Separating Sex from the Procreation of Children, Part 1

In my last blog post, I introduced this general topic: our increasing separation of sex, marriage, and the reproduction and care of children. These are three critical realities that are meant to be united in the created, natural order. Of course, they will sometimes be separated from one another through various tragedies, such as when the death of a parent separates children from being cared for by a married biological mother or father. But what we are seeing in our day is the increasing separation of these three realities by the intentional choices of adults.

In these blog posts my focus is going to be descriptive. Thus, I am not dealing with what to do about these various separations, including how we can prevent them, what we can do to help alleviate the harm done by them, and so on. Of course, such concerns are vitally important. But here, I just want to lay out the realities themselves, perhaps helping readers learn more about them, to visualize them in new ways, or both.

In this blog post and the next, I will overview the major ways in which we are increasingly separating sex from the reproduction of children. In this post, I will focus on contraception and abortion. In the next—which I hope to post on July 20—I will look at the institutionalization of same-sex sexual relationships and especially marriage as it relates to the separation of sex from the reproduction of children. I will also overview in vitro fertilization (IVF) and surrogacy which will also, as we shall see, bring back the issue of abortion.

(One quick, minor point. Sexual gratification associated with the burgeoning usage of pornography, virtual reality sex, and even the niche market of sexual robots, are certainly varieties of separating sexual activity from the reproduction of children. However—much more than any of the above [even, increasingly, same-sex sexual relationships and marriages, as we shall see]—these are detached from relationships with other persons, and are not at all connected, in actuality or potentially, with reproduction. I will tackle sexual activity that is completely detached from direct relationships with other human beings later, when I deal with the separation of sex from marriage. But not here.)

So, with all this said, let’s look at contraception, abortion, and the separation of sex from the reproduction of children.

Contraception

The most obvious way of separating sex from the reproduction of children is through contraception. For some, this may also mean sterilization, such as males having vasectomies or women undergoing tubal ligation or having sterilization implants to block their fallopian tubes.

We are not just talking about married couples using contraception to delay or limit childbearing. For a long time, much contraception has been used to enable unmarried people to have sexual relations with one another (or married folk with those with whom they are having affairs) with less risk of pregnancy. (Condoms are also used to limit the risk of sexually transmitted infections.) As a culture, we have become so obsessed with using contraception to lower the risks of out-of-wedlock sex, in order to make it easier for people to engage in non-marital sexual relationships, that, increasingly, we have even prioritized making it available to minors, in many cases without parental consent. In fact, as of 2017, in the United States, 21 states had laws that allowed the latter.

Most analysts of the 1960’s sexual revolution have identified the widespread availability of “The Pill,” starting in 1960, as a key element of that social movement. Certainly, the root causes of the sexual revolution were complex and numerous, some going back centuries. Moreover, some means to reduce the risk of pregnancy in sexual activity existed before the 1960’s. But it is hard to imagine the sexual revolution taking off with the intensity and speed that it did without The Pill.

There is another key shift that happened with the explosive availability and use of The Pill. As Glenn Stanton notes, “Even though women long knew how to limit their fertility, the Pill made (along with corresponding legal and cultural developments) the separation between sexuality and the possibility of babies nearly an inalienable right. (I added the emphasis.) In short, it helped turn being able to have sex without procreating babies into a kind of “entitlement.” This helped pave the way for what we will discuss next.

Abortion

The obsession with separating sex from the procreation of children was not sufficiently satisfied through widely available, increasingly effective, and inexpensive, contraception. To fill in the gap, so to speak, we concocted another “inalienable right”—abortion. SCOTUS gave us that in 1973, in Roe v Wade.

To be sure many people who use contraception do not support abortion, except perhaps in rare hard cases. Many people who use contraception would never obtain an abortion except, again, perhaps in a rare, hard case. Embracing contraception does not equal embracing abortion. Let me be clear about that.

