Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
I often tease women for being too focused on happiness and feelings, but Dr. J isn’t like that at all. She is all about economics, incentives, and moral boundaries. She thinks about the big issues. She once chastised me in an e-mail for being too emotional. I think she has had it with the feelings-based arguments from the socially-liberal left.
This lecture does not repeat much from her previous lectures.
Anyway – DO NOT MISS THIS LECTURE!
The MP3 file is here. (93 minutes, 43.5 Mb)
Keep in mind that this speech was given to Wisconsin Catholic seminarians, so there is a lot of rah-rah Catholic stuff. I’m an evangelical Protestant, so I just smile when she talks about that. At least there was no Mary in it. Yay!
SUMMARY
Contraception:
- contraception does not reduce the abortion rate
- contraception is bad because it makes sex a recreational activity
- contraception fails, which leads to the need for abortion
- 80% of abortions are done on unmarried women
- teenagers do not think that contraceptives will FAIL for them
- they don’t understand that the probabilities is PER ACTION – more actions increases probability
- the more you rely on something that has a small chance of failure, the more chance you will get a failure
- more sex, means more chances for a person to get a failure
- older women are naturally less fertile, so they skew contraceptive effectiveness figures higher
- contraceptives are most likely to fail for the young, the poor and the unmarried
- contraception means that women cannot ask men to promise to marry them before sex
- the pressure for a man to marry if the woman gets pregnant is gone
- the presumption is that the woman will have an abortion
- women who want to get married are at a disadvantage to get male attention now
- because men will prefer women who are willing to have an abortion if they get pregnant
- when people argue for these social changes, they don’t accurately assess consequences
- they think that they can have the happiness-making freedom without damaging anything else
- they think that no incentives will be created so that others start to act differently
- example: no-fault divorce – there were terrible consequences that were minimized by the social engineers
Divorce:
- people who wanted this believed myths in order to get the happiness-making freedom for the adults
- they said that divorce would be less harmful for children than if the parents stayed together
- they argued for no-fault divorce because they wanted happiness and didn’t care about children
- in a low conflict marriage, it is better for children if the parents stay together
- in a high-conflict marriage, it is better for children to divorce
- but for high-conflict divorce, you could have gotten a divorce for cause
- what people pushing no-fault divorce really wanted was to divorce to pursue happiness elsewhere
- there is also a financial incentive to divorce for no reason – alimony, child support, property
- but divorce really disrupts the lives of the children
- the VAST MAJORITY of divorces are in low-conflict situations
- the social norm was that low-level conflict meant that you stayed married for the sake of the kids
- a pregnancy after a re-marriage is devastating to children of the first marriage
- not being able to have a normal relationship with both biological parents is devastating to children
- what often drives people into co-habitation is the fear of screwing up their own marriages
- pro-divorce people want women to re-marry afterwards to provide kids with a “father-figure”
- the presence of a stepfather increases bad behavior in the kids, as well as risk of abuse
- but actually, stepfathers spend little time with kids, and draws mother away from the kids
- biological fathers spend the most time with the children
- disciplining the children is more complex with a non-bio dad
- normally, dads wants the kids to behave, and moms want the children to be happy
- often, the woman will forbid the father from disciplining the children
- the father will just drop out of parenting completely when his authority is not respected
Co-habitation:
- social engineers understate the risks of co-habitation and overstate the risks of marriage
- but research shows that co-habitation makes no positive contribution to marriage
- feminists love to say that marriage is very risky, but without comparing it to alternatives
(feminists don’t like marriage because of the “unequal gender roles”)
- when compared with the alternatives, like co-habitation, marriage is better on every measure
- feminists say that married women do not report abuse in marriage, that’s why marriage LOOKS better
- but murders HAVE TO BE reported, and co-habitation results in NINE TIMES more murders than marriage
- children are killed FIFTY TIMES more with co-habitation with an unrelated adult than with 2 bio-parents
- the live-in boyfriend is the culprit in 85% of these cases
Same-sex marriage:
- alternatives to marriage change rules and incentives, it is NOT the same thing as marriage
- necessarily, one of the parents will not have a close relationship with one bio-parents
- social engineers say that mothers and fathers are interchangeable – but they are different
- SSM undermines the presumption of paternity, and substitutes state-ordered parenting
- the public purpose of marriage is to attach mothers to fathers, and parents to children
- SSM elevates private purposes for marriage over and above the public purpose of marriage
- SSM will lead to fathers being marginalized from the family
- the state will have to force people to equate SSM and natural marriage
Artificial reproductive technology:
- it is the next substitute for marriage
- highly educated career women do not have to prepare for a husband to get a baby
- her behavior through her life changes because she doesn’t have to care about marriage
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06/27/2010 • 6:00 PM 197
Why “a woman’s right to choose” causes men to refuse to marry
Unborn baby concerned about not having a father
I found this post on RuthBlog, which discusses an article from the centrist Manhattan Institute on artificial insemination and single motherhood. It’s by Kay Hymowitz, who I agree with on many things, but not everything. This article was fairly good and it forms a good platform for me to make some comments below on the notion of “a woman’s right to choose”.
