Human Rights for Apes/Spain Herald

The Spanish Socialist Party will introduce a bill in the Congress of Deputies calling for "the immediate inclusion of (simians) in the category of persons, and that they be given the moral and legal protection that currently are only enjoyed by human beings." The PSOE's justification is that humans share 98.4% of our genes with chimpanzees, 97.7% with gorillas, and 96.4% with orangutans.

The party will announce its Great Ape Project at a press conference tomorrow. An organization with the same name is seeking a UN declaration on simian rights which would defend ape interests "the same as those of minors and the mentally handicapped of our species."

According to the Project, "Today only members of the species Homo sapiens are considered part of the community of equals. The chimpanzee, the gorilla, and the orangutan are our species's closest relatives. They possess sufficient mental faculties and emotional life to justify their inclusion in the community of equals."
posted by maggie at 9:09 PM VOTE 4 comments

And...Hello to their Books?/Maggie Gallagher

If you want to hear more from either or both of our guest bloggers:

Cristina Page, How the Pro Choice Movement Saved America: Sex, Virtue and the Way We Live Now.


Jennifer Roback Morse, Smart Sex:Finding Lifelong Love in a Hook Up World.

No, iMAPP doesn't get a cut. I'm just sympathetic to people with books to sell. Its hard!

Maggie
posted by maggie at 7:49 PM VOTE 0 comments

Farewell to Jennifer/Maggie Gallagher

Thanks Jennifer for your time and energy. Best of luck to you also in your future ventures.
posted by maggie at 7:48 PM VOTE 0 comments

Contraception and Consequentialism/Maggie Gallagher

Back to the subject matter. Jennifer's argument that contraception is bad for society is basically something like "Contraception caused the sexual revolution. And the sexual revolution is bad."

I actually see (in our comments) maybe the beginning of a potentially interesting debate on the second part. You know, where people actually think about stuff, and then disagree about it, and we all come out of the debate knowing more--more about what other people think if nothing else.

But I'm going to restrict myself to the first part. First let's note there is a lot to be said for this argument. Something very dramatic happened between 1965 and 1975. Everything changed. A friend of mine who married in 1964 and divorced in 1967 told me, "Before I married, if you weren't a virgin, it was a deep dark secret you never told anyone except maybe your best girlfriend. After I divorced, guys were like incredulous that I wouldn't put out on the first date! I mean they just couldn't believe it."

What happened? Well, one thing that happened was The Pill. Most people think it had a lot to do with making the sexual revolution happen, on the grounds that finally we had reliable contraception that separated sex from reproduction, a precondition of a sexual revolution.

I have no doubt it made a contribution. But four things bother me about making this link the main causal one:

a. there was reliable birth control before the pill. We know urban middle class families were limiting births to around 2 children by the late 19th century. The diaphragm dates from the thirties.

b. the Pill is a more effective contraceptive technology but it still produces a high enough failure rate that claiming we've separated sex from reproduction is ludicrous (9 percent of women on the Pill get pregnant in the first 12 months, according to survey data published in Family Planning Perspectives).

c. Large numbers of women aren't on the pill anyway. Less than half I think. (Subsequent Note: I just checked.Actually according to this 1998 Family Planning Perspectives article, although the Pill is the most popular contraceptive, it is used by 27 percent of women using contraceptives.)

d. Roman elites managed a sexual revolution without any modern methods of contraception. They just tossed their unwanted children in the streets to die.

If you want to know what really separates sex from babies in a reliable way, its abortion, not contraception. Which may be why Eisenstadt v. Baird lead to Roe v. Wade so quickly. Daughters of people with judgeships and Phd's were promised that the Pill would separate sex from reproduction. But enough of them kept getting pregnant that elites began to demand abortion as a right. (Speculative I know but I think there's something in this).

In other words I want to separate contraception, which is a technology, from what I call "the contraceptive culture" which is basically the idea that you have a right not just to use contraceptives, but to have sex without creating new life. A natural right to engage in the act that creates new life, without actually creating any.

Which leads me to the fifth objection I have to consequentialist arguments about cotraception. I note, as a matter of empirical fact, that neither of the two religious communities doing the best job of beating back the sexual revolution, or sustaining a marriage culture, have any moral objections to contraception: I mean the Orthodox Jews and the Mormons, both of whom have (relatively) high marriage rates, low OWB rates, and higher than average fertility for married couples.

I don't mean to suggest this means Catholics are wrong about contraception as a moral argument. I mean to suggest that practically, focusing on moral objections to contraception as the "prime cause" or "prime cure" of what now ails us in regard to the sexual revolution may be looking in the slightly wrong place.

What is more important, I think, than the negative ban is finding new ways to sustain the positive link between love, desire, union, and babies.

A subtle difference perhaps, but an important one.

Do you see what I mean?
posted by maggie at 6:55 PM VOTE 7 comments

Final Post/Jennifer Roback Morse

Cristina, many of the people I associate with find it endearing to hear about people running out to care for their kids, in between trying to do their jobs. I wasn't complaining. Honest.

More seriously: I don't know how many times I have to say this. No one is trying to take away your contraception. Not everyone agrees with you about its proper place and use.

It seems to me a perfectly stable social situation for Catholics and others who have moral objections to contraception, to go along their way, believing what they do, teaching why they believe it, trying to persuade others to join them, but ultimately, just trying to live up to their own beliefs. The Catholic bishops can't even get the Catholics to live up their teachings: they are not about to try and pass laws on the subject.

By the way, I shared my I Have a Dream post with several friends, including some who are highly placed in pro-life circles. None of them objected to my statement that I have no interest in regulating contraception. Not one accused me of being "soft on contraception." The fact that many, though not all, pro-life people have moral objections to contraception, does not mean they want to take it away from you, or that they would be able to, even if they wanted to.

I proposed this debate because I think it is a serious question as to how society should view all the changes that widespread contraception has wrought. Some, such as increasing education and labor force participation of women, are good things. Others are more troubling. I listed quite a few troubling issues earlier this week: the increasing sexualization of younger people, the increasing coarseness of our sexual culture, the high levels of illegimatacy. I raised the question of whether you thought there was a difference between married and unmarried sexual activity and contraceptive use. You did not respond to these issues.

Your solution seems to be more contraception, more sex education. One of the more striking things I learned this week was from the data Maggie very kindly posted. The Effectiveness of Contraception depends on the life situation of the person using it. Failure rates are higher for cohabiting and other unmarried people. This suggests that simply instructing people on the mechanics of contraceptive use will not, by itself, be enough to guarantee successful use.

I believe delaying the age of first intercourse would be good for individuals and for society. I believe promoting marriage as the appropriate context for sex would be constructive as well. Reducing the time between the age at first intercourse and the age at first marriage, would also be a good thing, for us as individuals and as a society. These are obviously not things that can be legislated. They require cultural and educational efforts, not governmental ones. These were some of the things I had hoped to discuss. Perhaps, another time.

Maggie, I appreciate your hospitality, and the thoughtfulness of your readers. I hope to see all of you again in cyber-space, if not in person.
Sincerely,
Jennifer Roback Morse
posted by Dr J Roback Morse at 6:52 PM VOTE 2 comments

Farewell and Good Luck, Cristina/Maggie Gallagher

Sorry Cristina you found this such an unpleasant experience. It seems to me it was not an especially good experience for anyone, although readers may disagree. (You guys are why we run this site).

I am also sorry you think my posts represented "biased information." It's a charge I would normally take pretty seriously, as I distinguish pretty hard between opinions or conclusions and evidence. (Which ones were biased exactly? The survey of contraceptive failure rates published in the Alan Gutmacher Institute's journal Family Planning Perspectives? Washington Post and Associated Press accounts of Bearman and Bruckner? The data on NFP failure rates from the Georgtown Institute for Reproductive Health actually substantiated both your and Jennier's claims (i.e. a perfect use rate that is quite low and a typical user failure rate of around 20 percent or so.) My intent was to post reliable sources and let readers interpret the information, which is why I said so little about them.

But everyone is entitled to their opinion, including your opinion about me.

Thank you for sharing yours about a wide range of things. Best of luck to you in your future ventures.
posted by maggie at 6:38 PM VOTE 7 comments

Cristina Responds to Jennifer/Cristina Page

Let's all give a round of applause to Jennifer, the only parent on earth who loves her children. Such high handedness! The implied smugness of people who preach to us about good parenting, as if they have all the answers and they are the only examples, is breathtaking. We're all such failures in your eyes, aren't we? So moved are we by the sexy content of shampoo and beer commercials that we've all up and forgotten to love our kids.

As hard as this may be for you to understand, I think it's worth mentioning because it is true for all working moms: I work because I love my child. We need two incomes, as do most American families. (And I bet most of the people on this blog have working spouses.) I don't need to be convinced, as you put it, to "find a way to embrace a desire for motherhood as well as a desire for meaningful work outside the home." I will say though, that your cherished pro-life movement works to make it as difficult as possible for mothers to work outside the home. Why was 90% of the opposition to the Family Medical Leave Act from pro-lifers? Even though it granted parents for the first time in history to right take time off from work to care for a newborn? (Isn't this exactly the type of legislation that makes it easier to have a baby and be a parent?). And yet, of course, sanctimonious pro-lifers fought against it. Why? Because anything that makes it easier to be a working mother is in conflict with the mothers should stay at home and be mothers-only lifestyle.

