COMMENTARY | On Feb. 15, the Atlantic Wire reported that Foster Friess, a Rick Santorum backer, stunned MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell when he said, “Back in my days, they used Bayer Aspirin for contraceptives — the gals put it between their knees and it wasn’t that costly.” Mitchell was speechless.
Friess was, of course, implying that the birth control issue wouldn’t be an issue at all if all we “gals” would remain chaste. At first, I almost excused his comment as being reflective of his views on sex outside of marriage. Then it occurred to me that even within a marriage, this would leave women in quite a predicament.
In short, our options would be to only have sex for the purposes for creating babies or to be willing to have a child every year or so from the time we got married until we were post-menopausal.
For argument’s sake, let’s follow out these scenarios to their logical conclusions:
If American women were to embrace option one, and only have sex with their spouses for the purpose of pro-creation, many husbands out there might only get one or two chances in the duration of his marriage to sleep with his wife. (The exact number would be 1.86 times, according to the Census Bureau.) Of course, soon enough he’d likely stray from his vows, thereby defiling the sanctity of marriage. So option number one seems like a bad idea, since it leads to infidelity.
If we were to instead opt for the alternative, then each married couple who continued to bond sexually whenever they wanted to would breed like the Duggar family, who have 19 kids and are still counting. Of course, most of us can’t afford to take care of that many children, never mind the psychological costs of essentially relegating women to being baby factories. And that’s not even factoring in the population problem that would be created. That means option number two is an even worse idea than the first.
However, there’s another way to settle this.
What if those people who want to fight against a woman’s right to use birth control were required to adopt a child for every unwanted pregnancy that occurs?
And those who oppose the morning-after pill could set up a program through each pharmacy that sells the emergency contraceptives. They could offer to take custody of those unborn children once they enter this world. Some women would probably take them up on it.
The same program could be set up within abortion clinics. Surely this would be more effective at saving unborn lives than just holding up signs.
I’d love to know if Foster Friess would actually be willing to become a foster parent.
The strangest part of this seemingly antiquated birth-control debate is that the same political views that tend to embrace an insistence that unwanted children be born anyway, also tend to embrace a desire to do away with social welfare programs.
So the general idea is to bring as many people into this world as possible? And then what — just let them starve?