Time Immortal

A Rasmussen poll ranks her popularity highter than that of Obama — but let’s remember what’s happening here. Barrack Hussein Obama is running for President, while Sarah Palin is not: if John McCain wins the election, she will be Vice President.

The Republican VP pick, then, is more popular than the Democrat front-runner. Politics is not my field, but it seems to me that for Obama, that’s not a good place to be. Hard-core lefties are beginning to realize this, and some are even, as is traditional, threatening to leave the country should McCain and Palin prevail in the election.

And let’s be honest: a week ago, most of us had no idea who this woman was, if we were even aware of her existence.

To say that this has inspired fear and rage among the Left would be a vast understatement. I can’t recall a time when I’ve seen such a broad spectrum of liberal-minded folk come So. Completely. UNHINGED. This website, a heartless mockery of Trig Palin’s Down’s syndrome is probably the most extreme example I’ve come across, but it’s hardly the only one.

Consider: Oprah Winfrey refuses to allow Palin on her show. The woman who introduced Obama to millions of American women, and who is ostensibly a champion of women’s rights and the advancement of women in all areas of the job market, including the political arena, will not allow the first woman on the Republican ticket to speak on her show. Even more egregiously, she will not allow the woman who will probably the first woman to hold the Vice Presidential (if not the Presidential) office in the U.S. on her show.

Indeed, supposed feminists have been forming ranks against Palin with a ferocity that makes no sense whatsoever. In an excellent column for the Wall Street Journal, Barbara Amiel (Lady Black) makes an excellent point (and not just when she compares Palin to Margaret Thatcher):

American feminists have always had a tough sell to make. To the rest of the world, no females on earth have ever had it as easy as middle-class American women. Cosseted, surrounded by labor-saving devices, easily available contraception and supermarkets groaning with food, their complaints have always seemed to have no relationship to reality.

Education was there for the taking. Marriages were not arranged. Going against social mores had no serious consequences. Postwar American women (excluding those mired in poverty or the odious restrictions of race) have always had the choice of what they wanted to be. They simply didn’t decide to exercise it until it became more fashionable to get out of the home than to run it.

Sarah Palin has put the flim-flam nature of America feminism sharply into focus, revealing the not-so-secret hypocrisy of its code and, whatever her future, this alone is an accomplishment. As she emerged into the nation’s consciousness, a shudder went through the feminist left — a political movement not restricted to females. She is a mother refusing to stay at home (good) who had made a success out in the workplace (excellent) whose marriage nevertheless is a rip-roaring success and whose views are unspeakable—those of a red-blooded, right-wing principled pragmatist.

The metaphorical hair stood up on the back of every licensed member of the feminist movement who could immediately see she was a monster out of a nightmare landscape by Hieronymus Bosch. Pro-life. Pro-oil exploration in Alaska, home of the nation’s polar bears for heaven’s sake. Smaller government. Lower taxes. And that family of hers: Next to the Clintons with their dysfunctional marriage, her fertility and sexually robust life could only emphasize the shriveled nature of the one-child family of the former Queen Bee of political female accomplishment.

Mrs. Palin’s emergence caused a spasm in American feminism. Caste and class have always been ammunition in the very Eastern seaboard women’s movement, and now they were (so to speak) loading for bear. Sally Quinn felt a mother of five had no business being vice president. Andrea Mitchell remarked that “only the uneducated” would vote for Mrs. Palin. “Choose a woman but this woman?” wrote Baltimore Sun columnist Susan Reimer, accusing Sen. McCain of using a Down’s syndrome child as qualification for the VP spot.

The hypocrisy was breathtaking. Only nanoseconds before the choice of Mrs. Palin as VP put her a geriatric heartbeat away from the presidency, a woman’s right to have a career and children was a shibboleth of feminism. One always knew that women with views that opposed those of official feminism were to be treated as nonwomen. To see it now out in the open was the real shocker.

