Consequences of controlling fertility

Today a NZ study has come out that links abortion to mental health problems for women. Abortion is turning into a controversial issue everyone wants to ignore, but just keeps coming back at the most inconvenient times. Ironic that abortions are given to prevent mental health problems, and instead they cause the very problem they are supposed to prevent.

I started writing this post a couple of weeks ago when Lindsay Mitchell asked the question, "What's wrong with individuals controlling their own fertility? Isn't that what personal responsibility is all about?" By itself, that comment may not have inspired anything, but then Lindsay wrote another post on Nia Glassie, where she wondered about what has changed over the last 40 years, that families can be created whereby there is no commitment from the male to stay around and look after his woman or offspring. Not that Lindsay stated it quite so crudely as that, but you get the picture. She said:

Here's the difference though. Forty years ago they wouldn't have been allowed to form the kind of groups loosely call families. There would have been no financial mechanism to create them. Babies were adopted out, sometimes to extended whanau, sometimes to strangers. But to people who WANTED them. It wasn't a perfect answer by any means, but what ever is?

So 40 years ago we weren't seeing the kind of mayhem we see now. Child abuse and neglect most certainly happened. But from everything I have read it was on a much smaller scale.

Indeed. Forty years ago everything was incredibly different. Children typically had a mother and a father that were married to each other and stayed together for life unless death took one parent early. The idea that a person could sire children without marrying and to multiple mothers without consequence was repugnant and not socially tolerated.

Forty years ago attitudes to sex and marriage were changing. Women wanted freedom from the "burden" of children. Men wanted sex without having to marry first. The new contraceptive pill that arrived on the scene seemed an answer to a prayer. But the overall consequences of this prayer were foreseen by few people at the time.

However, the consequences were foreseen by the author of Humanae Vitae, which explained what would happen to society and to individuals if the ability to control one's fertility became widespread. So, what were the consequences of a contraceptive society to be?

1) A general lowering of moral standards throughout society.
2) A rise in infidelity.
3) A lessening of respect for women by men.
4) Coercive use of reproductive technologies by governments.

All of these predictions made forty years ago have come to pass. Moral standards have lowered dramatically over the past forty years to the point where we now have girl kissing competitions on the radio and boobs on bikes parades advertising pornography in the streets. Infidelity has risen, and men do not respect women in the same way that they did forty years ago. Governments do use reproductive technologies coercively and there are calls by the public for this to increase. You only have to listen to the earnest people on the radio who believe that people should have a license before they should be allowed to have children to see that the push for more coercion by the government will come from the general population.

Forty years ago, peer pressure and societal expectations ensured that men married before having sex and then stayed around to look after their families. Now, governments such as ours in NZ makes it easy for men to leave, or to never even make a commitment in the first place. The consequences for a society full of fatherless children have been enormous - increased crime and abuse of children, to name a few. For that we can blame the Sexual Revolution.

In sum [...] just about everyone else in possession of the evidence acknowledges that the sexual revolution has weakened family ties, and that family ties (the presence of a biologically related mother and father in the home) have turned out to be important indicators of child well-being—and more, that the broken home is not just a problem for individuals but also for society. Some scholars, moreover, further link these problems to the contraceptive revolution itself.

Consider the work of maverick sociobiologist Lionel Tiger. Hardly a cat’s-paw of the pope—he describes religion as “a toxic issue”—Tiger has repeatedly emphasized the centrality of the sexual revolution to today’s unique problems. The Decline of Males, his 1999 book, was particularly controversial among feminists for its argument that female contraceptives had altered the balance between the sexes in disturbing new ways (especially by taking from men any say in whether they could have children).

Equally eyebrow-raising is his linking of contraception to the breakdown of families, female impoverishment, trouble in the relationship between the sexes, and single motherhood.

Getting back to the original question that started this post, just what is wrong with controlling your fertility? The answer appears to be that the control of fertility changes how society views sex. Sex was once something that married couples did, fully expecting that the result of their union would most likely be children. Now sex is for fun and when children accidentally do come along they need to be looked after somehow. Or aborted if inconvenient. Our whole attitude to life has changed dramatically and with it our society's ability to act selflessly. Everything becomes about what is good for ME only.

Abortion and Child Abuse

Last week, Garth George came out with an incredibly controversial opinion on the link between a society that aborts it's children and one that has increasing levels of child abuse.

Predictably, the convictions for the inhuman torture and murder of little Nia Glassie have generated the usual outrage, breast-beating, anger, criticism and demands for something to be done.

It is sound and fury, signifying nothing. Because child abuse, sometimes fatal, is here to stay. And the same goes for violence against women.