As hard as this may be for you to grasp, I'll say it because it's why most people use contraception: I practice family planning because I love the child I have and the children I want to have. I also know that by spacing my children, I am creating healthier children too. I do that because I am a loving parent.

I grew up in a world with family planning. I have never cheated on my husband, had group sex, divorced, had same sex sex or an abortion, as you have. Because you took liberties that most of us have not, maybe you wrongly assume we have all led our lives as you have. Perhaps you feel compelled to convince us that somehow we can't keep the lid on things either. Your days of experimentation are yours to cope with, not ours.

I don't see how steering people away from family planning accomplishes any of your dreams. I think it is a sinister attempt to impose your (proven to fail) value system on others. What's clear from all your lecturing is how little faith you have in the American people to lead moral lives and make responsible decisions for themselves. No good shepherd can hold a flock in such contempt and also deliver it anywhere safely.

Finally, you've several times bemoaned the inconvenience of this debate (which you called for, by the way) and the pressure it put on you (gratuitously mentioning the apparently abundant responsibilities of your daily life). So just fyi, I have posted my entries from a different state of our country each night. I also didn't have Maggie on my team posting biased information to back up my claims, as you did. (I wouldn't allow it even if she would.) Maybe the next time you're up for a debate, you'll be willing to stand on your own and do your own bidding.

Cristina
posted by Cristina Page at 3:26 PM VOTE 6 comments

Reducing Unwed Childbearing/Brooking Institution Policy Brief

"Most social scientists acknowledge that, on balance, single parents, stepparents, or cohabiting couples are no substitute for childrearing by two married parents. Yet, new data from the federal government show that a record number of babies—nearly 1.5 million—were born to unmarried women in the United States in 2004. Empirical evidence of this sort has leveraged political support for the Bush administration's "Healthy Marriage Initiative." Congress recently approved major funding for this initiative as part of welfare reform reauthorization. Approximately $100 million per year will be available for research, demonstration, and technical assistance projects to promote healthy marriage through such activities as public advertising campaigns, relationship and marriage education in high schools, and relationship and marriage skills for both unmarried and married couples. In addition, about $50 million per year will be available to promote responsible fatherhood.

Preliminary evaluations of marriage education programs have revealed some positive results for middle-class parents, but there is not yet scientific evidence on how these programs will work for more disadvantaged couples. Indeed, marriage promotion among the poor remains a contentious issue. Not only is the effectiveness of such strategies unproven, but some critics view these strategies as poorly designed for dealing with high rates of incarceration, unemployment, substance abuse, and domestic violence among low-income men and with high rates of early unwed childbearing among low-income women.

This brief argues that for marriages to succeed among low-income families, it is also essential to address these underlying problems—most specifically, the problem of unwed childbearing."
posted by maggie at 1:52 PM VOTE 0 comments

Are At-Home Moms a Luxury Good?/Maggie Gallagher

Brad Wilcox over has familyscholars blog has pointed out the Great Caitlin Flanagan Debate has reinforced false stereotypes about who all these stay at home moms are.

They aren't mostly rich women or women with rich husbands. They aren't an economic elite at all. In fact, according to the Statistical Abstract of the United States 2002 (chart 662), the median income of a family with a wife out of the paid labor force in the year 2000 was $39, 735. The median income of a family with a wife in the paid labor force was: $69,463.
posted by maggie at 9:17 AM VOTE 0 comments

Demand for SSM/Maggie Gallagher

I got interested in the question of how many gay people marry, where marriage is available, not because I thought it was some sort of "killer app" in the gay marriage debate. It's not the kind of thing where you release the data and anyone will turn and say "Oh Socrates, your position cannot be denied!" (But then that so seldom happen in real life, don't it?. . .)

But the data is (for me) potentially relevant to several potentially important questions, including: Will marriage be a good answer to problems like hospitals who don't treat gay partners well? For if it turns out only a small minority of gay people marry, then marriage is not going to be a very good vehicle for addressing some of the legitimate social needs of gay people being raised in the gay marriage debate.

I have said (and believe) that gay marriage is going to have a bigger effect on marriage than on gay people, because (I believe) only a small minority of gay people will end up married. Jon Rauch is one of many folks who think otherwise, and I think we both recognize this latter particular question is an empirical one to be determined by the future actions of gay people.

To me, the results so far are pretty inconclusive. In general, in most jurisdictions, the demand for gay marriage by gay couples appears to be minimal: somewhere between 1 percent and 5 percent. In the Netherlands, which has had gay marriage for almost 5 years, less than 6 percent of gays and lesbians have married. (Maybe as little as 2 percent). (And that's assuming all the spouses are Dutch citizens). And the numbers are still dropping each year.

There are two big exceptions to this generalization: British Columbia and Massachussetts, both of which have a high proportion of gay marriages, perhaps as high as 14 percent for BC and almost 17 percent for Massachusetts.

If this upper bound figure is accurate, that's a pretty big demand and could signal marriage will eventually be a dominant, or at least majority, experience for gay people.

I suspect these two jursidictions are outliers for a reason however. British Columbia was the earliest province to adopt gay marriage. Quite likely people travelled from other provinces to marry there. Similarly Massachusetts is the only U.S. state which permits gay marriage. Quite likely a substnatial fraction of these Mass. marriages actually have an out of state spouse or even two. In order for nonresident couples to marry in Massachusetts, all they have to do is declare their intent to reside there. Press accounts have certainly reported at least some out of staters getting married in Massachusetts, nobody knows how many.

In which case, the upper bounds of this study would represent a potentially large overestimate of the proportion of gays and lesbians in Massachusetts who chose to marry.

Time(and more research) will tell.

I don't think comparing the proportional marriage rate of straight people to gay people makes a whole lot of sense (though Gary Gates agrees with Jon) because well, the proportion of gay people exposed to the risk of marriage is many, many times higher, since they start out with 0 percent married.

The big dropoff in Massachusetts between 2004 and 2005 is also notable. Almost 6000 couples married in the short 8 months of legal availability in 2004. In 2005 the number dropped sharply to 1300 couples.

It will be interesting to see what the future holds.
posted by maggie at 12:19 AM VOTE 1 comments

My Contraceptive Postings/Maggie Gallagher

So often people seem to assume that if I've posted information (or asked a question about information) I've also made an argument. I do think its important that discussions are informed by facts, and most of what I've done is this week is just point to a few, ones that were not made obvious to me as a young woman. I had to dig them up for myself.

It is seldom that the facts themselves make any clear or definitive argument. They are just data. They lie around waiting to be noticed, or used, for personal and/or debating purposes.

I do hope to post my promised comments on why I am discontent with consequentialist arguments on contraception. And maybe a little of how I do think about these facts. I've been busy with a lot of things, including trying to get a little media attention for our new study on the Demand for SSM. Maggie
posted by maggie at 12:04 AM VOTE 0 comments

New IMAPP Study: Demand for SSM/Maggie Gallagher

Thanks Jon, always glad to see you post. I'll respond shortly with my own "take" on the data.

Meanwhile the study can be found here.

An Associated Press story about the new report is here:

This is the Executive Summary:

"What proportion of gay and lesbian people choose to marry, when the option is legally available?

This research report offers estimates of based on the best available data. The highest estimate to date of the proportion of gays and lesbians who have married in any jurisdiction where it is available is 16.7% (Massachusetts). More typically, our survey of marriage statistics from various countries that legally recognize same-sex unions suggests that today between 1% and 5% of gays and lesbians have entered into a same-sex marriage. In the Netherlands, which has had same-sex marriage as a legal option for the longest period (over four years), between 2% and 6% of gays and lesbians have entered marriages.

Trend data is extremely limited, but the available data suggest that the number of gay marriages tends to decrease after an initial burst (reflecting pent up demand). Whether same-sex marriage will emerge as common or normative among gays and lesbians, or fade as time and novelty passes, cannot yet be determined."
posted by maggie at 10:01 PM VOTE 0 comments

The Contraceptive Quiz Show, Final Question/Maggie Gallagher

If 100 women start having sex at 16, use a contraceptive method perfectly that is 95 percent effective, and marry at 26, how many will experience a nonmarital pregnancy? (Cristina, Jennifer, you can play too if you want).
posted by maggie at 8:30 PM VOTE 17 comments

Contraceptive Effectiveness Rates/Maggie Gallagher

I can't actually tell you, like I promised, what proportion of 20 year old women who use diaphragms get pregnant in the first year of use because it turns out that "cell" is too small to report results for.

But for married women age 25-29, with incomes under twice the poverty rate, the answer is: 22.2 percent. For wives of that age with incomes at least twice the poverty rate, the answer is: 13.2 percent.

For unmarried women (both cohabiting and noncohabiting) who have incomes at least twice the poverty rate, the answer is a little over 19 percent.
posted by maggie at 8:23 PM VOTE 0 comments

Gay Families Traditionalizing Gay Culture/Dale A. Carpenter

". . .There are unmistakable signs that the emphasis on relationships and families in gay life, politics, and media is having traditionalizing effects on gay culture.

This is evident in the causes and trends that have dominated the gay movement for the past 15 years or so: serving in the military, joining the Boy Scouts, attending services at large gay-friendly churches, and above all, gay marriage.

