That is great, but why is it a trade? If universal child care will prevent thousands of abortions, pro-life people should not feel it is a trade for anything. It should be a giveaway to you. The fact that Congress has the power to enact measures that would likely reduce demand for abortion but doesn’t do so should be an extremely troubling oversight for genuine pro-lifers. It calls into question the sincerity of your so called “pro life” representatives in Congress and the “pro-life” special interest groups that support them unquestioningly.

On a separate note: One thing to keep in mind is that advances in medical procedure did make abortion steadily safer throughout the last century, so one reason why demand for abortion climbed is simply that it became more practicable.

You know, it’s interesting how pro-lifers, when confronted with the issue of affording children today, always have to bring up a 91-year-old aunt, a great-grandfather who immigrated in 1920, or something similar, in order to prove their point.

And you know what? It proves nothing. The cost of living 80 years ago was completely different. The range of jobs and average salary was completely different. People were more willing to “go without” because there was less to go “with,” so to speak. Less technology, fewer luxury items, etc. You cannot compare a 91-year-old’s youth to a youth today and then tell the modern youth that they’re selfish for living differently.

Maybe you believe that we need to go back to those values, but that’s much harder to do in a society where the cultural framework is so different.

Also, many of us don’t want to intentionally put children in poverty, or live in a boxcar (some Catholic on another site boasted about how her grandfather raised a bazillion kids that way), or go without food and health insurance. We don’t see that as loving, especially when it can be easily avoided by controlling the size of our families to begin with.

If pro-life means being okay with a child growing up in abject poverty, while making no effort to do anything about it, then count me in the deep end of the pro-choice pool.

The liberal prescription for lowering the rate of abortion — contraception — is a proven failure.

I’m sorry, where has this been proven a failure? When we look at countries where women have the greatest access to contraception, and where they are well-educated about sex and how to use that contraception, we see the lowest abortion rates (think the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium). On the contrary, where contaceptives and sexual health education are less available — and, interestingly, in countries where sexuality in general is demonized — we see higher rates.

If you don’t believe that contraception leads to abortion, consider what has occurred since the introduction of the pill in 1960. When the pill was first being sold, everyone thought it would decrease demand for abortion. Instead, the opposite has occurred — as contraception became more widespread, so did abortion.

It’s a wee bit more complicated than that, Dan. First, abortion rates became tracked more throughly after the procedure started gaining legality in some states. Before it was legal, it was difficult to track the number of abortions women were having — and few groups were even interested in doing so. The teen pregnancy rate has dropped considerably since the advent of the pill; also consider that both the legal right to abortion and the wider availability of the birth control pill came along with a lot of social upheaval that finally allowed women to experience sex and sexuality more on their own terms, and changed the way this country throught about sex. You’ll have a hard time blaming that on one specific type of contraception, when contraception itself has existed for centuries.

You write: Ariel Levy “rightly says it’s frightening that kids are bombarded with raunch culture but it is federally mandated that they receive minimal sex education.” I agree with the first part — it’s frightening that kids are bombarded with raunch culture — but sharply disagree with the suggestion that more “sex education” of the secular sort (i.e., how to put your condom on correctly, etc.) is needed. To me it is painfully obvious that it contributes to the problem if the schools tell kids how to use contraception, where to go if you “need” an abortion, etc. Children should be told the truth: sex within marriage is a beautiful and wonderful thing but a highly dangerous thing — both to physical and spiritual health — outside of marriage.

The Catholic Church and some liberal feminists share common ground in believing that our sex soaked modern culture objectifies and degrades women. I’ve never understood how women were conned into buying into the sexual revolution. In this regard, I highly recommend “The Women of Roe v. Wade” by Mary Ann Glendon (a Harvard Law School professor who represented the Vatican at the U.N.’s international conference on women, held in China in the 1990s). You can find it at the website for “First Things” and elsewhere I believe on the internet.