Other left-wing commentators haven’t displayed even as little restraint in their open contempt as the likes of Sally Quinn have. Indeed, Mark Steyn correctly notes that based on their responses to Palin, feminists and progressives — supposed champions of working mothers and of shattering “glass ceilings” wherever they can be found — seem to have “as narrow and proscriptive a view of what women are permitted to be as any old 1950s sitcom dad,” and all because Palin is openly Christian and ardently pro-life.

And when those criticisms ring hollow, Palin’s detractors turn instead to her “downscale” appeal, noting that she’ll certainly make the Republicals more popular with “the lower class” voters, while simultaneously alienating “the upper class” voters.

Leave it to Mark Steyn to note that one would “be surprised how crowded it is down at the “downscale” end.”

And remember: all this rage and animosity has emerged within the last week, and then in response to a woman John McCain picked at his presidential running mate, who was — prior to that point — all but unknown to most Americans, and who was enjoying an 80+% approval rate with the Alaska electorate as their governor.

John who? That’s almost what this campaign has become. And the Left are soiling their pants over it.

In most of the United States, there about 24 abortions performed for every 100 live births that take place. In New York, the ratio rises to 72:100.

This suggests — strongly suggests — that New York women are making use of abortion as their main form of birth control (this comes as no real surprise).

The proposed solution: even more and better access to contraception.

The main concern of the pro-choice advocates? That by using abortion as a primary method of birth control, women may not be using other forms of contraception to full effect, especially condoms…thus leaving themselves potentially more vulnerable to contracting STDs. The over 250 infants butchered daily does not seem to register as a concern.

But strangely, the potentially harmful side effects of procuring an abortion — especially surgical complications — do cause concern. We don’t often see mention of those showing up in print, despite the fact that abortion does pose some very real risks to the health of women, some of which can be catastrophic and fatal in their aftermath.

What the contraception advocates seem to miss is that more and more people don’t seem to care about things like STDs and “protection”. In like manner to how something like obesity (an almost wholly preventable condition) is becoming more and more common (and more of a strain on health care resources), it would seem to be the case that fewer and fewer people are genuinely concerned about things which might pose real and tangible risks to their health. Indeed, the case of obesity is telling, as it is demonstrative of how people will prefer convenience over health — it’s not hard to shed pounds by doing as little as giving up fast food and soda pop.

So too where sex is concerned. I’d bet dollars to doughnuts that women in New York, living a fast-paced urban lifestyle in one of the biggest, busiest cities in the world, want convenience everywhere they can get it, including in their birth control. And while the contraception advocates rightly point out that birth control pills are much cheaper than abortion as a method of contraception, those same pills are also more convenient. Even the pill regimens that allow you to miss a day here and there are just not as convenient as an occasional, one-time appointment at a “day surgery” clinic. Ditto condoms…and I’d also be willing to bet that the partners these women take are just as glad that they don’t have to worry about using a condom.

Convenience trumps good sense almost every time, and that’s what we’re seeing in New York, methinks.

And really, as the Curt Jester points out, why are pro-choice advocates actually calling attention to this issue? Why, for them, is it an issue? If it is not considered immoral to obtain an abortion, then is a ratio of 72:100 really any worse than a ratio of 24:100? Is it any better than a ratio of 110:100? Who cares if people are using abortion in a contraceptive capacity, if we’re not supposed to care that people are able to obtain abortions at all?

John C. Wright has the details, linking to an article at First Things by Mary Eberstadt that looks at modern evidence, gleaned from sociological and sociobiological research and studies concerning the course and state of society, which demonstrates that the predictions of Pope Paul VI in his 1968 encyclical have all come true.

Unfortunately.

Let’s begin by meditating upon what might be called the first of the secular ironies now evident: Humanae Vitae’s specific predictions about what the world would look like if artificial contraception became widespread. The encyclical warned of four resulting trends: a general lowering of moral standards throughout society; a rise in infidelity; a lessening of respect for women by men; and the coercive use of reproductive technologies by governments.

