This morning, hanging out in Indianapolis drinking some coffee and reading the newspaper, I was reminded why it was more relaxing to be in Seelyville and Brazil - I don't get the Indianapolis Star out west!
This morning the Star has a column from Froma Harrop titled "Failures of Conservative Moralizing." Her thesis: conservatives love to blame the sexual revolution for all the problems of today. The irony is that in her article she illustrates precisely the myopia that people who don't rejoice in the sexual revolution are always warning liberals about.
Harrop, in the crescendo of her piece, notes, "women giving birth out of wedlock are obviously not taking the pill. The pill prevents pregnancies rather than causes them."
WHAT? Has Harrop looked at any of the statistics on contraceptive failure rates? She illustrates the precise point that moral conservatives continue to point to; she demonstrates a complete inability to comprehend the connection between child births and the pill.
The pill has a FAILURE RATE. Condoms have a FAILURE RATE. To arrogantly assert that no pregnancy could ever come about when a woman was on the pill ("OBVIOUSLY" to use Harrop's phrase) doesn't prove "moral conservatives" wrong, it only reinforces our point.
The pill doesn't reduce "unwanted" pregnancies, it gives people the false promise of doing so, and when it fails, people are shocked and don't know how it happened because seemingly intelligent people continue to peddle the lie that "Obviously a pregnancy could never result when a woman is on the pill." How sad.
This kind of ties into the whole nonsense about the Church killing people with AIDS because they refuse to permit condom use. Abstinence is the only guaranteed way to not get AIDS (excepting non-sexual ways like bad blood in a transfusion). Anything else is like telling 100 people to jump out of plane with parachutes knowledge that 5 of those chutes will fail.
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