Numbers Add Up To Need For Old Values
When it comes to creating a new moral order, Francis Fukuyama is an optimist. “We can expect a new social order for a simple reason: Human beings are by nature social creatures, whose most basic drives and instincts lead them to create moral rules that bind them together into communities,” writes Fukuyama in a sparkling essay called “The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order” in this month’s Atlantic Monthly.
The social norms disrupted by our tumultuous entry into the post-industrial age can be repaired, Fukuyama believes. Crime likely will continue to go down and trust in our institutions will rise. Only in one area does Fukuyama express doubt: “With regard to sex and reproduction, however, the technological and economic conditions of our age make it extremely doubtful that anything like a return to Victorian values will take place.”
Great. The thing that most disturbs ordinary Americans, especially children - our high rates of fatherlessness and family fragmentation - are the things we can’t change.
Why? “Strict rules about sex make sense in a society in which unregulated sex has a high probability of leading to pregnancy,” he tells us, and that condition “disappeared with birth control.”
Being a child of the sexual revolution, this is a mantra I have heard repeated my entire adult life. We alone of mortals have successfully separated sex from reproduction. Hence, the sexual rules of yesteryear are simply as obsolete as the Edsel.
Myself, growing up and watching so many of my women friends get accidentally pregnant, I had my doubts about how perfectly in control of procreation we now are. Men, I suspect, especially highbrow guys who sleep with ambitious, career-oriented women who are most likely to have an abortion if a one-night stand “goes awry,” seriously underestimate how common this thing called unintended pregnancy still is.
In two articles in the March-April issue of Family Planning Perspectives, the journal of The Alan Guttmacher Institute, my lingering doubts were not only confirmed but quantified: Yes, even today, women who have sex risk conceiving children. Half of all pregnancies in the United States are unintended. Within two years, almost 16 percent of all women using contraception get pregnant. Of the two most popular contraceptive methods, almost 18 percent of condom users and over 12 percent of pill users get pregnant within two years.
Do the math yourself. Put your daughter on the pill at 16. Marry her off at 26. The odds some guy will knock her up at least once in the interim are: 47 percent - if she never stops using it, gets drunk or throws caution to the wind. As the authors of one of the studies put it: “The risk of failure during typical use of reversible contraceptives in the United States is not low. … The typical woman who uses reversible methods of contraception continuously … will experience 1.8 contraceptive failures.”
If your daughter is cohabiting with some guy, brace yourself for baby shoes: 30 percent of young women under 20 who are living with a man will get pregnant within the first 12 months of contraceptive use, compared to “just” 12 percent of married teenagers, for example.
These are facts about which, despite the abundant evidence of our sense, we are still in a serious state of denial.
One of the big reasons so many of our children are now born outside of marriage, Fukuyama points out, is that so few people, especially men, consider the conception of a child as a reason to get married. Pregnant brides have never been uncommon. Today’s unwed mothers are one predictable consequence of telling men that having sex no longer makes them responsible for babies.
Maybe it’s time we dusted off a few of those musty old sexual rules just in time for the 21st century.