Contraception Saves Money and Marriages

Listen to the apocalyptic rhetoric of the religious right and you'll find an important theme emerge: The introduction of contraception, which permits people to have sex for fun, is bound up with all of society's ills, from the imagined breakdown of the family to an undocumented surge in crimes against children. It's a cornerstone of right-wing thinking. And, no doubt, it's also the reason that not one pro-life group in the U.S. supports the use of contraception even though it's the only proven way to prevent abortion.

Sadly, most Americans seem afflicted by some strain of this prejudice. If they credit the pro-choice, birth control movement for anything, it's for the dubious honor of protecting vice. Planned Parenthood has never been tagged as a pro-family values group. A greater oversight has never been made.

The religious right is right in this: Birth control is the source of seismic change. Family planning has led to a transformation of our society so rapid we've only recently had the occasion to take stock. For example, the past century has actually witnessed a steep decline in extramarital affairs as a result, it would seem, of the very changes that drive the pro-lifers wild: The more lengthy and thoughtful trying-out of marriage partners in combination with greater candor about sexual desires within marriage.

Studies conducted in 1948 and 1953, found that 26 percent of women and a whopping 50 percent of men had an extramarital sexual experience. But today, in our sex- and sin-saturated culture, the number of married people who have had an extramarital affair has plummeted to 6 percent of women and 10 percent of men, according to (conservative) Ben Wattenberg in his book The First Measured Century. (Editor's note: Statistics show a wide variation in the percentage of extramarital affairs, as high as 55 percent of women and 60 percent of men.)

Preaching about faithfulness didn't lead to this family value upgrade. Rather, the uptick in fidelity today is the result of a society that accepts our sexual urges as natural and couples that can look within marriage for fulfillment of desires once branded indecent. (It is also this belief system that supports gay marriage and the children that result from it. To us, family is so important we believe everyone has a right to make one.)

Another truth is that when the birth control revolution got underway, women waited to marry and start a family. In 1970, the average age of a new mother was 21 years old. By 2000, the average age was 28. Harvard researchers recently reported that legalization of contraception is directly linked to the spike in the number of women becoming more highly educated and entering the "career" professions. In 1970, 5 percent of all lawyers and judges were women; today there are six times that. In 1970, one in 10 physicians was female, today it's one in three. Similar patterns are true for women architects, dentists, veterinarians, economists and women in most of the engineering fields.

Few women today would trade places with the typical 1950s woman and mother, the one fervently idealized by so-called "pro-family" groups. In the 1950s, women didn't approach parity with men in education and, guess what, their housework time was constant -- despite having new "time-saving" technologies. This was the era in which birth rates soared and doubled the time devoted to child care. And with women assigned to endless tasks of the home, men shouldered the full responsibility of supporting the family economically. One dire consequence was that one in four Americans in the mid-1950s lived in poverty. By the end of the 1950s, one in three American children lived in poverty.

Not surprisingly, researchers in the '50s found that less than one in three married couples reported being happy or very happy with their relationship. Compare that to today, when 61 percent of married Americans report themselves to be "very happy" in their marriage. Part of the sour spouse problem of the '50s was that many couples didn't really want to be married to each other. Often, they were trapped into marriage by unintended pregnancy. With no sex-ed, no birth control, no legal abortion -- the exact legislative agenda of today's pro-life movement! -- teen birth rates soared, reaching highs that have not been equaled since: there were twice as many teen mothers in the '50s than today.