In response to Laura Perrins: High abortion rates are the inevitable consequence of the Pill, Bogbrush wrote:
I feel your sense of tired defeat about this. In some ways, the genie has always been bursting to get out of the bottle because humans just want to have sex. It was held partly in check by religious threat, or dire financial consequences, or whatever, but it has always been clawing at the edges.
My parents married because my Mum fell pregnant – this was in 1961. I learned from genealogical research that my Dad’s parents did likewise in the 1920s, and I only remember my Grandad as a strict Catholic. They didn’t abort, they married and got on with it, but the root cause of the situation remained the same.
The Pill didn’t start anything; it is just a part of the process. I’d say a much bigger problem is the removal of living with the consequences. If people had to cope with the results of their actions then there’d be some self-correction, but as things stand, with even more perverse incentives – it’ll only get worse.
