IWF’s own Hadley Heath Manning joins High Noon podcast to talk about an essay she wrote for The New York Times about the birth control pill and sexual revolution. Her voice joins others’ on the Left and Right in expressing some of the downsides with which easy contraceptives and lax sexual mores have left women. Hadley and Inez also discuss hypernovelty and whether our culture can keep up with evolving technologies, and why sexual activity as a whole has declined among Gen Z.
TRANSCRIPT
Inez Stepman:
Welcome to High Noon, where we talk about controversial subjects with interesting people and one of those interesting people is my boss, Hadley Manning. So this week I have my boss on; Hadley Heath Manning is Vice President for Policy at Independent Women’s Forum and Independent Women’s Voice, which is our sister organization. Hadley, I’m so glad to finally have you on. We’re going to have her on to talk about this really interesting article that she managed to get published in the New York Times, which is unusual because they usually don’t like to publish interesting things. But her piece is called The Conservative Position on Birth Control is About Individual Responsibility. So we’re going to talk about that and we’re going to talk about the mixed feelings that I think a lot of women both on the Left and the Right really have now towards the sexual revolution. But after all that, Hadley, welcome to High Noon.
Hadley Heath Manning:
Hey, it’s great to be here. I’m a big fan girl of High Noon, so I’ve listened to just about every episode, and I have to say, I’m not a big podcast listener in general, not a big podcast person in general. So High Noon holds a special status. I’ll still listen, I’ll still tune into High Noon.
Inez Stepman:
It’s always good to have your boss be a fan of your work. That’s the best position possible for me.
Hadley Heath Manning:
I feel like you better stop calling me your boss because we’re about to talk about sex and birth control. We’re about to talk about some not-politically-correct topics here, but that’s what makes it interesting.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. So you wrote this piece in the New York Times emphasizing I would say both freedom and restraint and personal responsibility. It’s a very, I would say it’s a very John Adams-esque sort of position, right? Ordered liberty requires individual restraint and good choices.
So first of all, why did you decide to write about birth control? Because it seems like for so long it’s been outside of the political mainstream to even discuss upsides, downsides about birth control. It’s been something that, the genie is out of the bottle, the Right has kind of given up on discussing it. The Left pretends that the Right wants to hold women down and forcibly impregnate them. That’s sort of –
Hadley Heath Manning:
Handmaid’s Tale, yeah.
Inez Stepman:
Right, Handmaid’s Tale scenario. So what made you decide now to put your voice out there on this issue?
Hadley Heath Manning:
Yeah. Well, I’ll give you the real answer to that, the honest answer, and that is they came to me. The New York Times asked for my input on this, and I think that’s because I’ve written about birth control. Previously, I was really involved with health policy, health reform, the Affordable Care Act included, as everybody knows now, a mandate for insurance companies to cover all FDA-approved forms of birth control from the first dollar.
I thought this was a bad rule. I argued about that until I was blue in the face back when that was relevant, back when there were nuns having to sue the government to get out from under this mandate. And my position on that was always not just a religious-based argument. I’m not Catholic, I don’t have a religious objection to birth control, I’ve used birth control. But I think it’s just bad policy for a variety of reasons. It does create moral problems between employers who don’t want to pay for your birth control. And also it just is bad from an economic perspective. When you strip away any copay or any price for consumer at the point of consumption, you’re going to end up with over-consumption.
But anyway, that was how I got started on birth control politics. I’ve also argued in favor of birth control being over the counter. So for some people that might seem like a contradiction. I want it to be more available to women who want to just go to CVS and buy birth control, but maybe less available in terms of I don’t support a policy that requires insurance coverage for it. And I don’t support really any policy that mandates insurance coverage for anything because that’s how we’ve gone down this road of health insurance no longer functioning like real insurance. It’s just a payment plan for all of our healthcare services, basically.
