Aspirin, et cetera

I'm really tired of this topic, and I more or less agree with K-Lo, that the sooner we move beyond this, the better. But . . . the crux of that politically incorrect aspirin joke (which wasn't actually funny, but that's beside the point) is that once upon a time society understood that if a young lady didn't care to risk conceiving a child, she could choose to refrain from the activity that caused it. In a thousand ways, the culture supported her in that choice. Now the Obama administration hopes to install "free love" as a permanent state-sponsored entitlement.
 
The Hyacinth Girl expresses it more colorfully:

I’ve been listening to the coverage of Santorum’s big donor’s Aspirin statement. Since when has it been controversial to suggest that women used to value chastity? I mean, we don’t have a universal human right to be whores. Or do we? I can never remember. I’m not calling sexually active women whores, by the way. It just isn’t a big deal that Foster Friess makes a reference to the days when sexual promiscuity wasn’t celebrated or considered inevitable.

When women act as sexually, ah, indiscriminate as men, it doesn’t make us equal. It just leaves us empty. The message pushed by our sexual “liberators” is a lie and it damages us. I’ve heard it’s no good for men either, this conflation of promiscuity and masculinity, but I hear lots of crazy rumors.

Heh. But we've moved way past virtue or even marriage as the default option. The latter is fast becoming as quaint an anachronism as the former. From yesterday's New York Times: For Women Under 30, Most Births Occur Outside Marriage:

Meanwhile, children happen.

Amber Strader, 27, was in an on-and-off relationship with a clerk at Sears a few years ago when she found herself pregnant. A former nursing student who now tends bar, Ms. Strader said her boyfriend was so dependent that she had to buy his cigarettes. Marrying him never entered her mind. “It was like living with another kid,” she said.

When a second child, with a new boyfriend, followed three years later — her birth control failed, she said — her boyfriend, a part-time house painter, was reluctant to wed.

Ms. Strader likes the idea of marriage; she keeps her parents’ wedding photo on her kitchen wall and says her boyfriend is a good father. But for now marriage is beyond her reach.

“I’d like to do it, but I just don’t see it happening right now,” she said. “Most of my friends say it’s just a piece of paper, and it doesn’t work out anyway.” [. . .]

Today, neither of Ms. Strader’s pregnancies left her thinking she should marry to avoid stigma. Like other women interviewed here, she described her children as largely unplanned, a byproduct of uncommitted relationships.

A "byproduct." Sigh. For some single mothers, it's "No fathers need apply":

“Women used to rely on men, but we don’t need to anymore,” said Teresa Fragoso, 25, a single mother in Lorain. “We support ourselves. We support our kids.” 

Girl power! The men who fathered those kids are apparently seen as more trouble than they're worth. So the kids will grow up without fathers and they'll be the poorer for it, economically and emotionally.

And do the empowered, man-free women alluded to above really support their kids on their own, or do they get some help from Big Daddy?

Mary Grasso, who owned a sweets shop in Lorain, said men had stopped taking responsibility for their children because the state had stepped in with safety net programs. Ms. Grasso, 70, experienced the decline in weddings directly: wedding cake orders fell by half over the more than 30 years she was in business.

Compared with a real daddy, the daddy-state is a poor provider that's bound to get poorer as it runs into certain inexorable realities. Mark Steyn:

. . . the Baby Boomers did not have enough children to maintain mid-20th-century social programs. As a result, the children they did have will end their lives in a poorer, uglier, sicker, more divided, and more violent society. How to avert this fate? In 2009 Nancy Pelosi called for free contraceptives as a form of economic stimulus. Ten thousand Americans retire every day, and leave insufficient progeny to pick up the slack. In effect, Nancy has rolled a giant condom over the entire American economy.

Testifying before Congress, Timmy Geithner referred only to “demographic challenges” — an oblique allusion to the fact that the U.S. economy is about to be terminally clobbered by $100 trillion of entitlement obligations it can never meet. And, as Chart 5-1 on page 58 of the official Obama budget “Analytical Perspectives” makes plain, your feckless, decadent rulers have no plans to do anything about it. Instead, the Democrats shriek, Ooh, Republican prudes who can’t get any action want to shut down your sex life! According to CBO projections, by mid-century mere interest payments on the debt will exceed federal revenues. For purposes of comparison, by 1788 Louis XVI’s government in France was spending a mere 60 percent of revenues on debt service, and we know how that worked out for His Majesty shortly thereafter. Not to worry, says Barry Antoinette. Let them eat condoms.

This is a very curious priority for a dying republic.

Read the whole thing.

Many thanks to Michelle Malkin for the Buzzworthy link.

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Many thanks to Mark Steyn for his link and insights at the Corner. He gets American culture like nobody else.

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Thanks also to Pew Sitter for the front page link. The same to Doug Ross and CMR.

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