There's a lot of debate over whether giving away contraception (especially to teenagers) reduces or increases unwanted pregnancies.

Abortion doesn't seem to. According to a John Lott column, "academic studies have shown that legalized abortion, by encouraging premarital sex, increased the number of unplanned births, even outweighing the reduction in unplanned births due to abortion" (<link>). Giving the morning-after pill away does not seem to reduce abortion rates either--at least that's been the experience in Great Britain (<link>).

Promoting contraception relies too much on logic, foresight, and planning. And as always, there is the pro-abortion condundrum: if nothing's wrong with abortion, then there's nothing wrong with abortion, so why try to reduce it?

Unfortunately, it is likely that seeking to reduce abortion rates by providing contraception will only work if unplanned pregnancies are stigmatized. That also means stigmatizing unwed mothers, which is pretty hard to do when the heroic single mother is the icon of our age.

On the other hand, promoting adoption and simultaneously stigmatizing abortion may work better to reduce unwanted pregnancies. The question for an aborting woman should always be, why did you not place the baby for adoption? If "feelings" are the answer, then the next question, cruel as it may sound, is how could you elevate your feelings over the actual life of your child? Because placing a child for adoption is so much harder and painful for the biological mother than abortion, it would likely prove a more powerful deterrent to irresponsible sex.

I also think that adoption is part of a social contract in the West. We enjoy tremendous sexual freedom, but along with freedom goes responsibility--the responsibility in an unwanted pregnancy to carry a child created through voluntary sexual activity to term and to place the baby for adoption.

Contraception absolutely does reduce unwanted pregnancy. But only in the context of marriage. The dream that contraception would lead to consequence free promiscuity has proven to be just that, a dream.

When the Pill was introduced, it was common wisdom that this miracle drug would eliminate illegitimacy and save women and children all kinds of heartache. Instead, the illegitimacy rate in america skyrocketed, to the point where now 40% (almost 1/2!) of all firstborn children are born to single moms. In some minority communities, it is even higher.

Why is that? Simple. Because the Pill completely obliterated male moral sexual responsibility. Before the Pill, everyone understood that sex had consequences. Yes, pre-marital sex was prevelant, but so was the shotgun wedding. Society clearly recognized that if a man got a woman pregnant, he had to "man up" and take responsibility for her and the baby. But now, if a woman gets pregnant, it's her fault. She just should have been more careful. As a result, not just the shotgun wedding, but any popular concept of male responsibility for pregnancy has been lost.

Result? Well you can see it clearly. In the real world, the Pill has led to increased incidence of unwanted pregnancy. It is simply inarguable.

Your post really makes no sense whatsoever. It is the same reasoning that has lead to rampant teen birth rates and high rates of STD infection in the same group.

If you want to be,t your pious platitudes vs. teenage hormones, I know where I would put my money.

Unfortunately a lot more kids will have to suffer for your idiotic ideology before we finally give them real sex education and access to cheap or free birth control.

Lumpy, there is a reason the teen birth rate and STD rates have skyrocketed in the last four decades. And it's not because access to birth control and sex education have decreased since 1960. Quite the contrary, actually.

At some point, your ideology has to be tested by the actual facts.

So does yours, TC.

You are presuming causality with no evidence to back up your hunch. Why do you assume that sexual mores would have never changed in our society without the advent of more modern contraception methods? Condoms and abortions have been around since humans have been recording their history.

the true conservative:

Contraception absolutely does reduce unwanted pregnancy. But only in the context of marriage.

I knew you guys had a hard-on for traditional marriage, but I didn't know that it extended into the realm of believing that it conferred magical powers on inanimate objects. As for your argument that contraception has led to increased numbers of unwanted pregnancies, I think you're taking a temporal association of two things (the advent of contraception and the changing of sexual mores) and asserting a direct cause-and-effect relationship between them. You're probably right that contraception's availability has contributed to an increase in the frequency of premarital sex, but most of the increase is probably due to larger cultural changes. In any event, it is far from "simply inarguable."

Do you have an actual solution for this issue, other than "let's just go back to the good old days"?