So that’s how I got involved, and that’s in part why I think the New York Times asked me to write it. The real answer Inez is I think that they could have asked Ross Douthat or any number of intellectual conservatives who are Catholic to write about this, but for a variety of reasons, those Catholic friends and allies of ours might not have felt comfortable writing a long essay about birth control, understanding maybe that their personal positions on birth control are outside of the mainstream in some ways.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah, it’s interesting. For most of human history, this was not even something that one would have a position on so much because although there’ve always been ways to control fertility, natural ways to control fertility, and women have used those in the past. We had this huge technological revolution which went alongside the cultural revolution of the 1960s. And I believe it’s 1963 when the first birth control pill, oral birth pill-
Hadley Heath Manning:
Maybe not just coincidental that these things were happening at the same time, right? Oh, it just happened to be…
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. So what is your view on that? I realize it’s a bit of a chicken and egg issue, but do you think the culture and the sexual revolution was leading the technology, or do you think that this particular technology, the ability to really effectively control fertility for the woman, you think that that is what made possible a lot of the swing towards so-called sexual liberation?
Hadley Heath Manning:
Yeah, and I think it’s still up for debate how effective the most popular forms of birth control have been. I mean, there’s statistics that suggest that the typical use failure rate of the pill is like 9%. So to answer your question, I think the pill really brought about the mainstream changes in sexual behaviors. I think yes, you’ve always had natural family planning, but the risk of pregnancy has always been, I think, a key driver in how people make decisions about not just when to have sex, but whom to have sex with.
And when the pill came along and importantly, I think the pill came along with the promise of sex without the consequence of pregnancy. Whether or not it’s been good on that promise, I think talk to the many women who’ve conceived while they’re on the pill, but it at least brought the idea or the understanding between men and women that she’s got control of this. So it’s her responsibility. It definitely has been within the female body, that’s where the hormones are being ingested. That’s where the expectation of responsibility has been, but it’s not perfectly effective. And for that reason, we’ve seen an explosion, I think, in pregnancies that have happened between people who never intended to become parents together. And it’s been, I think it’s had bad effects for family structure. It’s contributed to not just the demand for abortion, which is really what the New York Times asked me to write about, but it’s also contributed to a higher number of children who are being raised by single parents, usually single moms.
So I think the pill brought about the widespread changes. Now, of course, we wouldn’t have been looking for this, we wouldn’t have been developing or looking to develop this kind of technology unless there wasn’t a demand for it. People wanted greater control over their fertility. But then how it’s been used and how it’s been perceived and the ideas that it’s the norms that it’s changed, I think that’s the direction I would say that the causal arrow has tended to go.
Inez Stepman:
It’s interesting because we’re both millennials, I think we’re almost the same age.
Hadley Heath Manning:
Are we geriatric millennials, though? Because I feel-
Inez Stepman:
I’m not. I don’t know. I’m not. I’m right in the fat part of the bell curve of… So I might be geriatric, but I’m not a geriatric millennial according to the definitions.
Hadley Heath Manning:
Okay.
Inez Stepman:
I got a lot of Gen Z Twitter followers of people who listen to this podcast, and I always feel exceedingly old talking to them. So I might be geriatric, but I’m not technically a geriatric millennial. But I feel like our generation is the first generation for whom the sexual revolution standards, both technological and cultural, were the norm. Whereas for Gen X to some extent, and then definitely for baby boomers, the sex revolution was new and exciting and to some extent still transgressive. I think millennials are really the first generation to be raised and come of age, I should say, under the norm that casual sex was acceptable and even encouraged as a norm.
Not to say that nobody ever had casual sex before 1990, obviously, but I think we really were the test generation for this. And now that we are in our mid-thirties or the geriatric millennials are hitting and cresting 40, there’s a lot of data that shows that our generation is going to be, the least percentage of us are married and the smallest percentage of women, basically since we started recording these statistics are not going to be… I got the double negatives confused. But basically, we had the highest percentage of women who are going to be hitting 40, 45 without having children and without being married.
And this was supposed to be sexual revolution and sexual pleasure. This was supposed to be liberation and fun, and everyone was supposed to be having a lot of sex. And what we’ve ended up with is actually probably less sex, definitely fewer relationships, less lasting relationships, and fewer children. I mean, put all of that together in a stew and-
Hadley Heath Manning:
Never mind other metrics like the quality of the sex we’re having. I don’t think some of these encounters are really that fun, but I don’t know. I’m not that experienced personally, but I’m also… I’ve got a lot of millennial women I think mixed feelings about birth control and about the pill itself. But I think that’s all, like you said, it’s all in a stew together. Now I think the truly transgressive position now is to say things like, “Maybe this isn’t good. Maybe this hasn’t worked out well.”