This development can even be seen in America's capital of gay sexual liberation, San Francisco. Recent stories in the B.A.R . and the Los Angeles Times document the beginnings of a change in attitudes toward open and explicit displays of sexuality in the Castro. The change is being spurred especially by gay families with children, who want a more family-friendly environment and are chafing at a culture they see as saturated with sex. . ."

"Last year, a lesbian mother of two, now 6 and 2, complained about a sadomasochistic tableau in a clothing shop window that featured a male mannequin chained to a toilet. 'As an adult I find this disgusting,' she wrote in an e-mail to city officials. 'As a parent I find it unconscionable.'"

Just a few months ago, the B.A.R . ran several stories about a life-sized wooden statue of an aroused naked man that was displayed in a Castro storefront. Parents in the neighborhood objected that it should not be visible to children who pass by on their way to and from school. After police got involved, the owner reluctantly covered the statue's private parts.

Some business owners are sensitive to families' concerns. A lesbian mother reported to the Times that a clothing store manager helpfully warned her about taking her 12-year-old daughter into a back room where "suggestive leather outfits were displayed." With more children in the neighborhood, she predicted, "businesses that accommodate the sensibilities of families will survive, while those that are less child-friendly will not."

"Our kids need a place in the community," said July Appel, executive director Our Family Coalition, an organization for gay families and a lesbian mother of two. "The Castro is big enough for everyone. Gay cruising has its place. But so do playgrounds."

The trend is being felt beyond commercial venues, reaching into the heart of gay organizations and events. The annual LGBT Pride Parade in San Francisco, by far the largest in the country, now provides a children's area with licensed day care. This year's parade will include a float celebrating gay families, complete with children singing Village People songs.

At the LGBT Community Center, nudity is now forbidden in the hallways – requiring bondage classes to stay behind closed doors. "Twenty years ago we couldn't have had such a rule," the center's director, Thom Lynch, told the Times. "People would have fought it."
posted by maggie at 8:12 PM VOTE 2 comments

Earlier Post/Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse

In case people missed it, I posted yesterday on Contraception and Illegitimacy. I had saved a draft yesterday when I had to go out for kid-duty. When I posted it today, it appeared as if I had posted yesterday. This post is an attempt to develop an explanaction for the impact of contraception on illegitimacy.
posted by Dr J Roback Morse at 6:56 PM VOTE 0 comments

I Have a Dream/Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse

Thank you for asking, Cristina. As a matter of fact, I do have a dream.

I have a dream that some day, every child will be conceived from an act of true love between parents who love each other, are married to each other, and eagerly welcome him. I have a dream that every child will spend his childhood with those parents who brought him into being. Parents see the value of the small society they have created between themselves and their children, and do everything humanly possible to sustain that society.

I have a dream that children can be children, take joy in their childhood innocence, and not become sexualized before puberty. All of society recognizes parents as the primary educators of their children, instead of regarding parents as impediments to formal sex education. Parents take seriously their responsibility to provide their children with accurate and complete information about sexuality, including the social and moral significance of sex, rather than acquiesce in whatever the school provides. Instead of the school deciding when children are ready for sexual information, parents monitor their child's maturity level, and make a considered judgment about when their child is ready. Parents feel themselves negligent if they fail in this. I have a dream that when parents elect to remove their children from public school sex ed classes, the parents no longer feel like interlopers and the children like outcasts.

I have a dream that Corporate America takes some responsibility for preserving the innocence of the young, and monitors the sexual images they place into the public square. Advertisers think it disreputable to market to children using sexual images. Retailers think it irresponsible to place erotic materials at check-out counters and other places where children might stumble across them. The entertainment industry takes responsibility for limiting the sexual content of its programming to appropriate venues.

I have a dream that the market accommodates the needs of the family, rather than the family adapting itself to the needs of the market. We create an economy in which people are prepared to earn a living before the age of twenty-five or thirty. Young people graduate from college without crushing debt, and without the prospect of unmanageable housing costs and tax burdens. Families can support themselves on one income, at least for a while. Mothers can return to the labor market and find a place where they can use their talents and earn some money.

I have a dream that young women find a way to embrace their desire for motherhood as well as their desire for meaningful work outside the home. At some time in their lives, most women have the opportunity to give themselves over completely to caring for their children and making their home. Women make sensible life plans for themselves, that take into account the possibility that their children may be too needy to be in day care and may need to be with their mothers. I have a dream that mothers not feel that they are wasting themselves if they stay home with their children.

I have a dream that fathers and mothers are husbands and wives. Men and women learn to cooperate with each other, respect each other's differences, appreciate each other's unique gifts. Women can trust their husbands not to abandon them, and men can trust their wives not to eject them from the family home.

I have a dream that if a woman chooses a lifetime of barrier-free, chemical-free intimacy with her husband, she not be made to feel like a freak. A family with many children can appear in public, without having to endure rude remarks. People might even show some gratitude to those who are investing their lives and their bodies in building the future of society.

And if any of these things are not possible for a young couple, I have a dream that friends and family will step up to help them. We find a way to accommodate and assist people who are unable to live up to the social norms, without destroying or dissipating those norms. Neighbors will help see them through their difficulties. And if it must be that they rely on the kindness of strangers, these strangers become friends.

I have a dream that we recognize that we have been trying to do something that no society in the history of the human race has ever attempted: create a society that has no norms at all about the proper context for sexual activity or childbearing. We come to recognize how unlikely this is to succeed.

So you see, I am not being evasive when I say I have no interest in regulating contraception. I believe that the widespread promotion of contraception has unleashed many social forces that would have been best contained. But it does not follow that the way to improve our situation is to retrace our steps. I realize that my agenda is not modest. Yet many changes I support do not involve legislation or regulation at all, but rather changes in private-sector policies that accompany a change of heart. Among those that do require government action, such as reform of divorce laws, the most appropriate venue is state or local legislation, not dictates from the federal judiciary.

You accuse me of wanting to turn back the clock to the 1950's. I have no desire to go backwards. If we are going to go back to any place, it might as well be the Garden of Eden. That is where we are all trying to go anyway, and it is just as practical as going back to the Eisenhower Administration.

No, I do not want to go back anywhere. I want us to go forward, to become what we should have been from the beginning.
posted by Dr J Roback Morse at 4:41 PM VOTE 5 comments

Effectiveness of Contraceptives Methods/Maggie Gallagher

Family Planning Perspectives, Volume 31, Number 2, March/April 1999
"Contraceptive Failure Rates: New Estimates From the 1995 National Survey of Family Growth" By Haishan Fu, Jacqueline E. Darroch, Taylor Haas and Nalini Ranjit

". . .Results: When contraceptive methods are ranked by effectiveness over the first 12 months of use (corrected for abortion underreporting), the implant and injectables have the lowest failure rates (2-4%), followed by the pill (9%), the diaphragm and the cervical cap (13%), the male condom (15%), periodic abstinence (22%), withdrawal (26%) and spermicides (28%). In general, failure rates are highest among cohabiting and other unmarried women, among those with an annual family income below 200% of the federal poverty level, among black and Hispanic women, among adolescents and among women in their 20s. For example, adolescent women who are not married but are cohabiting experience a failure rate of about 47% in the first year of contraceptive use, while the 12-month failure rate among married women aged 30 and older is only 8%. Black women have a contraceptive failure rate of about 20%, and this rate does not vary by family income; in contrast, overall 12-month rates are lower among Hispanic women (16%) and white women (11%), but vary by income, with poorer women having substantially greater failure rates than more affluent women. . ."
posted by maggie at 4:38 PM VOTE 2 comments

Reasoning from Exceptions

IMAPP’s very interesting study on the demand for same-sex marriage brings to mind a line of argument from last week’s marriage symposium at UCLA Law School. The thesis of some speakers seemed to be that there really exists no marriage tradition worth speaking of, much less one worth preserving. This thesis is supported by pointing to evidence of practices in some cultures that diverge from the norm of marriage between men and women. Assuming the practices are correctly reported, sometimes the divergence seems great, other times less so and sometimes the divergence is not real, such as with polygamy, which involved male-female marriages (there does not seem to be any evidence that a man’s plural wives were married to one another). Thus exceptional circumstances are used to generalize outlying practices as constituting a tradition of nontradition, to which new family forms cannot pose any threat.

This also seems to be a limitation on the current effort to litigate a redefinition of marriage. Typically, a lawsuit involves a handful of same-sex couples although the remedy they seek will change the definition of marriage for the whole population (a kind of class action suit). The IMAPP study suggests that even the group on whose behalf these plaintiffs sue may turn out to be not all that interested in taking advantage of the new law.

A recent student paper by Melanie Barrett examined the use of personal stories in one of the New York marriage cases and suggests that this practice might distort the effect of the legal change sought which, of necessity, will extend far beyond the plaintiffs in a given case. For instance, where a court relies on the exceptional circumstances of same-sex couple headed households with children to reject the function of marriage in channeling potentially procreative relationships into stable forms protective of mothers and children.

This is not to say that the law might not appropriately address exceptional circumstances, but that it might be wise to treat them as exceptional.
posted by William Duncan at 4:13 PM VOTE 1 comments

Effectiveness of Natural Family Planning/Maggie Gallagher

For all methods of preventing pregnancy, a. motivation of the user is the best predictor of efficacy and b. actual use rate failures are much higher than theoretical effectiveness rates. With a little push I can tell you how many 20 year olds using diaphragms get pregnant in the first year of contraceptive use. It isn't small.

