Inviolable Fertility

“You put me in charge of Medicaid, the first thing I’d do is get [female recipients] Norplant, birth-control implants, or tubal ligations. Then, we’ll test recipients for drugs and alcohol, and if you want to [reproduce] or use drugs or alcohol, then get a job,” said the Arizona Republican Party’s first vice chair a few days ago on his radio show. Russell Pearce, a former state senator, and one with a $85,000 a year state job as well as $76,000 a year in pension, resigned.

He claimed he was relaying someone else’s comments which his critics treated as his own, but as far as I can tell from the news reports, he was actually plagiarizing, that is, using someone else’s comments as his own. Which makes it worse, of course, not better. In any case, he did not say he disagreed with the comments he claims to have been merely relaying.

Democrats jumped all over the story and Republican candidates repudiated Pearce as fast as they could.

The affair raises again the question of why such people rise so high in the Republican Party but also the question of why Americans so value fertility. The Church rejects contraception, period, and, though I don’t know if anyone has ever argued this explicitly, though some theologians must have, holds that the protection of a woman’s fertility is part of defending human dignity. That some poor woman getting government aid will have more children is for the Catholic part of the cost of a welfare system.

But most Americans think contraception a very good thing and don’t have the same understanding of human dignity. Liberal Americans are fine with all sorts of restrictions upon personal liberty and indeed fine with paternalistic restrictions. Nothing in their philosophy requires the government to aid women who can’t afford the children they have to have more. The requirement that these women trade the ability to have children for government aid doesn’t restrict their sexual freedom — a freedom liberal America treats as absolute — but enhances it.

Why, on their own grounds, did Pearce’s critics attack him so energetically? Why do they hold the freedom to reproduce as an absolute? Did they have any other reason for their expressed outrage than the political value of taking down a leading Republican?

Imagine if Pearce had been an anti-smoking crusader and had talked about the costs of smoking and the effect of second-hand smoke upon children, and then said, “You put me in charge of Medicaid, the first thing I’d do is get the women on Medicaid nicotine patches and get them to stop smoking. They want to smoke, they can get a job.” People would have objected, of course, especially opportunistic Democrats, because feigned indignation is a political weapon, but not nearly so energetically as they did here. Russell Pearce would still have his job.