The Pros and Cons of Contraception

Evaluating the arguments

One day long ago, a fellow sophomore in high school approached me with a confidential request. Matt looked bashful, something out of character for the most popular kid in the class. It turned out he wanted me to buy him condoms. In that bygone era of 1981, condoms were kept behind the counter at the pharmacy, and Matt was simply too embarrassed to go through with it himself. I had no such compunctions, perhaps looking forward to a day when I myself might need condoms, so I helped Matt out.

Matt and I lived in the lefty paradise of Berkeley, California, not a conservative rural town. But less than a decade after Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972) legalized birth control for unmarried Americans, there was still some lingering reticence around contraception. We were decades away from sex positivity and the backlash against sex positivity and sex recessions, but nonetheless had the idea that birth control would let us have sex out of wedlock, sex preceding wedlock, or sex not preceding wedlock. In the unlikely event I had ever been called on to defend birth control, the right to have sex at the life stage of my choosing would have been high up on the list.

Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization has made us reconsider. Even a modest degree of reflection would have revealed a curious tension. On the one hand, almost no one really questions the availability of contraception, with public disapproval long languishing in the single digits. On the other hand, the newly empowered Supreme Court clearly had it out for abortion, and even many people who aren’t constitutional lawyers were aware that Roe v. Wade drew on an earlier decision, Griswold v. State of Connecticut (1965), that had legalized contraception for married couples. As Clarence Thomas would have us believe, overturning Roe was just the opening salvo against Griswold.

So what’s contraception good for, aside from non-procreative sex? And who’s even against it, given the consensus of popular support?

It turns out a great many people: On July 21, 195 Republicans (but no Democrats) voted against the Right to Contraception Act, a bill that would do little more than enshrine a federal right to birth control. In a representative retort, Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) denounced the bill as “a Trojan horse for abortion,” although the text of the proposed legislation doesn’t exactly make clear how that’s the case.

Perhaps the question should be: Is there a real argument against legal birth control, above and beyond the religious prohibition of a few devout Catholics and other traditionalists concerned with sinful fornication or what they see as birth control’s abortifacient properties? It turns out there is, and the argument stems from an unlikely source: Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. Back in 1996, she and her coauthors—including her husband, the Nobel Laureate George Akerlof—published a paper in The Quarterly Journal of Economics that’s provided the most compelling explanation for why 40 percent of American children are born out of wedlock. And it all comes down to birth control.

The early 1960s saw the introduction of the birth control pill and the development of the intrauterine device (IUD), and thus ushered in the sexual revolution. The advent of effective birth control, averred Yellen and her coauthors, also changed how men and women related to each other in intimate partnerships.

It’s a myth that everyone waited until marriage to do it in the old days. What was different was the response to pregnancy, and this is evident in the language of the pre-birth control era. If a man impregnated a woman, he had “gotten her in trouble.” Fortunately, she wasn’t resigned to a lifetime of trouble: he could “do the right thing” by marrying her. If he resisted, he might be sternly encouraged by her father, resulting in a wedding at the point of a shotgun. If the future father still resisted doing the right thing, the woman might be “sent away” to have her “bastard.”

Birth control changed all that, by freeing men of their responsibility to do the right thing. It was now a woman’s responsibility to use “protection.” If she abdicated that responsibility and got pregnant—well, birth control had been her responsibility, so her partner owed her nothing. He could move on, and his ex-girlfriend was left to decide whether to have the child. Increasingly, many did so.

Yellen and her coauthors make clear that a return to the status quo ante, a world without effective birth control, wouldn’t be productive. But that hasn’t stopped many conservatives from adopting their thesis to question modern sexual mores. Sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox has been one of the most prominent as he surveys the modern landscape of falling marriage rates and abundant single-parent families. Another academic, Mark Regnerus, has taken the Yellen argument a step further: the perceived availability of “cheap sex” has undermined men’s desire for committed relationships, undermined their motivation to work—since they won’t have wives to support—and even may be imbuing some of them with same-sex attraction.

Say what you will about these arguments, but they’ve been influential. Both Wilcox and Regnerus have testified before Congress and been frequently cited by conservative media; Wilcox is a prominent public intellectual, not to mention a long-time collaborator of mine.

According to research I recently conducted with sociologist Sam Perry, the Regnerus part of the argument doesn’t really hold up: having a history of promiscuity doesn’t make marriage any less likely. On the other hand, the Yellen et al. thesis has come to be accepted, even though some have questioned its ideological valence.

So this is the argument against birth control: it’s led to an explosion of out-of-wedlock births. These families are often impoverished, and the children they raise do worse than kids brought up in two-parent families.

So what’s the good part?

The most eloquent statement in favor of reproductive rights comes from the same body who brought you Dobbs. Writing for the majority in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), the Supreme Court made this stipulation: “The ability of women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation has been facilitated by their ability to control their reproductive lives.”

That’s the essential point. Women can’t be equal citizens if their ability to pursue an education, build a career, or run for elective office is dependent on their chastity. The social science evidence on this point is compelling, as was argued by an amicus brief to Dobbs from over 150 economists and other academics. To my non-lawyer ears, it sure sounds like reproductive rights should be recognized on the basis of the 14th Amendment, equal protection before the law. Five state supreme courts agree with me.

But the argument for reproductive rights goes well beyond school, jobs, or politics. Traditionally childbearing posed mortal peril to women. Into the 1930s more than one in 200 American women died in childbirth. Thereafter the rate of maternal mortality fell sharply, but has started to inch up over the past two decades. What’s more, the United States continues to have a maternal mortality rate several times as high as other countries in the developed world. While these rates are low by historical standards, the historical memory persists: childbearing can be life-threatening. At some level, this concern undergirds the long fight for reproductive rights, both here and abroad.

John Stuart Mill famously spoke of the importance of knowing the other side’s argument. It’s undeniably true that the advent of modern birth control has transformed American family life in ways that haven’t been uniformly positive. But what’s the alternative? Returning to a time when women were not and could not be equal citizens? That doesn’t seem like much of a choice to me.