…

Consider, as Wilcox does, the Nobel Prize-winning economist George Akerlof. In a well-known 1996 article in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Akerlof explained in the language of modern economics why the sexual revolution — contrary to common prediction, especially prediction by those in and out of the Church who wanted the teaching on birth control changed — had led to an increase in both illegitimacy and abortion. In another work published in the Economic Journal ten years ago, he traced the empirical connections between the decrease in marriage and married fatherhood for men — both clear consequences of the contraceptive revolution — and the simultaneous increase in behaviors to which single men appear more prone: substance abuse, incarceration, and arrests, to name just three.

Along the way, Akerlof found a strong connection between the diminishment of marriage on the one hand and the rise in poverty and social pathology on the other. He explained his findings in nontechnical terms in Slate magazine: “Although doubt will always remain about what causes a change in social custom, the technology-shock theory does fit the facts. The new reproductive technology was adopted quickly, and on a massive scale. Marital and fertility patterns changed with similar drama, at about the same time.”

To these examples of secular social science confirming what Catholic thinkers had predicted, one might add many more demonstrating the negative effects on children and society. The groundbreaking work that Daniel Patrick Moynihan did in 1965, on the black family, is an example — along with the critical research of psychologist Judith Wallerstein over several decades on the impact of divorce on children; Barbara Dafoe Whitehead’s well-known work on the outcomes of single parenthood for children; Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur’s seminal book, Growing Up with a Single Parent; and David Blankenhorn’s Fatherless America, another lengthy summarization of the bad empirical news about family breakup.

…

In sum, although a few apologists such as Stephanie Coontz still insist otherwise, just about everyone else in possession of the evidence acknowledges that the sexual revolution has weakened family ties, and that family ties (the presence of a biologically related mother and father in the home) have turned out to be important indicators of child well-being — and more, that the broken home is not just a problem for individuals but also for society. Some scholars, moreover, further link these problems to the contraceptive revolution itself.

Consider the work of maverick sociobiologist Lionel Tiger. Hardly a cat’s-paw of the pope — he describes Religion as “a toxic issue” — Tiger has repeatedly emphasized the centrality of the sexual revolution to today’s unique problems. The Decline of Males, his 1999 book, was particularly controversial among feminists for its argument that female contraceptives had altered the balance between the sexes in disturbing new ways (especially by taking from men any say in whether they could have children).

Equally eyebrow-raising is his linking of contraception to the breakdown of families, female impoverishment, trouble in the relationship between the sexes, and single motherhood. Tiger has further argued — as Humanae Vitae did not explicitly, though other works of Catholic theology have — for a causal link between contraception and abortion, stating outright that “with effective contraception controlled by women, there are still more abortions than ever. . . . Contraception causes abortion.”

Catholics, and the Pope, were poo-pooed from pretty much every quarter for speculating that elevating birth control to the status of a social norm — or even a social expectation — would ultimately cause many more problems than it would solve. The opinion of the Church was considered to be one of ignorance, backwardness, and fear.

Instead, it has been shown to have been nigh-prophetic…which, unfortunately, means that society has indeed suffered a great detriment that it could potentially have spared itself.

What a wonderful world we have created with our post-Christian sexual morality:

People in their early 20s have grown up with heightened awareness of HIV/AIDS, and the dangers of having sex without a condom. So Youth Radio’s Pendarvis Harshaw argues that when a couple decides to forego condoms, it’s a serious commitment…that’s replaced the engagement ring…………………

Because clearly there is so much more meaning in something like that. Diamonds and gold? Who needs ‘em, baby…I love you so much I left the latex at home this time.

Cue the asteroid, please.

Update: Mark Shea’s take on this issue suggests that I was perhaps too quick to see the negative angle in this story.

