Sex, Not Abortion, Is the Issue

In our national obsession with abortion, we have evaded our real problem: an epidemic rate of unintended pregnancy.

Sixty percent of all pregnancies in the U.S. are unintended, a rate two to four times higher than in other industrialized countries, cutting across all age, racial and income groups. Unintended pregnancy is sufficiently oppressive a condition that when abortion is not legally available, women will risk death, mutilation and imprisonment to end pregnancies they feel they cannot carry to term. Most unintended pregnancies, however, result in births.

Here is the question we are avoiding: With the advent of widely available contraceptives, shouldn’t the U.S. rate of unintended pregnancy (and consequently abortion) have declined, as it did in other industrialized nations? Why, with the best birth control technology in history, in the richest country in the world, is our unintended pregnancy rate so high?

The stock progressive answer focuses on contraceptives and the barriers women face in acquiring them. Undoubtedly, free, unrestricted birth control and information would do much to solve our problem. Nonetheless, most unintended pregnancies happen to people with good access to contraceptives and knowledge of how to use them.

What is different about us compared with, say, the Netherlands? People there are just as sexually active but are only one-fourth as likely to experience an unintended pregnancy. What distinguishes the Dutch is a greater cultural consensus that sex before marriage is acceptable and that couples are expected to protect themselves against unintended pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections. Sex education for young people is mandatory, consistent and thorough and television is used to educate viewers about the finer points of safe and responsible sex.

In the U.S., we compound our social ambivalence by treating contraception like a big secret and forbid its discussion on TV and in most schools. If you doubt the continued destructiveness of this silence in a culture that uses female sexuality to sell everything from computers to toothpaste, consider one of the most common reasons given during counseling of pregnant women for their nonuse of birth control: They did not want to appear to their male partners as though they were expecting sex.

Without consensus or a publicly expressed ethos about healthy sexuality, all we have are vague platitudes. If a young person should wait until later, just when is later? At what age should we begin to worry that one’s virginity is the mark of loserdom? How exactly do you know what feels right? How many partners is too many?

Family planning clinics necessarily refrain from moralizing lest they scare away those in need of contraceptives. And groups on the religious right offer abstinence as the only solution for the unmarried. But what about real life? What institution can address the great, contradictory, mysterious in-between, where sensible people make senseless mistakes no matter what they believe?

These questions never are acknowledged in mainstream public discourse, in which any act with consent and a condom is lumped under the labels “healthy” and “safe.” If things were that simple there would be few unintended pregnancies. But there are distressingly many, and so inevitably there is abortion.

We are collectively both the actors and shapers of sexual morality; pointing fingers at women who have abortions is really a misguided indictment of our own shared social irresponsibility. Couples who don’t intend to conceive have a responsibility to practice rigorous contraception, and the rest of us have a responsibility to make sure they have easy access to it. How a woman deals with a pregnancy is between God and herself; if she has no God, our judgments and interference are no substitute.

Our focus belongs on the example we set. Despite the best knowledge and ideals for our own behavior, few of us can claim we have never experienced irresponsible sex. If we want to heal our nation’s sexual ills, we must first practice sanctity around our own sexuality, and lead, without preaching, by demonstrating respect for ourselves and others in all aspects of our lives.

It is perhaps more true about sex than anything else in the world: We have the power to change only ourselves.