Why We'll Still Be Fighting About Birth Control 100 Years From Now

[yurbud]

Last edited Sun Feb 19, 2012, 04:54 PM - Edit history (1)

This is crucial historical analysis about the scope of the impact of birth control and how quickly we've come to take for granted being able to plan if, when, and how many kids we have.

When people look back on the 20th century from the vantage point of 500 years on, they will remember the 1900s for three big things.

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But the third one is the silent one, the one that I've never seen come up on anybody’s list of Innovations That Changed The World, but matters perhaps more deeply than any of the more obvious things that usually come to mind. And that’s the mass availability of nearly 100% effective contraception. Far from being a mere 500-year event, we may have to go back to the invention of the wheel or the discovery of fire to find something that’s so completely disruptive to the way humans have lived for the entire duration of our remembered history.

***

If you’re a woman of childbearing age in the US, you’ve had access to effective contraception your entire fertile life; and odds are good that your mother and grandmother did, too. If you're a heterosexual man of almost any age, odds are good that you also enjoy a lifetime of opportunities for sexual openness and variety that your grandfathers probably couldn't have imagined -- also thanks entirely to good contraception. From our individual personal perspectives, it feels like we’ve had this right, and this technology, forever. We take it so completely for granted that we simply cannot imagine that it could ever go away. It leads to a sweet complacency: birth control is something that’s always been there for us, and we’re rather stunned that anybody could possibly find it controversial enough to pick a fight over.

But if we’re wise, we’ll keep our eyes on the long game, because you can bet that those angry men are, too. The hard fact is this: We’re only 50 years into a revolution that may ultimately take two or three centuries to completely work its way through the world’s many cultures and religions. (To put this in perspective: it was 300 years from Gutenberg’s printing press to the scientific and intellectual re-alignments of the Enlightenment, and to the French and American revolutions that that liberating technology ultimately made possible. These things can take a loooong time to work all the way out.) Our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will, in all likelihood, still be working out the details of these new gender agreements a century from now; and it may be a century after that before their grandkids can truly start taking any of this for granted.

Full Text

It's tough to snip this one down to 4 paragraphs. The other point it makes is that the lurch toward fundamentalist religions in the last 50 years is a reaction to this profound change (though I think some other changes play a role too).

Another medical advance has also changed the ballgame: in the past, part of the premium on virginity was to ensure a guy was paying to raise HIS kids, but also served women too: a promiscuous woman would be unable to pin down any particular guy for child support since it could just as easily be someone else's.

DNA testing has changed that--and discovered that 1 in 10 guys are raising a kid he thinks is his but ain't.

The piece of this we haven't nailed down yet is when exactly it's best for women to have kids: if they do it when their young, society tsk tsks at them for interfering with their education, but if they wait until later, it can either interfere with their career or lead to long hours in daycare. Waiting would work better if we adjusted our approach to work so mom and/or dad have more time to do childcare.

[Lisa0825]

1. Link to full article?

[polly7]

3. I believe it's this:

http://www.alternet.org/visions/154144/why_patriarchal_men_are_utterly_petrified_of_birth_control_--_and_why_we%27ll_still_be_fighting_about_it_100_years_from_now/

[customerserviceguy]

2. Interesting read

While I can appreciate the length of time between the invention of the printing press and the Enlightenment, because things move much faster today, I don't believe it will take a hundred years to work a lot of this out. Hell, if we'd have seen more than two old hard-line non-Italian popes between John VI and now, we might not even be having this debate, since there's a reasonable chance that a pope from a more contemporary society might have seen the need to accommodate birth control, and certainly condoms for AIDS prevention.

You can say that contraception has changed society, but I see contraception as something necessarily resulting from the change that was inevitably coming. As human soiceties have gone from agricultural to industrial to service economies, children go from being a boon to a burden. On the farm, that extra mouth to feed also came with two arms and two legs to help bring in the harvest. Having a child while you work in a factory or an office (even one at home) doesn't add anything to your productivity, in fact, that child incurs costs in caring for him/her while you go about your life's work. As we evolved from a place where a large percentage of the population was devoted to food production, to one where a tiny minority was responsible for that, it was inevitable that reliable means of contraception would follow.

Of course, all religions are founded from the times when humankind made the transition from hunter-gatherers to farmers, and those religions established their beliefs and traditions to support the attributes of living in an agricultural society. They are having a hell of a time getting rid of them, but they will either have to, or will simply just cease to exist because they don't serve the needs of modern society.

[yurbud]

5. yep--industrialization and urbanization are powerful birth control in themselves

if more kids doesn't result in more economic advantage, and mom and dad are too pooped from work to make them, that will naturally cap the number.

It's still hard to believe that it was NECESSARY for religion to command people to reproduce. It makes about as much sense as saying ''Thou shalt breathe oxygen and drink water.''

[customerserviceguy]

10. What religion was needed for

was to enforce monogamy, at least for those who were not the leaders. Of course, banning non-reproductive forms of sexual expression was important to that idea.

[yurbud]

11. so the king could pork your wife, but you couldn't pork his.

[customerserviceguy]

12. Kings were always above the rules

Even in biblical accounts, they got whatever they wanted.

[yurbud]

14. they accumulated more customers than one guy could service

there's having enough for variety, but beyond a certain point, it's just about bragging rights.

[Kber]

4. Thanks so much for posting.

[cbrer]

6. Insightful to note

The historical significance of good contraception.

Although it's impossible to know, I believe if we survive, future citizens will look back at these times and call them the crazy years. If we're able to reach a true "age of reason", anyone outside of these proven concepts will find themselves increasingly marginalized.

The way we use money, or perhaps allow money to be used, will be under closer scrutiny, with lots of statistical, anecdotal, and social evidence of those effects, as well as the long term benefit of contraception.

Unless we destroy ourselves!

[yurbud]

7. our use of money will seem very odd--instead of a medium of exchange...

it became a means of absolute control.

[cbrer]

8. Yeah weird huh?

Didn't mean to hijack your thread...

[yurbud]

9. as long as its a fun ride, it's not a hijack

[yurbud]

13. looking at the looong view like this is encouraging:

whatever the current political mess we're in, in the long run, the internet and democratization of information are going to give us more democratic governments.

It already is seriously undermining pundits since random unknown bloggers can post better argued, better documented opinions that don't toe the corporate line than those published in newspapers and magazines or who appear on TV--and they can sometimes get a wider audience.

In politics, it's going to get harder and harder to do the corrupt deals that screw the vast majority for benefit of a handful of wealthy campaign contributors, and if we continue to have representative democracy, it's going to have to truly be representative in substance as well as name.

It's inevitable.

The part that's harder to predict is how we get from here to there and how long it will take.