The Unspoken Crisis

By Duncan Maxwell Anderson

November’s election made it clear. Most Americans know there is a cultural crisis. Most agree that abortion is a bad thing, and should at least be restricted.

But there’s a moral crisis much bigger than abortion that even conservative politicians and talk-radio hosts don’t dare discuss. It’s so deeply entrenched in our culture that no one believes it can be mentioned without touching off an unwinnable war: contraception.

Starting in the 1960s, America plunged into social and moral evils recognized by Catholics, Protestants and Jews alike. These plagues spread as they did in part because the U.S. Supreme Court quashed the state laws designed to suppress them. A turning point was the nationwide legalization of contraception in Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965.

Justice William O. Douglas wrote that the decision’s purpose was to protect the privacy of marriage: "Marriage is a coming together for better or for worse, hopefully enduring, and intimate to the degree of being sacred."

Those words probably sounded better than if the Justice had said, "This Court hopes to make it easier for spouses to cheat, and for 21-year-old men to get away with statutory rape," which was their actual effect.

Here is what followed the Griswold decision:

National divorce rates doubled, to one divorce for every two marriages. Sexual activity for unmarried females increased dramatically, especially among girls 16 and under. Illegitimate birth rates went up nearly threefold among blacks, to 64 percent, and sixfold among whites, to 18 percent. Fewer young men started families. The percentage of men 25-34 who were married with children dropped from 66 percent to 40 percent. Laws against abortion in all 50 states were nullified, spawning an industry that was, at one point, killing about 1.5 million unborn children per year. Graphic sex education is part of school; however, parents no longer let children walk home from school, because of the danger of educated sexual psychopaths. Were changes like these caused, directly or indirectly, by contraception? Nobel-prize-winning economist George Akerlof of the University of California at Berkeley thinks many of them were. Papers of his from 1996 and 1998 are cited in "The Facts of Life and Marriage" by W. Bradford Wilcox in Touchstone magazine.

The background of Akerlof’s argument - not a moral or religious one - is what everyone knows about courtship. For boys, paying attention to the girl is the cost, and the possibility of sex is the benefit; for girls, sex is the cost, and getting the boy’s attention is the benefit.

In the old days, this was the question: If the attraction is mutual, why should she hold back from sex? This was the answer: She might get pregnant, and he might leave her. Morality builds on human nature.

But suppose we change this age-old game by throwing in the existence of legal, relatively reliable contraception and abortion. The man can now parrot the arguments of the feminists and argue that those "choices" are available to her, and she undergoes no more risk from fornication than a man does.

These arguments may go unstated, but they are still in the air. The boy and girl both know that if she won’t cooperate, another girl might. So the negotiation tilts his way.

Multiply this little encounter across a population, and the world is changed. Men can more easily get sexual access to women without taking on the burden of marriage and children.

Women protect themselves by cutting back the number of children they have and getting a paying job outside the home. That way, they aren’t stuck if the husband leaves, and they keep themselves in the courtship market in case someone better comes along.

Rather than nurturing holy matrimony, as Justice Douglas implied, contraception has produced a holocaust of mistrust, selfishness, betrayal, bitterness, and divorce, poisoning the intimacy of man and wife, leaving spouses and children saddened and scarred.

When Pope Paul VI released "Humanae Vitae" ("On Human Life") in 1968, all expected him to bless the brave new world of contraception. Instead, he dropped a bomb that is ripping apart the Western world to this day. He condemned contraception and warned that it could "open wide the way to marital infidelity." He said it was "an evil thing" to make it easy for the young to break the moral law. For men, he added, getting used to contraception could tempt them to "forget the reverence due to a woman" and "reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires."

The Pope also warned that if men allowed themselves to claim total control over their bodies and the creation of new life, they

were inviting totalitarian governments to take over that control. Communist China would do just that in the 1970s, with its policies of forced sterilization and abortion.

We have learned that civilized society cannot survive the consequences of "sex without consequences."

Perhaps from heaven Pope Paul is calling, "Told you so."
 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Duncan Maxwell Anderson writes from New York where he is president of High Tor Media, Inc., a New York producer of educational and family-oriented books and magazines. This article was reprinted from TheFactIs.org- click [here]