A large family is not without its burden but is an unbelievable blessing if approached with joy and an open heart. As Mother Theresa put it, “having too many children is like having too many flowers.” I realize of course that we are not all saints like she was — but it is what we should strive for. Whenever the subject of large families is raised, I always think of a cousin of my father’s. She is 91 now and has lived her whole life in a Catholic country that was impoverished for most of her life. She has 9 now grown children who she raised in poverty greater than any poverty that is found anywhere in the U.S. today. She once told me what makes for a happy life: “you get married, and have a child; the child brings joy; then you have another child, and there is more joy; and then there comes another child, and the joy grow, the joy grows.”

I know this doesn’t resonate with modern American women, or at least not with many of them. But it nevertheless reflects a profound truth that joy is found in love, and not in material things or the pursuit of self. This is also where modern feminism and Catholicism separate ways. The sort of self denial and love that the Church so values is anathema to modern feminism.

A large family is a blessing if you can afford the daycare (or the cost of the mother not working and staying at home), the food, the minivan, the big house, the health insurance, the driving insurance and the college tuition, if the woman feels like going through pregnancy/childbirth many times over and if the parents both have enough patience to deal with 12 kids. I’ve said already I’m opposed to abortion, so that’s why I’m going to adopt a few kids when I’m older (that and I’ve never felt the need to contribute to overpopulation).

As to the mythical “kids who are getting abstinence-only education who won’t know their options even when they’re grown up and married” (do you seriously believe that there is a single such person?), our society for many centuries did well without adopting policies that pushed contraception. Yes, there were out of wedlock pregnancies, but they were very rare compared to today. In the 1950s for example, when contraception was not so widely available, only 1 in 25 births were out of wedlock; today, after 40 years of pushing contraception, it’s 1 in 3. As to regulating fertility within marriage, you probably don’t know it but natural family planning is very effective; moreover, no is calling for legal prohibition of contraception within marriage. (Personally I believe a large family is a blessing, not a curse; but I won’t try to convince to share this sentiment.)

As to the “born mother” — I agree. We need to address abortion by providing more support for pregnant women and by insisting that fathers take responsibility for the life they have created.

It is of course understandable that a woman might not want to give up her child for adoption (although it does not follow that killing the child is a better option). However, to characterize adoption as “giv[ing] up their child to a stranger who might molest them or mangle their minds with backward-looking religion and hateful, misogynist values” reflects ignorance about adoption. Most adoptions in America today are open adoptions, in which the mother can choose the family (from the many available families) based on, among other things, the family’s religion and other values.

As counterintuitive as it may seem, contraception does not decrease, but rather increases, the number of abortions. It does so by (1) greatly increasing the frequency of sex in situations where the couple is not commited to raising any child they might create; and (2) creating an attitude that there is a right to have sex without consequence (i.e., to have sex without the responsibility for creating a child) — people who have this attitude are predisposed to abortion when the contraception fails, as all contraception sometimes does. Another possible reason is that it creates competition among women to offer sex without responsibility to men. The latter explanation was given by a left leaning University of Chicago professor.

If you don’t believe that contraception leads to abortion, consider what has occurred since the introduction of the pill in 1960. When the pill was first being sold, everyone thought it would decrease demand for abortion. Instead, the opposite has occurred — as contraception became more widespread, so did abortion.

The only explanations I’ve ever heard as to why abortion has increased along with the availability of contraception is something along the lines of “well, contraception is not available enough” or “people don’t know about contraception” (aka “we need more ‘sex education’”). These “explanations” are absurd on their face. Contraception is sold in every drugstore in America. I doubt that there is a grown person alive in America who had not heard about the near miraculous saving power of the condom.

A good platform for the Democrats or a truly leftist political party on the topic might begin: “We are reviled by abortion and want to lessen its incidence. For this reason we promote sex education, birth control, and sufficient support for single mothers.”

At the very least, that might force the wRong to begin including those items in their agenda….

The issue is not just the unborn child, it’s also the born mother. And many mothers just don’t want to give up their child to a stranger who might molest them or mangle their minds with backward-looking religion and hateful, misogynist values.