Scripture describes Jesus as having pity on his flock because they were like sheep without a shepherd. I think the response of Jesus to a story like this is pity. In their own sad way, the youth in this story are facing reality far more clearly than their idiot parents who labored to reduce sex to a plumbing problem. marriage is indeed the sacrament of sex and the sexual act is indeed the body’s declaration of lifelong fidelity. contraception is the crossed fingers behind the back, the way of saying “Well, not really” while the lips say “I love you and give myself completely to you and our family.”

So the poor pitiable kids whose highest expression of love is to take off a condom is rather like the widow who offered two copper coins. It’s all he has and the Lord can work with that. Far more pitiable are the dolts who handed him that contraceptive culture in the first place and sold him the whole bill of good about the Imperial Autonomous Self. My generation has so much to answer for.

If there is one thing about becoming a parent that I fear, it is the part wherein I am responsible for educating my son(s?) or daughter(s?) about the need to approach sexuality with an attitude of sacramental reverence. It is my great fear that my child will turn out to be just another casual, callous youth who moves from bed to bed, and partner to partner, with the same carefree abandon one normally reserves for changing one’s socks.

Update II - The Road Warrior: Welcome, WebElf readers!

It turns out that the pill — that ubiquitous birth control method — is responsible for a potentially massive number of pregnancy terminations every year.

And yes, I realize that the point of taking the pill is, in most cases, to avoid getting pregnant. That doesn’t change the fact that a potentially massive number of implantations are being prevented, in essence aborting perhaps millions of unborn children at the very earliest stages of development.

Women on BCPs [birth control pills] have 28-day cycles and thus have 13 cycles/year (365/28 = 13.3).

According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute , 10,410,000 U.S. women are current pill users, a figure that constitutes 26.9% of all those using some method of contraception.

Gambrell notes that there is a 14% breakthrough ovulation rate in females taking the 50 microgram pills (10,410,000 x .14 = 1,457,400 ovulations each cycle). (1)

1,457,400 x 13 cycles/year = 18,946,200 possible exposures to pregnancy each year.

Since the normal fecundity rate (chance of pregnancy without using contraceptives) for the average couple is 20%, and if we were to suppose that the cervical mucus change cut down the sperm reaching the ovum by 50% (a very generous allowance), that means that there would be 20% x 50% x 18,946,200= 1,894,620 fertilized ovums that would have otherwise implanted in the walls of the uterus.

Of this number, the accepted rate for “pill pregnancies” is 3-5 per 100 women years i.e 3%-5%. (2)

This means that 95-97% of these unborn babies were prevented from implanting in the lining of the womb because of the oral contraceptive’s thinning of the endometrium (#3 above).

In other words, approximately 1,800,000 (95% x 1,894,620) babies die every year through the use of oral contraceptives.

According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), there were 854,122 legally induced abortions in the US in 2003.

Therefore the ratio between BCP abortion vs. conventional abortions is 2.2:1.  This means that for every  ONE women aborting through conventional means in the U.S., more than TWO women are aborting through the use of oral contraceptives.

Culture of death, indeed. God help us.

If you’re not reading ProWomanProLife, O Reader, you’re missing out. Case in point:

I once read that abortion was the right to kill in order to protect the right to copulate. Since then, I have never ceased to be amazed at the lengths we are willing to go to protect these “rights.”

Case in point: We worry more about the effect of estrogen from contraceptive pills on the smallmouth bass of the Potomac river than on the women who take it daily.

Would that women’s hormonal health was as significant as that of the smallmouth bass of the Potomac watershed.

One possible response to the above is that, quite simply, we value the lives and well-being of other (non-human) animals more than we value the lives and well-being of other human beings. After all, it would be a terrible thing if all the smallmouth bass went extinct. Equally, it would be a terrible thing if, for whatever reason, men and women started taking responsibility for their own sexuality, or started acting with moral reasoning in regard to said same. That might imply that they were something more than animals, and that there was something more relevant to our moral decision making than raw desire and animal instinct…and in our secular world, we wouldn’t want people thinking like that! Besides, we have to save the smallmouth bass!