Reproduction Politics

If those who cannot afford to raise children properly simply practiced abstinence, issues like sex education, abortion rights, birth control and vast tracts of social welfare would not remotely be necessary. The pressure on our criminal justice system – reflecting too many offenders with impoverished single “child-parents” who actually did not know how or could not afford to raise their unexpected brood – would dissipate, fewer children would drop out of school and the number of aimless unemployed social wanderers and those seeking-families-through-gang-membership would fall. All it takes is for all those in the lower socio-economic sectors simply to practice abstinence.

In her October 16^th Washington Post opinion piece, writer Catherine Rampell presents this intriguing headline: Is Sex Only for Rich People? Especially non-procreative sex. “Our country apparently doesn’t want low-income Americans to have free access to birth control, either by compelling all insurance plans to offer it or by adequately funding public reproductive health programs. In many schools — predominantly located in low-income, high-teen-pregnancy areas — we don’t even teach kids how contraception works. We also don’t want them to have easy access to abortions when they inevitably get pregnant because they’re not using birth control, with states such as Texas and Mississippi trying to shutter their few remaining abortion clinics.

“Then we don’t help them very much after they birth those unplanned kids, instead publicly chastising irresponsible single mothers for having babies they can’t afford and offering little assistance in the form of child care, education or cash. Dumping unwanted children onto the child welfare system isn’t exactly celebrated, either.

“By process of elimination, the solution for low-income people is to never, ever have sex.” School districts across the land, particularly in the Bible Belt, are dropping sex education from public high school curricula arguing that the issue is a matter for parents to determine, that teaching about birth control and other sensitive matters is not something that states should do. Pressure to cut welfare support to unwed mothers (which necessarily cuts support for their children) often emanates from the same individuals who oppose abortion but truly have not found “baby placement” alternatives for the masses of young, unmarried youth giving birth before their time.

Indeed, these social conservatives – often driven by deeply-held religious views – see the solution as very simple. Don’t have sex. “This, of course, is magical thinking. The belief that we can get entire classes of Americans to practice abstinence until they’re financially ready for marriage and children is a right-wing delusion on par with the left-wing delusions that go into socialism: Both rely on a fundamental miscalculation about human nature. If the socialists wished to legislate away self-interest, the moralists wish to legislate away libido.

“Data show just how difficult it is to keep those unmarried libidos in check. Tawdry though it may be, nearly 9 in 10 young, unwed adults have had sex, according to the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy.” The Post. Sex education and emphasizing prudent use of birth control are essentials in reducing these unplanned and unwanted births.

“Study after study has documented astounding amounts of confusion and misinformation about baby-making. One in 5 unmarried young men, for example, incorrectly believes that having sex standing up is a form of birth control. Among women who have unintended births because they weren’t using contraception, about a third say they hadn’t thought they actually could get pregnant, perhaps because they’d had sex before and never previously landed ‘in the family way.’ But who could really blame young’uns for their ignorance and silly extrapolations, when even a former congressman, Todd Akin, once declared that an effective form of contraception is a woman’s internal desire to ‘shut that whole thing down’?

“It should be no wonder, then, that more than half of all pregnancies are unintended, and that the proportion is 70 percent for single women in their 20s, as Isabel Sawhill discusses in her thoughtful book, ‘Generation Unbound: Drifting into Sex and Parenthood without Marriage.’

Government spending on family planning offers a huge return on investment, not just for families but for the public. In 2010, every $1 invested in helping women avoid pregnancies they didn’t want saved $5.68 in Medicaid expenditures that otherwise would have been needed, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Once upon a time, both left and right understood this calculus. Title X, the federal family planning program that primarily serves low-income women (and whose funding has fallen 18 percent over the last decade, after adjusting for inflation) was passed under President Nixon with unanimous Senate support. Today this and other federal programs that democratize family planning (including the Affordable Care Act) are subject to constant gutting and mockery, with pundits referring to advocates of affordable birth control as ‘sluts,’ and politicians asking why the state should be subsidizing ‘recreational’ activities like sex.” The Post.

Americans seem increasingly to be fact averse, looking instead for answers in slogans that simply do not and have not worked. “Trickle down” economics and “the rich as job creators”… meet “abstinence.” The numbers, the statistics, the social data are not ambiguous or capable of a different interpretation. They are disturbing inconvenient truths that those with deep affinities to slogans and mantras above all cling to, avoiding contact with anything contradictory… like facts.

I’m Peter Dekom, and as the quality of our schools continues to erode, Americans are increasing basing their policy decisions on just about anything but well-researched facts… and the results of that failing trend are around us everywhere.