Personally, (although anecdote is not data) I used NFP for 8 years without a failure. Of course I wasn't a love struck teenager. Maggie

This is from the Georgetown Institute for Reproductive Health:

"Couples who use natural methods correctly to prevent pregnancy have only a 1% to 9% chance of becoming pregnant during one year of use, depending on which method they use.

Couples who do not use their method correctly—that is, they have intercourse on days when the method's guidelines tell them that the woman is fertile—-have a much greater chance of unintended pregnancy.

The following is the probability of pregnancy for women using natural methods:

Standard Days Method
During the first year of use, the probability of pregnancy is about 5%. During typical use, i.e., using the method correctly during some cycles but having unprotected intercourse during the woman's fertile time in other cycles, the probability of pregnancy is about 12%

BBT Method
Among perfect users, the first-year probability of pregnancy is only about 2%. During typical use the probability of pregnancy is about 20%.

The Ovulation Method
The first-year probability of pregnancy for methods based on using only cervical secretions to identify the beginning and end of the fertile time is about 3% among perfect users and 20% among typical users.

Symptothermal Method
The first-year probability of pregnancy among couples who use two or more fertility indicators are about 2% to 3% among perfect users and as high as 13% to 20 % among typical users. . ."
posted by maggie at 4:11 PM VOTE 1 comments

Demand for Same-Sex Marriages / Jon Rauch

I haven't yet read IMAPP's new paper on utilization of same-sex marriage, but Gary Gates, a demographer at UCLA, drew my attention to this Washington Post article, in which he notes that "that a sharply higher percentage of gays and lesbians were deciding marry than heterosexuals of marrying age." Gary tells me:

The math behind this is that about 2.2 million marriages occur in the US in a given year out of a possible 96 million unmarried people. That’s about 4.4 million married people out of 96 million or 4.5%. Maggie’s study suggests 13.6% of gay people married in Massachusetts.

Speaking generally (not about IMAPP's paper), these marriage prevalence/rate comparisons are a thorny business. On the one hand, you'd expect pent-up demand to produce somewhat higher marriage rates after SSM legalization, which may be what Gates is picking up in Massachusetts. On the other hand, we're dealing with a population that has been socialized outside of marriage for generations. I've always advocated SSM not just because it will meet demand in the gay population for marriage but also because, over time, it will create demand for marriage.

It's also important to compare rates to rates and prevalence to prevalence. Most straight people eventually marry (high prevalence), but in any given year only a small fraction of the straight population marries (that's the annual marriage rate). A fairly common mistake--made, for instance, by David Frum in a National Review article of March 28, 2005--notes that a small percentage of the estimated homosexual population has married in (say) the year or two since gay marriage became available, and then compares the tiny fraction of gays who are married with the large majority of straights who are married, concluding, as Frum did of Canada:

...very few homosexuals wish for marriage for themselves... Within the first year, about 4,000 Canadian couples had been married in Ontario. Since then, the number of same-sex marriages seems to have dropped off. Current statistics are hard to come by, but it's a good guess that nearly two years after same-sex marriage arrived in Canada some 98 percent of adult Canadian gays have chosen not to avail themselves of their new legal right.

Taking a closer look, Samuel Bell, of Raleigh, NC (in a letter to Independent Gay Forum...the letter is no longer online), pointed out that

only about 1.1% of all Canadian gays got married during that year [2003-2004, after gay marriage was legalized in several provinces of Canada]. In that same period, about 300,000 out of 23,250,000 marriageable heterosexual Canadians got married, which amounts to approximately 1.3% of the heterosexual population. Thus, the heterosexual marriage rate was similar to the gay marriage rate.

In other words, some 98 percent of straight Canadians also chose not to avail themselves of their right to marry in the year after gay marriage was legalized.

I'm confident that IMAPP will not have made that mistake, but it's worth noting that, even if gays married at the same rate as straights (or, for that matter, at higher rates), many years would pass before marriage prevalence could match in the gay and straight populations. Maggie G. and I disagree on whether SSM would build or erode the marriage culture, but we probably do agree that, either way, it's not a quick process.

posted by Jon at 2:14 PM VOTE 2 comments

What Virginity Pledges Succeed At Doing and What They Fail At Doing/Maggie Gallagher

From the March 19 2005 Washington Post, "Teen Pledges Barely Cut STD Rates, Study Says"
"Teenagers who take virginity pledges -- public declarations to abstain from sex -- are almost as likely to be infected with a sexually transmitted disease as those who never made the pledge, an eight-year study released yesterday found.

Although young people who sign a virginity pledge delay the initiation of sexual activity, marry at younger ages and have fewer sexual partners, they are also less likely to use condoms and more likely to experiment with oral and anal sex, said the researchers from Yale and Columbia universities. . . "

Here is an excerpt from Associated Press story on the original Bearman and Bruckner data, dated Jan 4, 2001, "Teen virginity pledges surprisingly effective, study says"

" . . ."We didn't expect to see any effect from these pledges, but it was just the opposite," said Dr. Peter Bearman, a sociology professor at Columbia University and lead author of a study on the issue.

Making such a pledge was most effective for 16- and 17-year-olds, Bearman and his colleagues found. Virginity pledges had no effect among those 18 or older, and the effect on younger participants was variable.

Results of the study are being published in this month's issue of the American Journal of Sociology.

"The average delay among pledgers is 18 months," Bearman told The Associated Press. "That is significant. And that is a pure pledge effect." . . ."
posted by maggie at 8:00 PM VOTE 1 comments

More later

Spare me the amateur theology, please. I don't have time to respond to your long post, right now. My foster kids had only a half day of school today, so I'm off. I'll check in later.
posted by Dr J Roback Morse at 6:03 PM VOTE 0 comments

Cristina Responds/Cristina Page

Come on Jennifer, I know you have a dream. I’m not asking whether you think contraception is likely to get banned. What I wanna know is, really, do you want it to be? Forget pragmatism—what does the Chief Visionary want?

I wish it weren’t so, Jennifer, but I regret to inform you that you are wrong about the abortion rates under Bush. The dramatic decline we witnessed during Clinton years, according to the Guttmacher Institute, which both sides of the abortion conflict refer to as the experts on this issue, appears to be slowing under Bush. Also off base is your bet that Clinton-era declines in abortion could be attributed to policies like parental consent requirements and “virginity pledge” programs. The New York Times just conducted a study of states that have implemented parental consent restrictions and found that they had scant impact on the abortion rate. (This makes sense, after all, most parents don’t want to compel their daughters to be teenage mothers.) These restrictions do achieve other results however—increases in later term abortions. (Mississippi experienced a 19% increase in second trimester abortion, Minnesota had an 18% increase and Missouri had a 27% increase among teens after they implemented parental consent laws). So, congratulations.

To credit “virginity pledge” programs with having any impact on the abortion rate is hilarious. Who knew you were so funny! First, a (peer-reviewed and published) study by researchers at Columbia and Yale found that kids in “virginity pledge” programs have the same rate of STDs as kids who are not in the “virginity pledge” programs. The only difference is, “virginity pledgers” are more likely to have risky sex, less likely to use condoms, and less likely to get treated for the STDS they have. Male “virginity pledgers” are four times more likely to have anal sex than teenage males that don't pledge. Both male and female virginity pledgers are six times more likely to have oral sex than non-pledgers. “Virginity pledgers” are not only having sex: they’re having porn star sex. The notable difference is that porn stars are more likely to use condoms. (If you hope to use the Heritage Foundation’s unpublished, non peer-reviewed, unscientific defense claiming that “virginity pledgers” are less likely to have STDS than kids not in these programs as a rebuttal, don’t. The Heritage Foundation "study" was based on anecdotal accounts in which “virginity pledgers” were asked if they had an STD. The Columbia/Yale study relied on actual medical results of STDs tests conducted on kids in each group.)

We know what works to delay sexual initiation and prevent STDs and teen pregnancy. At least we did know until pro-life groups pressured the CDC to remove information from their website on what the agency's experts deemed “Programs that Work.” (These were programs that were scientifically proven effective in reducing risky sexual behaviors that contribute to HIV, other STDs and unintended pregnancy). The reason pro-lifers wanted information on proven effective programs censored is because they were all comprehensive sex ed programs—not one was abstinence-only. (Even though mountains of evidence show abstinence-only programs don’t work, promoting them does pay—one in four federal abstinence-only dollars goes to pro-life groups.) What is known to be effective are comprehensive sex ed programs that include and emphasize abstinence.

I agree with you, there are considerable benefits when teens delay sexual activity. On this point we are united. But let’s look to the places that enjoy the outcomes both you and I claim to seek and compare them to the places that are rife with the problems we both hope to solve.

Sweden discontinued abstinence-only-until-marriage programs in the Seventies and replaced them with comprehensive sex ed courses--this triggered a 70% decline in teen pregnancy rates over the next thirty years. Today, Sweden teens have the lowest teen pregnancy and abortion rates in the world. Swedish teens receive comprehensive sex ed and they also, on average, delay the initiation of sexual activity by a year later than American teens.

