The Northampton Seminar
Helen Navare
It is no surprise that the rates of every outcome harmful to women—uncommitted sexual encounters, sexually transmitted infections, nonmarital births, and abortion—have climbed precipitously during the decades that the federal government has escalated both public and private support for contraception. Yet the IOM report—a report on women’s health—makes no reference to this substantial body of literature. Americans are likely to support its conclusions generally. They assume, understandably, that widespread distribution of contraception successfully reduces pregnancy rates. Four decades of history and empirical data, however, demonstrate otherwise. Women’s reproductive lives are more, not less, outside their control in a sex and mating market dominated by the notion that it is not sex but “unprotected sex” that makes babies.
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