So the other day I read Ross Douthat and Megan McArdle’s takes on the whole “conservatives should be pro-contraception if they really want to reduce abortion” thing, and I really liked them because the idea that providing better access to contraceptives reduces abortion rates was one of those little things I absorbed at some point during my socialization and have never since had occasion to question.
Am I wrong that there’s something a little off about the general concept of “unintended pregnancy?” (Link: Wikipedia) I’ll grant you the “we used reliable contraception” excuse, though the failure rates are far higher than almost-never. But in the main sense: a pregnancy is “unintended” if you had sex hoping it wouldn’t work?
(Also: can anybody identify when having kids became a bad, misery-causing thing? I’m assuming that the idea dates back at least to the sterilize-the-poors movement of the early 20th.)
Re: your parenthetical question - some interesting stuff out there on it. I was remembering harried mother types from old books, but not really any concrete examples, so here’s just a skimming of what I’m finding on the question.
This - “England and Wales experienced a demographic transition characterized by slow and steady change. From 1700, the death rate began a long gradual decline. The decline was initially due to three factors: the first was the trade revolution, which introduced new foods such as potato and maize (corn) from the Americas. The second was the agricultural revolution that brought about higher yields of food production locally through the use of new agricultural practices. Finally, the industrial revolution that made new goods available. All of these changes were gradual, and increased the general standard of living for the population, without major medical breakthroughs. While death rates fell, the birth rates remained high, as both cultural norms and expectations and need for productive labor at home made immediate downward adjustment in the birth rate difficult to attain. As life in an urban industrial society made large families neither necessary for labor nor desirable for cost reasons, the birth rate declined over one or two generations. The intervening period saw a dramatic rise in the annual rate of population growth, to about 1 percent per year.It is important to note that this same transition seen in England and Wales took place in every industrialized country in the world (all of Europe and Russia, North America, Australia and New Zealand and Japan). All went from high birth and death rates in traditional, rural-agrarian societies to low birth and death rates in modern urban-industrial societies, though the dates and rates of change vary considerably.”
This one is fun reading though irritatingly blanket-statement-y, and brings up the rather overwhelming variety you encounter when you look at “families in America” since the time when non-native civilizations here became a thing.
It is complicated and interesting to me, thinking through this, because childbearing was a leading cause of death in pre-menopausal women until the 20th century. (It still is, in some non-industrialized countries.) So the view of children being a good thing to have was even higher than we might think from our place along this timeline, because it came at the cost of the lives of millions of mothers…and millions of siblings, since so very many babies died in childbirth, too.
The Victorians, caught between the industrial revolution which reduced the economic need for large families and the medical advances that radically lowered maternal mortality, had a particularly poignant view of the high cost of childbearing. I remember reading that the sudden minor key tragic-sounding finale to Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty (after an act full of light-hearted wedding festivities) was meant to symbolize the reality and gravity of a married woman’s fate occurring to Princess Aurora as the curtain fell.
We have inherited a great many of our sentimental tics from the Victorians, and this heavy ambivalence may be one of them.
I really object to the OP’s advocacy of “aggressively promoting IUDs and implants.” Even if I had no religious objections to them, I object on the grounds of ethics and women’s rights and dignity. These are products, people, sold by corporations more interested in profit than anything else. They have hurt women by the thousands and they will continue to hurt more women. They should not be urged on anyone, pushed, promoted, or shilled–let alone “aggressively” so. I am not talking about Dalkon Shield ancient history either. The Mirena is currently subject to a class action lawsuit and investigation, for instance. That’s your “new improved state of the art next generation IUD” btw. IUDs carry substantial risks including uterine perforation and increased infection risk, which can cause infertility and worse. And let’s not even get into the horrors caused by the “next generation hormones” like Yaz.
If a woman wants to choose this for herself with no pressure or incentive, that’s one thing. But the whole point of aggressive public health campaigns is to convince and subtly coerce. This is like twisting women’s arms into doing Jaeger shots. Sure some can handle it, some will enjoy it and even swear by it, but some will suffer and even die. No one should be coerced or incentivized into behavior that carries such serious risks.
The other problem is this: who are they (”They”) interested in getting on board with “LARCs”? People who They think have too many kids. Hmm…now how could that ever go wrong?
Mmm okay, maybe “aggressively” wasn’t the word I wanted to use. I don’t agree that we shouldn’t promote things just because they hurt women by the thousands, though. IUDs definitely carry risks, but so does the pill, plus the health risks associated with that extra risk of pregnancy if you forget a couple days, plus all of the negative effects on your life an unintended pregnancy has. Like, no matter what you promote you’re going to promote something that has hurt women by the thousands in some way or another.
(I tried to look up some numbers on what the probability of various side effects is exactly and couldn’t find anything. Open to changing my mind if it seems that LARCs are actually dangerous enough to outweigh the benefits of not getting pregnant.)
And I don’t think we should convince anyone who wants children not to have them. I do think that finding women who don’t want children right now and aren’t going to use other methods consistently and telling them “hey, here’s something you don’t have to think about for the next five years” is better than anything else I can think of.
(I mean I’m also sort of pro-spreading abstinence memes, but I just don’t know if there’s any way to do that effectively.)