What are feminist scholars writing about artificial insemination?
Kay writes:
Keep in mind that research like this is taxpayer-funded – aspiring fathers who are busy working and saving for families they will struggle to support are paying the salaries and scholarships of these feminist scholars. And the research of these feminist scholars becomes the basis of policies like the one being pushed by Sue Leather in the UK, to provide taxpayer-funded artificial insemination to any woman who wants to have a child.
But what do ordinary women think of artificial insemination?
Kay explains:
As you know we have tons of statistics showing that children raised without a father suffer enormously. But now some people seem to be saying that a woman has a right to choose to have a baby who will grow up without a father.
Well, what is a woman’s right to choose, really? It seems to be used in a lot of scenarios. It’s a woman’s right to choose to kill an unborn child, which has happened over 40 million times in the United States so far. It’s also a woman’s right to choose to destroy her child’s future by depriving that child of a father. It’s a woman’s right to choose to have drunken hook-up pre-marital sex with scores of promiscuous alpha males who have no ability or willingness to be husbands or fathers. It’s a woman’s right to choose to unilaterally divorce a man she freely committed to love for life, so she can steal his house and much of his future income. It’s a woman’s right to choose to work full-time and to abandon her children to day care and schools that discriminate against boys. It’s a woman’s right to choose to have sex with a man (or several men), then to accuse him (or them) of rape because she doesn’t want her reputation ruined. It’s a woman’s right to put on weight after marriage, and then to have her husband arrested for “verbal abuse” when he asks her to slim down. And so on.
That article caused me to think a lot about that phrase “a woman’s right to choose”. And it seems to me that there is a common core to the examples of a woman’s right to choose that I listed above. What the phrase really means is that a woman has a right to choose to selfishly pursue her own happiness regardless of the effects on the people who love her and depend on her. It also means that a woman should never be judged or held accountable for the destruction she causes. And it also means she can offload the financial costs of her own choices onto taxpayers who have no choice but to pay for the damage she causes. And it also means she can blame men for all of the obvious and predictable consequences of her own selfish and irrational behavior.
And how do men respond to this? Well, men know that marriage requires both partners to love each other and the children unselfishly. Men know that marriage is about two people growing to be less selfish and less irresponsible. And so women who believe in “a woman’s right to choose” are not qualified to marry or raise children. And this is why men do not commit to marriage any more. We would like to marry, and raise children. But we can’t find anyone suitable for marriage. And even if we found a decent unmarried woman from the 23% who did not vote for Obama, there is the feminist state – courts, schools, etc. – to contend with, which is firmly committed to “a woman’s right to choose”. The government has enormous power to regulate men, marriage and parenting – so there is really no hope at all. Men will have to wait until women come to their senses and stop voting to replace men with the government.
UPDATE: The public-funding of invitro fertilization is happening faster than I thought, at least in the UK. Check out this article from the UK Daily Mail. (H/T Secondhand Smoke via Head Noises)
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Filed under: Commentary, Children's Rights, Commitment, Family, Fatherlessness, Feminism, Feminist, Fertility Clinic, Health, Hedonism, In Vitro, In Vitro Fertilization, IVF, Love, Marriage, Menopause, Orphan, Pro-Choice, Right to Choose, Selfishness, Sperm Bank, Sperm Donor, Welfare State, Women