Southern states in the U.S. are five times more likely to use abstinence-only programs than in the Northeast. Southern states now have another distinction: the highest rates of new HIV/AIDS infection, the highest rate of STDs, as well as the highest rate of teen births. Whereas new cases of AIDS decreased or remained constant in the Northeast, Midwest, and West recently, the South, alone, experienced an increase. Seven of the ten states with the highest Chlamydia rates, all of the states with the highest rates of gonorrhea, and nine of the top ten states for syphilis rates are all in the South. And that’s because in the service of scaring kids into not having sex, abstinence-only-until marriage programs tell kids that condoms don’t work. Most teens (like the 88% of all "virginity pledgers" who break the pledge) turn out not to be convinced about the virtues of chastity but, sadly, are convinced not to use condoms.

The abstainer-in-chief, Bush, invested unprecedented sums in abstinence-only as Governor of Texas. The result? While the rest of the nation enjoyed dramatic declines in teen pregnancy, by the end of Bush’s term as Governor in 2000, Texas ranked dead-last in the nation in the decline in teen birthrates. Overall the teen pregnancy rate in Texas during Bush’s term as governor was one of the highest in the nation, exceeded by only four other states, including Florida—which his brother governed, using the same approach. When Bush took office he boldly took the dead-last approach and prescribed it for the rest of the nation.

Jennifer, I feel like I have been diligent in answering all of your questions. I’m hoping in your next post you will begin to answer some of the one’s I’ve posed to you. Such as, why are you against child care? Given all of your efforts to convince people to stop using family planning, being against child care seems particularly sinister. Isn’t access to child care essential for working parents and critical in helping them provide for their families? (Or is it that you don’t think women should work?) You suggest in your book, that there is no right, and should be no right, to sexual activity without conception (p.77) This is the theory from which most pro-life policies flow, both the anti-legal-abortion and anti-contraception efforts. Wouldn’t policies (like banning abortion and limiting contraception) cause parents to have more children? Wouldn’t parents then need more financial resources to support their burgeoning families? And wouldn’t employment and child care then be an even greater necessity?

Also, I’ve noticed in your book that you argue that the biological bond mothers have to their babies is related to positive cognitive and social benefits and that no non-biological caretaker could possibly substitute. If, as you hope, our nation outlaws abortion, and contraception gets used less, shouldn’t we be prepared for a surge in needs for foster care and adoption? It would seem that the types of family arrangements that need to quickly emerge in response to the social upheaval you favor fly in the face of your own philosophies on parenting and a “proper family.”

One last point, you claim in your book that stepfathers are not as good fathers to their children as biological fathers are. Are you against remarriage? Joseph wasn’t Jesus’ biological father. In my view, Jesus didn’t turn out so bad.

Looking forward to hearing from you. Cristina
posted by Cristina Page at 4:41 PM VOTE 9 comments

Contraception and Illegitimacy
(I meant to post this yesterday, before I ran out to provide taxi service for 4 kids :-) and found it today. Sorry to the commenters, especially Fitz)
There is a very sophisticated argument by Nobel Prize winning economist George Akerlof that explains the puzzle of why rising out of wedlock births could be associated with increased access to contraception and abortion. His argument is that the availability of contraception, and its widespread social acceptance, changed the dynamic of the pre-marital relationships between men and women. Tradition-minded women, who might have wanted to postphone intercourse until marriage have to compete for relationship with women who are willing to be sexual before marriage. This increases the competitive pressure on even tradional women, to be sexual before marriage. Brad Wilcox summarizes Akerlof's findings:

Traditional women could no longer hold the threat of pregnancy over their male partners, either to avoid sex or to elicit a promise of marriage in the event their partner made them pregnant. And modern women no longer worried about getting pregnant. Accordingly, more and more women (traditional as well as modern) gave in to their boyfriends’ entreaties for sex.

In Akerlof’s words, “the norm of premarital sexual abstinence all but vanished in the wake of the technology shock.” Women felt free or obligated to have sex before marriage. For instance, Akerlof finds that the percentage of girls 16 and under reporting sexual activity surged in 1970 and 1971 as contraception and abortion became common in many states throughout the country.

(Akerlof's original article appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 1996, but I haven't found it on-line.)
Also, among the poor, marriage has all but vanished as the socially acceptable context for both sex and child-bearing. Yet, tremendous educational efforts have been made to provide family planning for the poor. African American women account for about 12% of the population, but for about 32% of the abortions. According the Guttmacher Institute, "one in six U.S. women who received recent contraceptive or reproductive health care obtained these services at a publicly funded clinic."
You'd think that if more contraception were the answer, we'd have acheived a reduced illegitimacy rate by now.
posted by Dr J Roback Morse at 3:34 PM VOTE 0 comments

What's Legal v. What's Smart
We are living in a very pro-choice, pro-contraception legal and social environment. Suppose a person believes, as I do, that some of what people choose to do with their right to contraception is problematic, from the personal perspective and the public policy perspective. Let me be more specific: an overwhelming majority of the non-marital sexual activity in this country is either dumb or destructive, or both. What exactly are we allowed to say or do about that without people hyper-ventillating that we're about to take away their right to contraception? Is there no place in this discussion for a simple statement that, even though you are allowed to do it, you shouldn't do it?
Precisely because we do have so much freedom, precisely because this area is so personal, we ought to have a lively cultural and social space where the pro's and con's of personal decisions can be aired.
Thanks Maggie for giving us this space.
posted by Dr J Roback Morse at 3:18 PM VOTE 1 comments

More Questions

Maggie, I appreciate your contribution to this debate. There are several important questions that are being either ignored, or taken as settled. Your post focuses on one: Has the widespread availability of contraception increased the incidence of out of wedlock sexual activity and out of wedlock births?
Here are some other questions:
Cristina is solicitous of the rights of married couples to use birth control for the responsible spacing of births, and enhancement of their marriage. So are many of the comments over at the Family Scholars blog.
Do you agree that the public policy isssues and the personal issues are different for married couples versus unmarried individuals?
Could you live with the post-Griswold world, but pre-Eisenstadt world? In other words, do you think it would be good public policy to require access to contraception for married couples, but leave access for the unmarried to the discretion of the states?
posted by Dr J Roback Morse at 1:52 PM VOTE 0 comments

Contraception Quiz Show/Maggie Gallagher

Ok, this one is for readers. Three questions

1. What proportion of unintended pregnancies take place among women who report they were using contraceptives?

a. 78 percent
b. 53 percent
c. 33 percent
d. 14 percent

2. According to a study published by the Alan Guttmacher Institute's Family Planning Perspectives, the typical woman who uses contraceptives every year from her 15th birthday to her 44th birthday will experience how many pregnancies?

a. 1.8
b. .75
c. .44
d. .19


3. By their 40th birthday, about what proportion of American women experience an unintended pregnancy?

a. 90 percent
b. 60 percent
c. 35 percent
d. 10 percent
posted by maggie at 10:11 AM VOTE 1 comments

Contraception and Consequentialism/Maggie Gallagher

Jenny, Cristina, feel free to ignore these remarks, or not as you please. I don't want to spoil a good debate!

I'm not sure a lot of light is being shed yet,as one of the commenters noted you guys seem to be mostly addressing different things. (Jennifer, feel free to comment on child care if you like but it does seem sort of off topic.) One feature of the debate does strike me: For Cristina it is self evident that contraception will reduce the abortion rate and the out of wedlock birth rate. If you are against these things, you must advocate for more government contraception programs as the solution.

I'm struck by this form of argument because it is so very common in America today. If you are going to claim a causal link for anything remotely traditional (say: marriage is good for children and society), you must amass mountains of social science evidence. This evidence will be fought tooth and nail (Did you know correlation is not causation?) in every conceivable way. Only after exhaustive debate will you finally be permitted to say the obvious. ("children do best with their own married mom and dad") and only so long as this statement does not contradict some other more urgent liberalist moral imperative (like, say "there are no rational arguments against gay marriage.")

Whereas when you say something dubbed "progressive" you don't need much evidence. Or sometimes any evidence at all.

The question of whether and what kind of contraception promotion would reduce abortion or illegitimacy is an empirical one. And the answer is not as simple and obvious as Cristina makes it. Certainly the widespread introduction of reliable contraception, including its promotion in schools, was empirically associated with increases in both abortion and illegitimacy. Correlation is not causation. But you do sort of have to grapple in some way with this historic fact.

European countries have lower fertility generally; They have lower abortion rates generally, too. they no longer clearly have lower illegitimacy rates. (countries vary but the clear trend is up up up). It's of course hard to know what they are doing in Europe (and each country does things differently) that we are not doing, as we have government funded contraceptive programs in schools, etc. and a right to abortion up to the 9th month. Legally contraception is a Constitutional right. Culturally, contraception is widely and generally accepted here and available in every drug store. Many insurance plans cover it. Those of us with moral objections are a tiny minority, even among church-going Catholics.

I do think Cristina, if you are going to make dogmatic statements about identity groups to which you do not belong (such as 'prolifers must support more aggressive contraception campaigns or else they aren't really prolife')you ought show more interest in whether and how and what would actually work, rather than merely asserting as dogma that it does.

And is "what works" really the question for you? Would you support an education campaign in schools delivering a powerful antiabortion message if it involved the use of contraceptives as the means to reduce abortion? (And let's say, pilot programs showed a big reduction in the abortion rate as a result?) Maybe I'm reading you wrong, but it seems to me "what works" to reduce abortion isn't a very important value for you, so maybe your very strong judgments about what prolifers should believe in order to avoid the horror of being dubbed a "hypocrite" or a "professional prolifer" by you isn't, you know very persuasive or very intellectually threatening either.

