Contraception: Why Not? (part 6)

This post is part of a series by Professor Janet E. Smith.

Slide: Unwed Pregnancy

The growth of the incidence of unwed pregnancy tells an amazing story.  In 1960, 3 percent of white babies were born out of wedlock and 22 percent of black babies were born out of wedlock.  In 1960 6 percent of all babies born in the United States were born out of wedlock.

In 1960 it was hard for a teenager to get a contraceptive.  Teenagers had to go to a seedy gas station or hotel to find a condom machine and buy a few condoms.  Now they can get condoms in their Welcome Back to School Kit.

In 2003, about 24 percent of white babies were born out of wedlock.  Sixty-eight percent of black babies were born out of wedlock and 34 percent of all babies born in the United States are born out of wedlock.  Metro Detroit actually has the highest unwed pregnancy rate in the United States: 75 percent.  If you want to try to discover the source of poverty and social dysfunction in Detroit, this is a place to start.

Most of those who live in poverty in the United States are single women with children.  It’s not that there aren’t jobs; it’s that when a woman has a child at home she can’t get the education that will qualify her for the jobs that exist.  She can’t earn the money that will pay for child care and her job.  So she has to live off welfare.  Greater availability of contraceptives has not led to a reduction of out-of-wedlock pregnancy; in fact, out-of-wedlock pregnancy increases with availability of contraception.

It is a social disaster that one out of three babies born in the United States is born to a single mother.  More than one out of four pregnancies ends in abortion.  One out of two marriages ends in divorce.  So what does this mean?  Let’s work out the stats.  Only about 28 percent of the babies who are conceived in the United States will be born and born to a mother who is married — to a mother who will remain married to the same man for the rest of her life.  Every other baby conceived in the United States is either going to be aborted or born to a single mother, or born into a household that is touched by divorce.  Do you wonder why we have the problems we have?  This is a very good place to start looking for answers.

Slide: Children and Poverty.

About 68 percent of the children who live with a never-married parent live in poverty.  Forty-two percent of those living with a parent who is separated live in poverty.  About 38 percent of those living with parents who are cohabiting live in poverty.  Only 12 percent of children living with parents who are in their first marriage are living in poverty.  My guess is that most of those people are in the early years of their marriage.  As they are married longer they build up some savings etc. so that they get out of poverty.  So if you want to look at the major sources of poverty in the United States, a very good place to look is at single parenthood:  women having children out of wedlock and people cohabiting, getting separated, getting divorced.

Slide: Abortion

Does access to contraception reduce abortions?  Roughly 63 percent of women who are getting abortions have never been married.  Eleven percent are divorced, 6 percent are separated, and 1 percent is widowed.  Eighty-one percent of those getting abortions are not living in the married state.  Fifty percent of the women who go to abortion clinics claim that they were using a contraceptive when they got pregnant.  They are seeking an abortion because of a contraceptive failure.  The other 50 percent say that they have used a contraceptive in the past; they just weren’t using it at this particular time.  Often these are teenagers and sometimes women in their 20’s.  They break up with their boyfriend, they don’t like the side effects of the contraceptive pill, they stop taking it, the boyfriend comes around or they get a new one and before they get on the new birth control regime, they have sex and they get pregnant.

Nineteen percent of those getting abortions are married.  But so far as I can tell the major reason for the abortions of the married women is not poverty.  There are many reasons.  One is that 10 percent of babies conceived by married women are conceived with by someone other than her husband.  We also have an enormous increase in the use of in vitro-fertilization.  Three or four embryos are implanted and then two or three are selectively terminated and that means aborted.  You’ll also notice there is a radical decrease of individuals with Down syndrome in our culture.  If pre-natal testing detects a baby with Down syndrome, the baby is often aborted.  I can’t tell you how many women call me and tell me that their doctors tell them that either because of their own health or because of some anomalies of the unborn child, they need an abortion.  Of course I always recommend that they go to a good pro-life doctor and get a second opinion.  Almost always they inform me that this doctor tells them that they can get through the pregnancy alive and healthy and that the baby is either all right or they will be able to live with the challenges of having a baby with defects.

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