I don't know too many pro-choice people who would say that "there's nothing wrong with abortion"; it is an ethically gray area (at least to a thinking person), one with lingering physical and psychological effects and not to be undertaken lightly. Reducing the number of abortions is a valid goal for anyone on either side of the debate.

As for your other points, I think you're tilting at windmills here. It's a heck of a lot easier to teach people how to properly use contraception than it is to tell them "Hey! You need to disapprove strongly of unplanned pregnancy and unwed parenthood!" One is changing a behavior, a reachable (if difficult) goal. The other is an entirely more elusive matter of altering the course of an entire culture. Good luck with that one.

As for your last little social-contract bit: that only applies if one agrees that every conceived embryo is the ethical and moral equivalent of an already-born person. Given that approximately 50% of conceived embryos never implant in the uterus or miscarry ("spontaneous abortions," in medical terms), I have a hard time believing that the other 50% are deserving of quite that strong an ethical status. Thus, a gray area, not one with the ethical imperative to compel the kind of responsibility burden you envision.

The last forty years (more like fifty) has seen a marked rise in the availability of automobiles for teenagers.

Cars. Teenagers. Pregnancy.

Who would have thought? In fact, the dip in teenage pregnancy as of late could be said to correspond to the unavailability of gasoline.

While I can't show causality for this scenario any better than you can for contraception, it is still as valid an argument.

So does yours, TC.

I'm not ideologically against birth control. We use it.

You are presuming causality with no evidence to back up your hunch. Why do you assume that sexual mores would have never changed in our society without the advent of more modern contraception methods?

If you bothered to read all of my post, you would have caught the part where I said pre-marital sex was common then too. The part that has changed is society's popular attitude. Pregnancy has changed from a male responsibility to a female responsibility. Hardly a progressive change.

I knew you guys had a hard-on for traditional marriage, but I didn't know that it extended into the realm of believing that it conferred magical powers on inanimate objects.

Contraception works in an environment where the responsibility for the potential consequences of sex is a shared responsibility, not just the girl's problem.

Contraception works in either environment. The question of shared responsibility, while it does reflect on justice, does not affect the ability of a pill to alter ovulation/implantation or of a condom to block insemination. There is nothing magical about either situation.

NightSwimmer:

You are presuming causality with no evidence to back up your hunch. Why do you assume that sexual mores would have never changed in our society without the advent of more modern contraception methods? Condoms and abortions have been around since humans have been recording their history.

This is the most reasonable assessment of the situation. Others appear to be swayed to interpret the facts based on their own moral code; picking the evidence that supports their emotions and rejecting the evidence that doesn't.

Well said.

In the pre-Pill days while it's true "everyone understood that sex had consquences", it's NOT true that men universally "manned up" and took responsibility. This fact was/is the main impetus for abortion on demand. (Look up 'baby farming' in England).

That, plus women who do shoulder the responsibility without a man were/are penalized by society in the form of decreased opportunities in work, education, etc. Attempts to get men to "man up" (and not just monetarily) have been largely unsuccessful.

Shaming women (or men) for out of wedlock birth hasn't worked ... so I doubt whether shaming abortion itself is going to work.

In the end, IMO, it is the lack of respect for children and lack of respect for what it takes to raise children successfully that is lacking in our socity. We simply do not value children or child raising. This does not bode well for reducing abortion, nor does it bode well for children who are born.

Abortion and single motherhood are both clues to a sickness in our society that we are not willing to discuss. They is not the sickness itself, but rather the symptoms.

One organization that IMO comes the closest to understanding the bigger picture is www.feministsforlife.org . However, they are routinely denigrated by those pro-choice people who wish only to focus on the narrow issue of keeping abortion legal.

While that is understandable, the "common ground" that President Obama talks about gets lost in the partisan dust.

If legal abortion has not reduced the rate of unwanted/unintended pregnancies (which it hasn't) and if reducing the rate of unwanted/unintended pregnacies is a common goal (which everyone seems to agree it is) shouldn't we be focussing our efforts in different directions?

This response by Wren W hits closer to the truth of things than most I've read. You hear a lot by people on both sides about how important children are, but if you look impartially at American society you'd get the opposite impression. Take education, where the rights and needs of teachers and administrators always take 1st place over the needs of actual students. (Of course students don't vote or make campaign contributions.)