On the other hand, Jennifer, I've grown less clearly persuaded by consequentialists arguments against contraception, for several reasons. More on that in another post.
posted by maggie at 9:32 AM VOTE 2 comments

Did the Abortion Rate Decline under Clinton?/Jennifer Roback Morse

In yesterday's post, Cristina asks rhetorically why pro-lifers didn't call Clinton and congratulate him for the decline in the abortion rate that took place during his term. I suspect the reason they didn't is that they didn't believe his policies particularly deserved credit for the decline.

During the 2004 election cycle, a claim circulated that abortions decreased under Clinton and increased during Bush's first term.
That claim has been debunked. The downward trend in the abortion rate continued, even during the Bush years.
The trend is more likely caused, not by increased contraception, but by a combination of abstinence "pledge" programs and parental involvement requirements.
Among non-pledgers, the median age for beginning sexual intercourse was 16 years and 11 months. By contrast, the median age for the onset of sexual activity among all pledging teens was 21 months later, at 18 years and 8 months.
Also, just to anticipate a possible criticism: the "pledgers" who do later have sex, are no less likely to use contraception. So, the delaying sexual activity through these programs has no serious down-side that I can see.
There are other reasons for wanting to delay the initiation of sexual experience, which I'll go into in a later post.
posted by Dr J Roback Morse at 6:06 PM VOTE 1 comments

The Context of Contraception/Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse

Cristina has confounded multiple issues in her posts. Much of her discussion focuses on the use of contraception by married couples. That sanitizes the discussion. The major policy innovation was not so much Griswold v. Connecticut, which concerned the rights of married couples, but Eisenstadt v. Baird, which protected the rights of individuals, married or not, to use contraception. Do we really believe that increase in non-marital sexual activity has been a positive social development? I do not.

She wants to know what pro-lifers are going to do to reduce abortions. Delaying the age of initiating sexual activity reduces the abortion rate, the STD rate, and has a number of other benefits, both public and private.

According to a study by Ralph Rector:
Girls who begin sexual activity at an earlier age are far more likely to have abortions. Nearly 30 percent of girls who started sexual activity at ages 13 or 14 have had an abortion. By contrast, some 12 percent of girls who began sexual activity in their early 20s have had an abortion.

• Beginning sexual activity at a young age greatly increases the probability of becoming infected with sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). Girls who began sexual activity at age 13 are twice as likely to become infected by an STD as girls who started sexual activity at age 21.
• Women who begin sexual activity at an early age are far more likely to become pregnant and give birth out-of-wedlock. Nearly 40 percent of girls who commence sexual activity at ages 13 or 14 will give birth outside marriage. By contrast, 9 percent of women who begin sexual activity at ages 21 or 22 will give birth outside marriage.

To the extent that the combination of the availability of contraception and the contraceptive mentality lowers the age of first sexual experience, it is implicated in increasing abortions, not reducing them.

Look, I really think that many people could support a goal of raising the age of first sexual experience.
posted by Dr J Roback Morse at 2:11 PM VOTE 2 comments

BTW: On the FDA/Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse

regarding my previous post: I think the short-circuiting of political deliberation is one reason why there is so much weight and pressure on the FDA's approval process of contraceptive products. State legislatures are not allowed to say, "we think this contraceptve device X is a bad idea in context Y for reason Z." If the FDA approves it, it's legal. So any legitimate concerns people have get driven into debates over the FDA approval process, because there is no political process available to deal with it.
posted by Dr J Roback Morse at 2:08 PM VOTE 0 comments

The State's Interest in Banning Contraceptives/Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse

I admit to being a little weirded out by the article Maggie posted yesterday on overturning Griswold. But after reading it, there is rather less there than meets the eye. His argument is that protecting the health of the public is within the police power of the state. Therefore, if the state determines that a particular contraceptive device is harmful to the health of the public, or to the public good of marriage, and decides that these harms outweigh the benefits of the contraceptive method, then the state should be constitutionally permitted to outlaw it.

This scenario is very far from any political reality. The elected representatives of the people in a jurisdiction would have to find that combination of facts, weigh costs and benefits, and then make the case to the public at large that a ban would be on balance a good thing. Ain't gonna happen in my lifetime.
What is rather more likely is that some states will regulate some forms of contraception more than they now do (which is basically, not at all.) And rather than an outright ban on any particular form of contraception, I think it is much more likely that some states would limit access to it for certain groups, particularly unmarried minors.

I think there could easily be support for requiring some form of parental involvement in the contraceptive decisions of minors. You don't have to be even particularly pro-life to believe that the current policy protecting the privacy of minors against their parents amounts to an eggregious violation of the parent-child relationship. Most parents, pro-life or not, would want to be involved if their daughter were going to get contraception. I could support that sort of legislation.
posted by Dr J Roback Morse at 1:03 PM VOTE 0 comments

News Flash/Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse

It is probably a safe bet that most pro-lifers believe in the Virgin Birth of Jesus. I'm not looking for legislation on the subject any time soon.

This illustrates an important assymetry on the two sides of this debate. Many pro-choice policies, and certainly, the most significant pro-choice policies, have been imposed by the judiciary. The democratic process has been short-circuited, because the ordinary give and take of debate has been cut off by the judiciary. Because of Roe v. Wade, a state legislature can not place limits on abortion. Because of Griswold v. Connecticut, state legislatures are limited in how they can regulate contraception. Overturning these Supreme Court rulings does not mean that either abortion or contraception would be outlawed. It would mean that the states could begin the process of deliberation that would allow them to decide what they believe is reasonable and beneficial for their community.

Contrary to Cristina's characterization, pro-life people are all over the map on the contraception question. There are some who disapprove of contraception as a life-style choice, and there are some who couldn't care less. There are some pro-life people who believe the contraceptive mentality has been destructive. I put myself in that category. There are some pro-life people who would like to ban some forms of contraception, but not others. There are some pro-life people who would ban it all the day after tomorrow if they could.

None of these people are going to automatically get their way. Every one of these groups of people recognizes that they have a responsibilty to persuade the public of their views. There is no secret pro-life cabal, plotting to take away people's diaphrams. Unless large numbers of people agree with the policy change, it isn't going to happen. And, in my opinion, it shouldn't happen.
posted by Dr J Roback Morse at 1:02 PM VOTE 0 comments

What Should Be Legal?/Cristina Page

Jennifer, you write in your post on contraception that “for the purposes of this debate, I am not concerned about what should be legal or illegal.” I find it curious that you are unwilling to state whether you think contraception should be legal or illegal. Why not just come forward and state your position? I think for the purposes of this debate it is essential that readers understand where you stand on this important point.

Also, Maggie to reply to your post—I have made a distinction in my posts (and in my book) between genuine pro-life people (those individuals who support furnishing Americans with the best, most effective and realistic ways to prevent abortion) and the pro-life organizational establishment that does not support these strategies and instead opposes them. Feminists for Life does not support the use of contraception to prevent abortion—it says so clearly on their website. Feminists for Life has no position on contraception. This would be the equivalent of the National Cancer Institutes having no position on the most proven cancer fighting treatments. And that would be unacceptable. The American public would, rightfully, shut them down.

Indeed, so eager is the Right to Life movement to ban contraception that it has now reclassified the most commonly used forms of contraception—the ones that 40% of Americans use—as abortion. There is no scientific rationale to do this: not one contraception method can cause an abortion. Even the top medical advisors to the pro-life movement have come out against these attempts to reclassify contraception as abortion—including the chief medical advisor to the Christian Medical Association and Concerned Women for America. The pro-life Ob/Gyns write, “the ‘hormonal contraception is abortifacient’ theory is not established scientific fact. It is speculation, and the discussion presented here suggests it is error.” They continue in the same unequivocal tone: “if a family, weighing all the factors affecting their own circumstances, decides to use this modality, we are confident that they are not using an abortifacient.”

Of course, clarifying inconvenient biological truths is beside the point. Don’t be misled. This fracas is not caused by a simple scientific misunderstanding. If it were, pro-lifers would rush to support birth control methods that don’t, as they say, “cause abortions,” like the diaphragm, condom, cervical cap, and spermicides. There’s not one pro-life group in America that supports any of these methods either.

But because so many of your readers are in disbelief over the pro-life establishments anti-contraception campaigns—I offer my book as proof. Please understand that the evidence of these efforts is too numerous to include here: five or seven chapters in my book are devoted to documenting the anti-contraception campaigns led by mainstream pro-life groups. (For readers who hope to refer to the evidence, all my citations are included in the amply documented endnote section of my book and whenever possible I included web addresses to the evidence too.)

Jennifer, I do not share in your disapproval of the average American’s sex life. 85% of Americans in a relationship have sex once a week. Having sex, without the exclusive purpose of babymaking, is an accepted part of American lives. It’s so accepted, it’s passé. Women are sexually liberated, right-wing, churchgoing women too. And, yes, I think it is a positive thing that people have sex frequently. I don’t believe people “use” each other for sex, as you do. I think sex is a natural expression of intimacy and that we were given (by the intelligent designer?) a hearty sexual appetite because regular sex makes us healthier and happier people in better relationships.