Because I think we’re, in general, at least the sort of left-leaning popular culture message is, “Well, some people haven’t gotten married and some people haven’t become mothers, but that’s great.” And then I think a more transgressive or maybe less popular opinion is, maybe there was some short-term-decision-making that happened for a lot of people in our generation that said, “This is liberating. This is fun. I can put this off. I can focus on my career. I can focus on myself now.” But then maybe in the long run, I think people still express desires for marriage and family. And if those desires aren’t being met, then maybe that’s not good.
And I’ve tried to, in my discussions about this, and in my New York Times essay, I’ve tried to base my arguments in ultimately what is good for people, but readers of the New York Times and people on the Left keep wanting to come back with, “How dare you push your morality on me? How dare you push your religious perspective on me?” And I’m not even trying to make a religious argument. I’m just trying to say, “What’s really good for people? Has this really been good for people?” And I think you get a mixed bag of answers there, but I don’t think it’s an unequivocable good. I don’t think it’s an unadulterated good thing that we’ve had this increased control over fertility. I think it’s changed a lot of other… It’s had a lot of other effects, some of which are not good.
Inez Stepman:
Even to talk about this issue in terms of the good, in a normative way, I feel like is itself a challenge to the way that we think about these issues as a series of unjudgeable choices. The worst sin in our culture is judgment. So there’s a series of choices that you make. They’re all fantastic and unjudgeable, maybe we allow a little bit of therapeutic discussion as to whether or not they were right for you, but we never want to talk about especially sex in any kind of language that might have words like ‘the good’ in it.
Do you find that that’s missing in our discussion, or do you find that that’s such an unbridgeable barrier with people, let’s say not a dedicated Left, but I don’t know, your typical 27-year-old woman in America that it’s almost a non-starter to talk about the good with regard to sex at all?
Hadley Heath Manning:
I think I’m encouraged by how I feel like there’s started to be some change on this. I don’t know if it’s just me that’s sensing that, but I’ve seen more people come out and say, “I’m not a conservative, but I’m curious about having better frameworks for sex.” Like there’s a columnist at The Washington Post named Christine Emba who wrote a book, and I think her book is called Rethinking Sex: A Provocation. And I wouldn’t say she’s really conservative, but she wrote a book about how surely consent can’t be the only thing that we think about, and we have to think about putting the good of the other person into our framework for when or how to engage in sexual relations with people.
And so I was encouraged by that, and then I was further encouraged recently, Louise Perry has a book, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. I don’t consider her to be a hardcore conservative or anything. Mary Harrington is like, she’s a feminist who, she… Twitter handles move in circles, and she talks about how progressivism and feminism have come into conflict, and I agree with her on these things. So I think there are more people talking about this issue who don’t come from the Judeo-Christian background of sex… The Christian sexual ethic is you don’t have sex until you’re married, and then you only ever have sex with your spouse for your whole life, and a lot of people have rejected that in our society. But then where did we go from there?
We went to a place where, well, it’s like you said, Inez, you can’t judge. So really the only thing that we’ve attempted to judge—and the #MeToo movement was kind of evidence of this—is like, did you have her consent or did you have his consent? But then I think a lot of people have started questioning since then, well, is that enough? Is that sufficient? Is that a sufficient framework for how to think about when and how to engage in sex? And so I’m encouraged by the fact that people are asking these questions and sort of rethinking what the framework should be because I think it’s not served people well to have such a low bar for, okay, well, they both said it was okay, so I guess we’re supposed to consider that good sex now.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah, I almost have seen the #MeToo movement, and before that, what I would call the campus inquisition under Title IX and with flagrant violations of due process, et cetera. I’ve almost seen it as a response from the Left, an acknowledgement that something about the modern sexual culture isn’t working, but then being unable to question exactly what you said, Hadley, of the reinsertion of ethics or some kind of framework of good and bad. And so therefore, I think that’s why they reached for this concept of consent and made it unworkably broad and impossible and legally terrifying, I think, to young men.
