectations about long-term commitments than ever, effectively discounting the ‘price’ of sex to a record low, according to social psychologists.”

Item Two:

PHILLIP LONGMAN: Actually, The Children Aren’t The Future: The World Will Be More Crowded — With Old People.“The U.N. now projects that over the next 40 years, more than half (58 percent) of the world’s population growth will come from increases in the number of people over 60, while only 6 percent will come from people under 30. Indeed, the U.N. projects that by 2025, the population of children under 5, already in steep decline in most developed countries, will be falling globally — and that’s even after assuming a substantial rebound in birth rates in the developing world. A gray tsunami will be sweeping the planet.”

(Emphasis added.) What I see here, as a pro-life father of six children, is how the economics of sex and reproduction have been distorted by the Contraceptive Culture.

Perhaps you see something else in this Rorshach inkblot test.

ADDENDUM: To explain what I mean by “the economics of sex and reproduction,” this phrase doesn’t refer strictly to monetary values, but rather expresses an understanding of the processes of sexual behavior from a market perspective.

The old saying that a man will not “buy a cow if he’s getting the milk for free” — i.e., that promiscuous women undermine their marital prospects — expresses this supply-and-demand concept of sex. But the truth of this adage an individual basis can also be extrapolated to the larger society: When women are generally promiscuous, men will be generally reluctant to marry.

This explains why, in every culture, sluts are stigmatized. The rational basis of what feminists derogate as misogynistic “slut-shaming” is seldom articulated, but it is this: Promiscuous women make it more difficult for all women — including chaste women — to get and keep a husband.

As female promiscuity flourishes, the incentives for men to enter into and remain in monogamous relationships are diminished. Furthermore, the men for whom monogamy is most discouraged by widespread female promiscuity are the men most desireable as husbands. Affluent, confident, attractive men — Alpha males — are those whom women commonly dream of marrying, but in a society that tolerates (or even encourages) female promiscuity, such men are also magnets for tramps, floozies and bimbos.

Because these Alpha males never lack opportunities for low-investment sex in a promiscuous society, more chaste women find themselves under pressure to “put out” if they wish to attract the interest of a successful man. And even if a woman can manage to land a real “catch” of a husband in such a society, his fidelity is always jeopardized by the floozies, who don’t give a damn whether their one-night-stand is married or not.

This unfortunate situation is an inexorable consequence of the Contraceptive Culture, which hurts women far more than it hurts men, although ironically it is feminists who most zealously defend the Contraceptive Culture.

Contraception transforms the nature of the sexual act and, as contraception becomes a routine matter, the ways in which we think about sex — that is to say, our cultural expectations — are likewise transformed. Because cultural expectations are seldom examined in any genuinely objective way, most people never question the assumptions of their own cultures. And when you try to explain to such people that life can be lived in other ways, they often become angry and irrational, as if you had insulted them. And speaking of feminists . . .

Feminists are not the only “progressives” who lack the curiosity to question whether any particular element of their political agenda is genuinely “progress.” But offending feminists is just so much fun that I can seldom resist the temptation of pointing out their errors.

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Two Words: ‘Surgical Sterilization’

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A writer at the parenting blog Babble, pregnant with her fourth child, writes about the prospect of her husband undergoing vasectomy. And as always when that topic — or tubal ligation for women — comes up, I find myself startled by the blithe attitude so many people take toward such a genuinely drastic step.

“Snip! Snip! Hee hee hee hee!”

Last year, writing about the 50th anniversary of the contraceptive pill, I pointed out a seldom acknowledged fact: “Female Sterilization is the method used by 17.8% of American women 15-44. . . . Oral Contraceptives are second at 17.3%.” 

Think about that: Nearly 1 in 5 American women of childbearing age has undergone surgical sterilization. This ought to be genuinely shocking, the subject of sociological study. What does this incredible statistic say about a society so vehemently hostile to human procreation that it spends many millions of dollars each year to permanently extirpate the reproductive capacity of its women?