Having a lively sex life within a relationship makes relationships stronger—and that’s because it makes couples happier. The esteemed journal Science published a study in 2004 in which the scientists (including one Nobel prize winner) found that the one activity that made women happiest was sex. Another study found that regular sex brings people as much happiness as a $50,000 a year raise. “The more sex,” the researchers write, “the happier the person.” In 2004, Time covered the health benefits of sex and reported, “Studies are showing that arousal and an active sex life may lead to longer life, better heart health, and improved ability to ward off pain, a more robust immune system and even protection against certain cancers, not to mention lower rates of depression.” So, it turns out an active sex life is pro-life too.

As for your theory that contraception has led to more promiscuity. Well, a closer study of those idealized Fifties marriages (the archetype of what you hope to return the nation to) further erodes your argument. Studies conducted in 1948 and 1953 found that back then 26% of women and 50% of men had had an extramarital affair. But today, in the more sexually accepting culture you denounce, the rate has sunk to 6% of women and 10% of men. (More conservative estimates put the current rate of adultery at half of what it was in the Fifties.)

As for children had outside of marriage. I think it is sad that you do not consider these children legitimate. By vilifying family planning I think you are on the fasttrack to creating the very families you condemn.

Hope you will be willing to explain to me and readers why you oppose child care. All the best, Cristina
posted by Cristina Page at 10:43 AM VOTE 4 comments

SSM and Nebraska Political Update/World-Herald
April 25, 2006

Kramer, Stenberg unite on one issue
BY HENRY J. CORDES

"All three Republican candidates for the U.S. Senate support a federal constitutional amendment barring legal recognition of gay marriage. But that didn't stop one candidate from taking a shot at another Monday.

In an unusual joint press conference, both David Kramer and Don Stenberg stood side by side with representatives of a socially conservative family organization to urge support for such an amendment.

The third Republican, Pete Ricketts, was in New York but issued a statement indicating support for an amendment to define marriage as "between one man and one woman."

Ricketts, a former executive of Ameritrade, was attending a meet-and-greet event with friends and former business associates held in a new condominium his father purchased near Central Park.

Kramer noted the absence, saying, "He's spent millions of dollars on TV ads talking about 'Nebraska values,' but when he had a chance to stand up for them, he's not to be found."

Family First, a socially conservative organization that is the Nebraska affiliate of Focus on the Family, is holding a series of press conferences to rally support for the amendment. Speakers Monday stood in front of a banner urging Nebraska Sens. Ben Nelson and Chuck Hagel to vote for the measure.

Both Nelson, a Democrat whom Ricketts, Kramer and Stenberg hope to unseat in November, and Hagel, a Republican, have said they oppose gay marriage but don't support a federal amendment and that the issue should be left to the states. . ."
posted by maggie at 7:58 AM VOTE 0 comments

Taking Credit; Taking Responsibility/Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse.

Cristina has credited the pro-choice movement with decreasing family poverty, increasing marital happiness, and increasing women's participation in college and the professions.

I wonder if she would be willing to take responsibility for some of the negative consequences of the pro-choice movement, broadly interpreted to include abortion, contraception and the contraceptive mentality.

For instance:

the increase in illegitimacy;
the increasing perception that procreation is an individual activity or project, that doesn't require a relationship;
the attitude among men that paying for an abortion discharges his responsibility for his pregnant wife or girlfriend;
the attitude among women that men can be used as a combination wallet and sperm bank;
the increase in infertility due to delaying child-bearing until so late in a woman's reproductive years that conception is difficult;
the general coarsening of our sexual culture.
posted by Dr J Roback Morse at 4:43 PM VOTE 5 comments

The State's Interest in Banning Contraceptives/Patrick Shake

[Well, this seems to be the week for this. Maggie]

"I thought you (and possibly your readers) may be interested in an article that I wrote that was recently published in the UST Law Journal. The article is: "Griswold at 40: The State's Compelling Interest in Banning Contraceptives."

Here is a link to the article:
posted by maggie at 3:56 PM VOTE 3 comments

The Form of Debate/Maggie Gallagher

Cristina and Jenny welcome to you both. I've put no restrictions on your debate giving you free access to this site, without any editing from me. But it certainly makes a sharper debate if you debate each other, rather than a generalized opponent.

Statements that take the form "professional prolifers or prochoicers believe X " are hard to prove and tend to lead the debate sideways. I also feel obliged on behalf of Feminists for LIfe and others to say that many prolifers, professional and amateur, do not oppose either contraception or child care.

But I look forward to hearing more from Jennifer and Cristina on what they think about the question of the social costs and benefits of contraception.
posted by maggie at 3:29 PM VOTE 0 comments

New Religious Coalition for Marriage/NYT

[You can access the actual signed letter, and the list of bishops signing it, at www.religiouscoalitionformarriage.org. Maggie]

April 24, 2006

"About 50 prominent religious leaders, including seven Roman Catholic cardinals and about a half-dozen archbishops, have signed a petition in support of a constitutional amendment blocking same-sex marriage.

Organizers of the petition said it was in part an effort to revive the groundswell of opposition to same-sex marriage that helped bring many conservative voters to the polls in some pivotal states in 2004. The signers include many influential evangelical Protestants, a few rabbis and an official of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

But both the organizers and gay rights groups said what was striking about the petition was the direct involvement by high-ranking Roman Catholic officials, including 16 bishops. Although the church has long opposed same-sex unions, and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops had previously endorsed the idea of a constitutional amendment banning such unions, it was evangelical Protestants who generally led the charge when the amendment was debated in 2004.

"The personal involvement of bishops and cardinals is significantly greater this time than in 2004," said Patrick Korten, a spokesman for the Knights of Columbus, a lay Catholic group.

The Catholic bishops and many of the other religious leaders involved have pledged to distribute postcards for their congregants to send to their senators urging support for the amendment. The Knights of Columbus is distributing 10 million postcards to Catholic churches.

The petition drive was organized in part by Prof. Robert P. George of Princeton, a Catholic scholar with close ties to evangelical Protestant groups. Aides to three Republican senators — Bill Frist of Tennessee, the Republican leader; Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania; and Sam Brownback of Kansas — were also involved, organizers said.
Archbishop John J. Myers of Newark said that at a meeting in Washington in February, the Senate aides recommended the idea of a postcard campaign, recalling the success of a similar effort that the bishops organized in support of a ban on so-called partial-birth abortion.

"We think the American people are on our side on this, and we want the Senate to know it," the archbishop said. . ."
posted by maggie at 3:16 PM VOTE 0 comments

LDS Statement in Favor of Constitutional Amendment for Marriage

Here.
posted by maggie at 3:14 PM VOTE 0 comments

How Pro-Choice is Pro-Choice Enough?
Cristina says:

If instead the pro-life movement were in fact interested in reducing abortion, pro-life policymakers would take note that the countries with the lowest abortion rates in the world are also the ones that have adopted the strongest pro-choice policies and have made contraception widely available, if not free.

How much more pro-choice do you want America to be? Abortion is legal throughout pregnancy, indeed right down to the moment the baby is coming down the birth canal. We have one of the most liberal abortion laws of any industrialized countries. According to Ramesh Ponnuru's new book (and he is quoting a Center for Reproductive Rights publication here)

The UK generally limits abortion to the first 24 weeks...In Sweden, tne National Board of Health and Welfare has to sign off on abortions past the 18th week.... In Denmark, a hospital committee must approve abortions past the 12th week. France requires women seeking abortions within the first 14 weeks to get counseling and observe a one-week waiting period. After 14 weeks, two physicians have to determine that contineud pregnancy poses a grave risk to a woman's health or that fetal impairment is very likely.

Contraception is widely available, and socially acceptable. In some cases, children as young as fourth grade recieve publicly funded instruction on how to use contraception.
Do you seriously believe we could reduce the abortion rate in this country with more aggressive pro-choice policies? I don't.
posted by Dr J Roback Morse at 1:31 PM VOTE 5 comments

The High Cost of Children For Educated Women/Prospect (U.K.) Magazine

[By Prof. Alison Wolfe, a professor in public sector management at KCL and author of "Does Education Matter?" (Penguin). Maggie]

". . .As the American economist Shirley Burggraf has pointed out in The Feminine Economy and Economic Man, the financial disincentives to childbearing have become so high for upper-middle income families that the puzzle is not why professional women have so few children but why they have any at all. She observes, "no society until recent times has expected love alone to support the family enterprise. To put it another way, parental love has never cost so much."

Value-based volunteering is giving way to professionalised organisations with public sector contracts, and personal fulfilment for both sexes is increasingly evaluated in economic terms. Yet we still rely on traditional values and emotions to produce the next generation. It is fortunate that children are so intrinsically rewarding or our birth rate would be far lower still.

