To continue pounding on the Red Families v. Blue Families theme, I wanted to further discuss the air of utter unreality that surrounds the policy pronouncements of the right wing on matters of sex, divorce and family. I hate to sound like a Johnny One Note, but this is worth a couple of posts, so I'll confine this one to the areas of premarital sex and birth control, where the prescribed policies of the right might be fairly described as a nostalgic fairy tale.
Let's review the absurdity for a minute, shall we. It is the basic premise of this reactionary cohort that the public policy of the United States should be to declare sex appropriate only within the bounds of marriage and that students in our public schools should be taught to abstain from sex in any other circumstances. Now think about it -- it's 2010 -- people have been having sex out of wedlock routinely for a long fucking time. The Guttmacher Institute Study to which I have linked is really illuminating in this regard and I recommend that you take a look at it. The takeaway findings -- "premarital sex is nearly universal by age 30, and commonly experienced at much younger ages." This has been true for more or less the last forty years, with the median age of first intercourse having gone down slightly over time, from around age 20 for the cohort born between 1939 and 1948 to age 18 for those in my cohort to just over 17 for those born between 1969 and 1988. There's a lot of continuity in these numbers -- basically 75% of Americans born between 1959 and 1988 had had premarital sex by the age of twenty. The Guttmacher Study concludes with the kind of common sense admonition one might expect from an entity dedicated to fact-based public health recommendations:
Premarital sex as a normative behavior is not surprising in an era when men and women typically marry in their mid to late twenties. Indeed, not only is premarital sex nearly universal by age 30, but it is also common at much younger ages. Evidence from the past 50 years suggests that establishing abstinence until marriage as normative behavior is a challenging policy goal. Instead, these findings argue for education and interventions that provide young people with the skills and information they need to protect themselves from unintended pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases once they become sexually active.
Compare this with the plank in the Republican Platform on this issue:
Each year more than three million American teenagers contract sexually transmitted diseases, causing emotional harm and serious health consequences, even death. We support efforts to educate teens and parents about the health risks associated with early sexual activity and provide the tools needed to help teens make healthy choices. Abstinence from sexual activity is the only protection that is 100 percent effective against out-of-wedlock pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases, including sexually transmitted HIV/AIDS. Therefore, we support doubling abstinence education funding. We oppose school-based clinics that provide referrals, counseling, and related services for contraception and abortion.
There is no attempt at reason here -- there is fear mongering -- you fuck and you will die -- that is immune to the fact that on a bipartisan basis Americans are getting laid and they are doing so without benefit of marriage. One might surmise, shockingly enough, that Republicans are getting laid an awful lot, proving the old (slightly scary) adage of a meat cutter I once worked with -- "there's a customer for everything."
The problem here is that this kind of rhetoric precludes policies that might say take actual teenagers and teach them effective ways to avoid pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease. But that would require acknowledging that people are going to have sex before marriage, that the vast majority of people will have sex prior to age 20, and that a pretty sizable contingent will do so by the age of 17.
Even more puzzling is the hostility to contraception. Studies show that virtually every sexually active American uses contraception at some point in their lives and that a solid 85% do so for a period of years or decades. And yet, rates of unplanned and unwanted pregnancies are much higher in the United States than they are in Western Europe. More distressingly, the rates of unplanned pregnancies among low income women have spiked in recent years.
For a brief moment in the mid to late 1970s, there was a bipartisan consensus in favor of federal funding to promote family planning services to adolescents and low income women. This soon fell victim to Reagan era efforts to appeal to their religious right base by substantially cutting such funding. Since that time the Republicans have embraced a policy of unrelenting hostility to federally funded family planning while promoting abstinence only education. The unequal access to contraception dictated by age and economics has had predictable and deleterious results -- as of 2006, half of all pregnancies in the United States were unplanned. As a result, women in the U.S. with incomes below the poverty rate have five times the rate of unplanned births as women in the highest quintile of income. Cahn and Carbone note that "in the twenty-first century in the United States, birth control is readily available to those with the means and the discipline to use it. Political divisions over its use, therefore, primarily affect the poorer, the unsophisticated and the vulnerable." In short, the Republicans favorite targets.
So the question arises, how do you deal with people for whom facts don't matter, who care not a bit about creating effective public policy, and who, ultimately, view unplanned pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases as appropriate punishment for those who engage in sex outside of marriage (unless they are Republicans of course)? I am afraid that the only realistic answer is that you can't -- only by consistently defeating Republicans on the electoral front can we be assured of policies that will benefit the reproductive choices and overall public health of the nation. The next time someone suggests that it doesn't matter if Democrats or Republcians prevail in elections, show them the Guttmacher Study and the Republican Platform plank that I have quoted and see if they can't understand why such things matter a great deal.