Yet the very fact that this practice is so widespread prevents anyone from daring to comment critically about it, for fear of seeming to be “intolerant” or “judgmental” toward the victims of this surgical war against human fertility.

“Snip! Snip! Hee hee hee hee!”

Go on, laugh. I’m sure the guards at Dachau enjoyed a hearty chuckle now and then.

VIDEO: ‘Demographic Winter’

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My wife and I have six children, which is three times the national average in the U.S. People often ask, “Are you Catholic?” No, we’re proudly Protestant. Yet one cannot ignore the fact that, almost alone among major Christian denominations, the Catholic Church has a well-developed pro-life, pro-family doctrine as part of its basic belief system. It is lamentable that Protestants — even conservative denominations — have not followed suit, insofar as I think that the 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae, for example, has proven quite literally prophetic in its forecast of the social consequences of what has been called the Contraceptive Culture. (See “The Pill at 50: Unhappy Un-Birthday.”)

One obviously need not be a Catholic to see this, nor even a Christian, because every man may examine the facts for himself. And strangely, most people remain utterly unaware of the dire results of a collapsing birth rate. If you’ve read Mark Steyn’s America Alone or Pat Buchanan’s The Death of the West, you know what I’m talking about. But those are political books by conservatives, and the arguments made by Steyn and Buchanan are apt to be rejected by those who aren’t interested in politics, or who don’t share the conservative views of the authors. In the same way, religious arguments about sexual matters are likely to be rejected by people who aren’t religious.

Therefore, it was very encouraging when an e-mailer sent me a link to this video hosted at a Catholic site, Gloria.TV, of the 2008 documentary Demographic Winter. It’s 54 minutes long, but it’s well worth watching.

The important thing to understand is that there are no inexorable trends in human affairs that we are powerless to resist. Men make trends, and not the other way around. Change begins with one person — and that person is you. Do not ask what government can do. Do not ask what your neighbor or your church can do. Instead ask yourself, “What can I do?” And whatever that is, do it.

Don’t look at me. I’ve got six kids — certainly I’m part of the solution, not part of the problem.

K-Lo Slams Contraceptive Culture

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Too many conservatives nowadays are unwilling to take on the cultural issues that underly much of the debate over public policy, so kudos to Kathryn Jean Lopez for directly addressing the accusation that Republicans, by seeking to defund Planned Parenthood, are “waging war on contraception”:

The debate in Congress was given momentum by the Live Action investigatory videos, which raised significant questions about what exactly Planned Parenthood is doing; but the rest of us need to discuss why we’ve let Planned Parenthood step in as a mainstream Band-Aid, throwing contraception and even abortion at problems that have much more fundamental solutions.

Lopez concludes:

As evidence of the reckless and dangerous callousness at institutions supposedly dedicated to women’s health — failure to report the sex trafficking of minors, failure to report child abuse — continues to emerge, we can’t afford to lose sight of another, more fundamental conversation that we’ve got to have, among friends, in our homes and churches — a talk about what it means to be human.

The “Republican war on contraception” rhetoric — recently employed by Amanda Marcotte at Slate and Amanda Terkel at HuffPo  — gets translated by the New York Times into a “Republican war on women”:

Republicans in the House of Representatives are mounting an assault on women’s health and freedom that would deny millions of women access to affordable contraception and life-saving cancer screenings and cut nutritional support for millions of newborn babies in struggling families.

Understand the fundamental premise being expressed by this rhetoric: Access to contraception is such a sacred right that access must be subsidized by taxpayers, and any opposition to such a policy is contrued as inherently hostile to women. This worldview makes contraception the essence of womanhood, a belief that is not merely unnatural, but is in fact anti-nature, because from the standpoint of human biology, reproduction is the entire purpose of sex.  Continue reading K-Lo Slams Contraceptive Culture →