Screeds
Thursday, September 30, 2004
Choice And Consequence
June 5, 2002
Ah, America. The Land Of The Free. But… free from what? Free to what? And on what terms?
There aren’t many who regularly check their premises or their convictions against the verdict of reality. I trust that you, Gentle Reader, are a member of that "not many." If you’re smart enough to be a Palace regular, surely you watch the world around you for evidence that your beliefs might be mistuned.
Correlations between changes deserve elevated attention. Of course, one must take care in one’s interpretations, for often the correlation between A and B is not because one caused the other, but because of a common causal factor C that produced them both. Still, in studying Man and the societies he inhabits, we start with correlations and move on from there.
Political freedom is, as Archibald MacLeish put it, the freedom to choose and to create the alternatives of choice. Its inseparable companion, as noted by savants from Tom Paine to George Bernard Shaw, is responsibility. ("That is why most men dread it!"—Shaw) When we choose a course of action, we make ourselves liable for the consequences. Some of them are held to our account by our fellow men; others are imposed upon us by implacable Nature.
The history of technological advance has been the pursuit of improved choices: choices whose consequences are more palatable and less burdensome than older alternatives. It has been a stirring saga. Americans of today enjoy richer, fuller lives, blanketed with broader possibilities, than any previous society. Yet the dynamic of choice remains what it has always been: we must be ready to bear whatever consequences our choices entail. No one else ought to have to do it for us.
About thirty years ago, the notion was advanced that teen pregnancy and venereal disease could be curtailed if the schools were to offer a course of instruction in sexual matters. It proved a popular idea, and the government-run schools swiftly created programs and curricula in answer to it. Today, those programs are well entrenched, richly funded, and defended as fiercely as any aspect of State schooling. But what have their consequences been?
Thomas Sowell and others report that the negative phenomena that school sex education were "supposed" to combat quickly surged upward, and have remained well above the pre-sex-education norms to this day. It is particularly noteworthy that teen pregnancy, which had been steadily declining before the advent of school sex programs, reversed course and shot upward in tandem with those programs’ penetration of the schools.
The consequences of the programs have never been honestly addressed by their promulgators and boosters. They have taken refuge in the intellectually specious claim, made only in the wake of these developments, that these negative phenomena were about to explode anyway, that they would have been worse had the schools not instituted sex curricula, and that the proper response to them is more classroom sex education, not less. They emphatically disavow responsibility for the booming pregnancy rate among teenagers.
It’s worse than that. Government-run schools used to restrict sex education to the high school grades. They used to allow parents to withdraw their kids from sex curricula. No longer. And today, the advocates of homosexuality and abortion on demand have unfettered access to American teens, whereas the opponents of these things are barred at the schoolhouse door.
Many people respond to these observations with "So what? You can still send your kids to private and parochial schools." True, if rapidly rising property taxes have left you the wherewithal. But the notion of a government-provided education as a public good, something intended to lift the whole society to higher levels than it could otherwise attain, is not examined.
In the wake of classroom sex education and legal abortion, American women have undergone over 40 million abortions. When Harry Blackmun wrote the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade, he surely did not have it in mind to produce such a result. Nor, in perfect honesty, can we say that this would have been the result without the concomitant introduction of sex to the classroom. But together, leavened with the notion that we have the right to sex free from all consequences, they have brought us a carnage undreamed, unequalled by any war in history.
By 1970, the pivot year, technology had already brought us reliable contraception of several kinds. Parents were no less knowledgeable about sex, and no less aware of their responsibilities to their children, than previous generations had been. Arranging an adoption was less difficult than it is today. The major change that underpinned the abortion explosion was attitudinal: the shucking of the antiquated notion that we’re responsible for the consequences of our sexual behavior.
Recently an acquaintance asked me if I thought his wife, who had become pregnant at 19, before she met him, should have borne and raised a child rather than having an abortion. He conspicuously failed to mention the adoption option, which was open, then as now, to any pregnant woman unwilling to assume the duties of motherhood. Perhaps he didn’t want to entertain the argument that nine months’ inconvenience is a reasonable consequence of unthinking, unprotected sex, that it is infinitely preferable to the cheapening of all life that attends the use of abortion as post hoc birth control—to say nothing of abortion’s psychological effects on a young pregnant woman.
Choice entails consequences. I speak from the most tortuous of political straits, as one who deplores abortion as an unmitigated horror but nevertheless believes that in the greater number of cases it must remain legal. The great sin of the pro-abortion forces has been to excise the whole concept of consequence from our thinking about sex. Their ferocious defense of the government-run schools against the reintroduction of that concept speaks eloquently to their fear for their positions, their esteem in the public eye, and the weight on their consciences should they be proved to have been wrong all these years.
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