Ruth Marcus cites a “thought experiment” put forward in a new book:
Imagine that all women in the United States, upon becoming sexually active, were automatically fitted with an intrauterine device or other form of long-acting birth control.
This scenario sounds creepy, with its undertones of Big Brother and eugenics; framed this way, it would be neither a realistic nor a desirable development.
But this thought experiment, provoked by a new book by Brookings Institution scholar Isabel Sawhill, illuminates two important societal and technological realities.
First, as Sawhill describes in “Generation Unbound: Drifting into Sex and Parenthood Without Marriage,” single parenthood is becoming the unhealthy “new normal.” . . .
Consequently, the more effective argument to sexually active 20-somethings is not to hurry up marriage — it’s to slow down the decision to have a child.
Which leads to the second point: There is a relatively easy and inexpensive (compared with child-bearing) technological solution at hand.
The most popular contraceptive methods have high failure rates, due more to misuse (or non-use) than to product shortcomings. Thus, 18 percent of condom users and 9 percent of those who take birth control pills will become unintentionally pregnant in the course of a year.
The smarter alternative is encouraging young women to switch to LARCs — long-acting reversible contraceptives such as IUDs, which can remain in place for as long as 12 years, or implantable birth-control, which can last for three years.
The insights of behavioral economics are at work here: To achieve the desired outcome, switch the default, from having to take active steps to prevent pregnancy to having to take action to achieve it. These methods, Sawhill writes, “are forgiving of human frailty.”
Government can’t and shouldn’t force young women to use LARCs. It can — thank you, Affordable Care Act — make them readily and affordably available.
via Long-acting birth control could help stabilize the single parenthood trend – The Washington Post.
The writer puts forward an idea, then takes it back as going too far, but the idea has been put on the table. What is the mindset here? Could you see automatic birth control happening some day? What is wrong with this?
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