But as Glenn Stanton also pointed out, continuing on to the next sentence from what I quoted above, “The fact that a woman could be sexually active and virtually guaranteed (by medical science no less!) of not becoming pregnant had the effect of making her feel cheated when an unexpected pregnancy did happen.” (Again, I added the emphasis.) For many (again, not all), this meant that if a baby happened anyway, well, we ought to be able to kill it before it is born. Or, to use that hideous modern euphemism, “terminate the pregnancy.” To many in our culture and its elites, standing in the way of any woman wishing to obtain an abortion became seen as fundamentally unjust, akin to (or worse than) denying her freedom of speech or religion. This is certainly consistent with turning being able to have sex without procreation into a “right.”

Abortion was “needed” because contraception is generally not foolproof. There is still usually a risk of pregnancy, and this increases dramatically the more often sex, even “protected” sex, is engaged in. And of course, abortion was also “needed” because, people reasoned, women and/or their partners neglecting to use contraception at all, or using it improperly, should still not be forced to have an “unwanted” child.

Then, abortion also became “needed” because the woman and/or her partner might not have gotten the baby they wanted or in the manner they wanted. The woman was pregnant with a “defective” child, she was pregnant with a boy but she and/or her partner wanted a girl, she was carrying triplets but only wanted one, she chose to get pregnant with someone she thought she would marry but then split up with him, and so on. The justifications for abortion rapidly expanded beyond dealing with unintended pregnancy. (We will touch on some of this again in my next blog post, as it pertains to IVF and surrogacy.)

As I have mentioned there are and always have been the truly hard cases, of course—for example, rape, or pregnancies that pose serious health risks (or even certain death) to the mother. But we have long known that these “hard cases” are an unbelievably tiny percentage of abortions. Most abortions are for women who, for whatever reason (usually unintended pregnancy), do not want their babies.

Isn’t it an amazing indictment of our modern culture that—in spite of the widespread availability of inexpensive and relatively effective contraception—carelessness, promiscuity and other factors have still conspired to produce many millions of pregnancies in sexually active women and/or their partners who do not want these children, and so dispose of them? In 2020, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated there were 198 abortions for every 1,000 live births in the United States. At the highwater point in 1984, there were 364 abortions for every 1,000 live births, and that number never dropped below 300 for 20 years from 1976 to 1996. The impulse to have sex but not children was strong enough to lead Americans to kill over 44,500,000 unborn children between 1973 and 2015. This is enough innocent humans to populate the current metropolitan areas of Los Angeles plus Chicago, New York City, the entire Dallas-Forth Worth Metroplex, Philadelphia and its surrounding areas, and most of the Pittsburgh metropolitan area. And we have killed many more since then.

Moreover, let’s not forget that most abortions are now performed using pills, particularly mifepristone and misoprostol. When these pills are taken outside of clinical settings, these abortions are not included in official counts. Obtaining pills to do “self-managed abortions” (that is, outside of medical settings) is remarkably easy. In fact, Doctors Without Borders provides instructions to help women do this. There is even a medical group in Europe that ships these pills to the United States via a pharmacy in India, intentionally and effectively circumventing laws against it. Such services are easily found on the Internet. Mexican pharmacies providing these pills without a prescription are also currently experiencing booming demand from Americans. At this point, we really have no idea how many American women are having abortions. The true figure is much higher than the available statistics indicate.

Conclusion

Contraception was designed to facilitate having sex detached from procreation. We always knew it wouldn’t work perfectly. As being able to do this, for married and unmarried alike, became a widespread expectation so strong that sex without any risk of procreation began to feel like a “right” to many people—even for those who failed to use contraception or to use it properly—it is natural that pressure for widely available, legal abortion would follow, as it did. Then, it was just as natural that the justifications for abortion would expand, as they have.

That is the story I have tried to briefly tell in this post. In my next blog post, I will pick up this story further, closing out my overview of “separating sex from the procreation of children.” Hope you will tune in then.