The hard economics tells us that professional women will have to give up most if they have children, and so will be least inclined to do so. Highly educated women overwhelmingly stay in work and so pay little or no earnings penalty when they have children. But more and more of them in the developed world have no children at all. "The rich get richer and the poor have children" still applies; but this time around, it is women specifically that we are talking about. About 30 per cent of graduate women born in the early 1960s entered their forties childless. For graduate women born in 1970 (a substantially larger group) the expected figure is 40 per cent. . ."
posted by maggie at 12:22 PM VOTE 0 comments

Should People Have Premarital Sex?/AJC.com

The Atlanta Constitution Journal sponsors a debate here.
posted by maggie at 11:45 AM VOTE 0 comments

Contraception: Good for Society? Opening Post/Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse

Thank you Cristina for accepting my challenge. Thank you Maggie, for hosting this debate. I hope this debate will give readers a clear idea of what the Pro-Choice and Pro-Life sides believe.
For purposes of this debate, I am not concerned about what should be legal or illegal. I simply point out that many of our (perfectly legal) sexual decisions are just plain dumb. Behind the demand for abortion and contraception is an entire world view about the meaning and purposes of human sexuality. It is this position that I dispute, because I believe it encourages people to make choices that will not make them happy.
The modern view holds that sex is a recreational activity with no moral or social significance. The freedom we have come to value is to be completely unencumbered by human relationships. We are entitled to end or walk away from any relationship with a person who might legitimately make demands upon us that we don’t want to fulfill. Reproductive freedom in particular, is the right to unlimited sexual activity without a live baby resulting.
I call this view of sex, Consumer Sex. The decision to have sex is comparable to the decision to go bowling or go out for pizza. If sex is a recreational activity, then our sex partners are consumer goods, that satisfy us more or less well. When we are no longer satisfied with our sex partners, we feel entitled to discard them. We believe it is morally acceptable to use people, as long as they consent to being used. If sex is voluntary and properly contracepted, it is ok.
The alternative view is the organic view of human sexuality. Sex has two organic purposes: procreation and spousal unity. Spousal unity is a fancy way of saying that sex builds up the relationship between the husband and the wife. Both of these organic purposes build up the community of the family. Procreation brings new people into being. And spousal unity helps to sustain the bond between the spouses, so they will be there for each other and their children over the long-haul.
This organic view of human sexuality is completely consistent with science, both the biology of reproduction and the physiology of attachment. People have a better chance of having a happy life if they embrace this view, rather than the consumer sex position. I need not say that consumer sex would be impossible in the absence of abortion on demand and unlimited access to contraception.
posted by Dr J Roback Morse at 9:53 AM VOTE 9 comments

Contraception: Societal Good or Evil?/Cristina Page

Thank you Maggie for hosting this debate. Jennifer, thanks for the opportunity to debate. It’s particularly nice for me to have the chance to test my ideas with someone on the other side, especially a “Chief Visionary” of the other side (as you list on your bio). It’s so rare that the two sides actually discuss things civilly.

So, let’s begin. Our jointly chosen topic of debate today is “Contraception: Societal Good or Evil.” The fact that this topic is even worthy of debate will come as a surprise to most Americans, including a majority of pro-life Americans who support birth control simply because it prevents abortion. Most people still have no idea that the pro-life movement is working to strip Americans of family planning. As you know, my book, How the Pro-Choice Movement Saved America: Freedom, Politics and the War on Sex, documents the well-funded and successful pro-life campaigns against the most proven and realistic way to preventing abortion: contraception. As I argue in my book, the pro-life movement is not interested in reducing abortion; its priorities are elsewhere. Pro-lifers are most interested in changing Americans’ sex lives. I gather that this is where you come from as well. I read about your years of experimentation (as you explained to Kathryn Jean Lopez) with “adultery, fornication, cohabitation, group sex, same-sex sex” as well as the abortion and divorce. Now, I understand, that you’ve found another way, and would like everyone else to follow suit.

The pro-life campaigns – and yours – are designed to take away the ability of Americans to enjoy sex without getting pregnant, and that puts contraception in the crosshairs. If these pro-life efforts also happen to lead to more abortions (or fatal disease), well they figure, that’s God’s will.

If instead the pro-life movement were in fact interested in reducing abortion, pro-life policymakers would take note that the countries with the lowest abortion rates in the world are also the ones that have adopted the strongest pro-choice policies and have made contraception widely available, if not free. Pro-lifers would also do some soul searching over the fact that many of the places on earth with the highest abortion rates are those that have adopted the strictest pro-life policies. It’s curious that not one pro-life leader sent out a letter of congratulations to President Bill Clinton, our nation’s first pro-choice president, for presiding over the most dramatic decline of the nation’s abortion rates ever. And that’s because the policies that led to that decline, wider access to contraception and practical work-family policies, are apparently more offensive to the pro-life establishment than abortion.

So, I’m not surprised that you, a professional within the religious right, would oppose what has been proven to work to reduce abortion. Being anti-contraception is party line for the pro-life movement today. That there’s not one pro-life organization in the United States that supports the use of contraception should be sobering for all Americans, genuine pro-lifers included, especially since we know contraception is 85% effective at reducing abortion.

The typical American woman spends twenty-three years of her life trying to prevent pregnancy. She spends only seven trying to get pregnant, be pregnant or breastfeeding. Without contraception those twenty three years are dicey. I expect, on this point, you’ll make a big pitch for “natural family planning” –a technique most notable for its unpopularity (less than 2% of Americans even try it) and high failure rate (25%). But know that scientists who have recently looked into women’s ovulation cycles report that 40% of women ovulate more than once during their cycle. The scientists explain that natural family planning may not just be hard to practice, it may be impossible. They conclude, “We have a name for people who practice natural family planning—we call them parents.”

And so in a world without contraception, the world you’d like to usher in, couples who hope to have two kids (as most Americans do) would be consigned to a life of abstinence within marriage (with two momentary exceptions). Few of the sex-free couples would take any comfort from the logic you lay out in the following passage from your book:
“[R]eproductive freedom is empty: it is based on a misunderstanding of the amount of control that is reasonable or desirable in a fully lived human life. We convince ourselves that we are entitled to control the timing and arrival of children. If that is so important: isn’t it equally important to control who those children are, what those children do, whether those children please us? But this is plainly both impossible and inhumane. Yet that is what we set ourselves up for, when we begin to think in terms of “family planning.” pg. 87.

Who in their right mind thinks that because you only want to have two kids (or three or four) you won’t love them for who they are? Does anyone in the real world really think that parents who use birth control don’t want what’s best for their children?

Most Americans want to plan their families to the size they want and can support and can love. This is an American value, and it is the basis on which we construct our happy families. It’s the code by which Americans now live. It’s important to note that having access to family planning has resulted in critical benefits for the family.

In the nineteen fifties, contraception was not as widely available and was also, for the most part, illegal for single people (the Supreme Court legalized contraception for single people in 1972—one year before Roe v. Wade). If we look back to the Fifties for signs of marital perfection—we come up short. First, lack of access to birth control in those days didn’t restrict sexual activity, only the (now-avoidable) consequences of it. The rate of teen motherhood in the Fifties was in fact twice the rate it is today. Yes, people did marry earlier and not always as a result of love but, as likely, unintended pregnancy. Marriage was the norm in the Fifties, more specifically, unhappy marriage was. Twice as many married couples today report to be “very happily married” when compared to married couples asked the same question in the Fifties. You may be pro-marriage. I’m pro-happy-marriage.

Family planning has indeed changed the way people find marriage partners and when. These days, rather than marrying at nineteen, couples are more likely to marry in their mid to late twenties. That age jump is important. It coincides with the college years. Family planning, and more specifically, the introduction of the pill (Harvard researchers have discovered) was directly related to women flooding into the workforce and the professions. Working women (who you seem to have a disdain for in your book), have dramatically improved family income. In your great nostalgia for the Fifties-style marriage, you seem to forget to mention that one in four families in the Fifties lived in poverty, unable to get by on one income. Women’s move into the workforce, brought forth by access to family planning, has played a primary role in solving poverty. Half as many families today live in poverty as did in the Fifties. Today, families in which the husband is the only income maker are four times more likely to live in poverty than families in which both husband and wife work. Not only did family planning give women the ability to decide when to have a family, and thereby get a foothold in the professions, it also gave families the ability to space and plan for the number of children they can support. As for the benefits to children by being in families with more stable incomes, they are numerous, including more involved father, more educated mothers. It’s not inconsequential that family income happens to be one of the great determinants of children’s positive cognitive and social development.

Of course, worldwide contraception is also life-saving technology. As Save the Children reports in State of the World’s Mothers, “increased access to and use of modern contraception can lead to dramatic improvements in infant and maternal survival rates.” Spacing children is critical to healthy pregnancies. And so, whatever convictions you cherish, the facts are clear: as contraceptive use rises in a country, maternal, fetal and infant deaths decline. That’s why in Finland, where 75% of women use contraception the lifetime risk of a mother dying in childbirth is 1 in 8,200. Only 4 out of 1,000 Finnish infants do not make it to their first birthday. Compare this to Niger, where 4% of women use birth control. There, one in seven mothers die in childbirth and 156 of 1,000 infants die before reaching age one. (The US rate of maternal death during pregnancy is 1 in 2500—why we don’t enjoy the dramatically lower Finnish death rate is in large part courtesy of the pro-life movement’s efforts against contraception.)

In closing, I see that in your book you trot out the standard pro-life diatribe against child care and working women. I think we should probably touch on that subject in more depth sometime this week. But for now, suffice it to say, it’s interesting that professional pro-lifers are against contraception and child care too. Such a paradox only makes sense when you accept that what really is most offensive to you, the pro-life movement, and the bureaucracy of the religious right, is the way in which the modern family is structured: marriages between equals, in which consideration and planning is given to the number of children people can provide for, lavish with attention, and launch into the world, educated and stable, loving, kind, and hopefully immune from unfounded prejudices, especially those poisonous ones coming from the religious right these days.
posted by Cristina Page at 1:29 AM VOTE 15 comments