We have brought it on ourselves. We have bowed to the blandishments of liberalism, immorality, materialism and hedonism and have set aside most of the moral and legal strictures which for centuries formed the mortar which held societies together and kept them from self-destruction.

For nearly 50 years, we have presided over the gradual unravelling of the fabric of our nation through the breakdown of the traditional family unit upon which community cohesion has always depended.

And we have allowed the wondrous differences between men and women to become so blurred that we no longer know whether we're Arthur or Martha.

So now we are beginning to pay the price. No matter what we try to do, the price will get ever steeper in misery, pain, terror and despair for the victims, and frustration, anger and shame for the nation.

The best we can hope for is that Government agencies, voluntary and self-help groups and others in the "helping professions" can save one or two children or women from harm along the way and, if they're lucky, minutely stem the tide.

They will treat symptoms, rarely with success, but the fundamental causes, which are now so firmly embedded in our way of life that they are irremovable, will continue to fester and erupt and spew out their poison.

I have said it before and I say it again: The number one cause of abuse against women and children is abortion.

Garth then goes on to quote Mother Teresa who believed that once societies abort their children it's all over for them - they no longer can tell people not to kill others if a mother is allowed to kill her own child. Morality is turned on it's head.

Adoro Devote put it even more strongly this way:

In the siege of Jerusalem, the captives were forced to eat their own dead children, among other horrors. What's so much worse about America is that not only does our new leader advocate abortion, but the slaughter of children born alive in spite of the attempt on their lives, and we're using embryos....THOSE ARE CHILDREN....in vaccines and to study various cures. How is that better than the cannibalism of Jerusalem? It's worse because it's been CHOSEN and ADVOCATED!

Let me make this comparison again:

In the siege of Jerusalem, the people were forced to eat their dead children. They had a water source, but were cut off from food for, what...three years? How long was it? Long enough for them to resort to cannibalism out of desperation. Those who thirst without respite will die. Those who hunger...get creative. In their desperate creativity, they ate their own children.

Can you imagine anything more horrible?

No?

Check out modern-day America:

America is not under siege. We have abundant food and water. We are a wealthy country, in spite of our huge national debt. The milk and honey are flowing, wine is being poured out copiously, and there is much rejoicing.

We are under no duress. Yet the abortuaries are doing brisk business in in-the-womb slaughters these days, and our new President-elect has voted THREE TIMES against the Infant Born Alive act, which would require medical treatment for babies born alive in spite of the intention of the abortionists and the mothers to kill them in utero.

You say that no, we're not eating our children. Maybe not as the inhabitants of Jerusalem did...but what we're doing is much worse.

Remember....they were under duress and seeking survival. Doing the abominable just to try to live. They were not in their right minds.

We are...in theory. We have more than we need.

But we ARE eating our children. We ARE cannibals.

Replace America with New Zealand and the same applies. This country is not poor, despite the attempts of Socialists and Greenies to make it so. We are cannibals as well, as we don't need to eat our children, allowing them to be swallowed up by the trivial excuses of mental health or not right now or whoops, how did that happen?

I find idea incredibly chilling and quite apt.

Linking it all together

If you take a step back from abortion, you get to contraception. A society that contracepts expects there to be a backstop for contraceptive failure. A society that contracepts thinks more about what "I" want than doing what is right and good. A society that contracepts is killing itself, slowly (population decline) and painfully (abortion, child abuse, violence, murder). When someone asks what is wrong with controlling your fertility, that is what is wrong with it, it changes the focus from what must I do in order to live a good life to what can I do to make like as easy and as comfortable and as pleasurable as possible.

This sort of society requires abortion to exist, it sets up the mindset that children are expendable and dependent on our desire to have them (ie they should be wanted) and any that are not wanted can be killed for the convienience of the mother. This sort of society is created from that idea of controlling fertility, and that is what is wrong with controlling fertility. If we want things to change we have to stop controlling fertility.

And a step further back again, if we want things to change, we have to rediscover God. Because the further we move from Him, the more things fall apart.

“Forgetting God is like forgetting and denying man himself, even if we hardly admit it,” the cardinal said, according to SIR. This leads to a “pathological situation” which permits abortion, euthanasia, experimentation on embryos and their exploitation for economic purposes.

He said such phenomena and the decision are not “isolated episodes” but reveal “a Christophobia which is nothing else but hatred for oneself.”

~ Archbishop of Toledo

Related Links:
Running the Social Development show, Nia Glassie - Why? ~ Lindsay Mitchell
Vindication of Humane Vitae ~ First Things

Antonio Card. Cañizares Llovera, Archbishop of Toledo, on “Christophobia”