But it’s like trying to jam an entire sexual ethic back into this actually pretty limited concept of consent. Although I will add that not only is it limited in the sense that only a small percentage of bad sex is rape, that it’s also confusing because, especially for women, it seems antithetical to the way that women, naturally, in my case I believe evolutionarily approach sex to ask women in advance to lay out what they will and will not consent to and to have that kind of clear mindedness about it.
So much depends on the man and his role in all of this, in this sort of mating game. Whether or not he makes himself attractive enough for a woman to say yes is like that is… I’ve just made that the most scientific and unsexy description of what seduction is, right? It doesn’t leave any room. The idea of consent being both extremely broad now and extremely rigid, leave no room at all for seduction, which is why you have French actresses and stuff coming out against #MeToo, because it basically eviscerates French culture.
Hadley Heath Manning:
Yeah. Well, I think also the way you’re talking now, when you start saying things, you start sentences with, “Well, especially for women,” now you’re talking about sex differences and this opens a can of worms about a whole separate issue in our society. But I do think it is of particular interest to feminists and to people who are concerned about women’s wellbeing to be talking about this. And I tried to include some statistics in my New York Times… First of all, the editing process was fascinating to me because there were things that they asked me for more evidence or citations for, and then there were other things that I could just assert.
But one of the things that I said—this has been particularly bad for women—they said, well, let’s see some evidence of that. And so I revisited some studies about the mental health consequences of casual sexual encounters. And it turns out it’s not great for guys either. A lot of guys after the fact have feelings of regret or depression after a casual sexual encounter. But it is true that particularly for women, there’s been a trade-off and there’s been, it seems like we aren’t paying enough attention to the ways that women say, “This is not fulfilling for me, and this is not really what I want.” More in the surveys, even, what people want, what women want is a relationship. They want sex, but they want sex that means something. And sex with a partner who is responsive to their individual sexual needs, which are beyond the physical. Women in general, obviously it’s hard to talk about these things without painting in broad strokes, but women’s sexual experience is tied up in the attachment that they feel to their partner. And that’s an emotional thing.
And I’m a woman, I have sex with my husband. I mean, it is definitely, it’s a thing from personal experience I can say, how I feel about the sex depends a lot on how I feel about him. And if we can’t have frank conversations about that culturally, if we just expect men and women to approach sex the same way, I think not only is that incorrect and biologically and evolutionarily speaking not right, but I think it does a disservice to women because I think we’ve, in the past couple of generations, we’ve been asking women to approach sex more like men and less like what we’re innately or inherently what we tend to do or what we are designed to do, what we feel like is in our best interest.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah, you’re getting close there to some kind of naturalistic argument. And I only note that to say that I think there’s this weird… I also feel like some kind of breaking in the Overton window around birth control happening. And one of the places that I see it happening is in the naturalistic, sort of holistic health movement. And it’s always seemed really incredible to me that oftentimes, for example, the same women who will, they’re eating all organic, they want all natural products. They won’t use a spray on their countertop if it doesn’t have ‘all natural’ on the label, very, very cautious about what they put in their body. We have had this, and I’m definitely part of this, we have had this cultural standard now—and again, I think millennials are really the first generation for whom this became the standard—where it is very common for girls to go on birth control at 14 or 15 and not come off it and have those hormones in their bodies for 10, 15, 20 years before they go off that and take it as a daily medication.
Do you think that that’s one way to open this conversation? First of all, because I’ve seen… So Evie Magazine has published some things about it. I’ve seen reels and TikToks of women who are… It’s not ideological at all, the way that they’re talking about it. It’s about what you put in your body, saying, “Okay, well, can we find some alternatives that actually honor the way that women are naturally and not screw with the hormone balance that women naturally have?”
One, is that a fruitful way to talk about this? Lol, fruitful. Two, what are the consequences? I mean, medically, I know that you’re in favor of putting this over the counter, and I know that it’s a relatively safe medication, but I find myself in recent years wondering, there are so many stories of women having really bad side effects, myself included. I have my stories of terrible side effects from birth control. I’m not saying they should never be used by any means, but these are really powerful drugs that we’re encouraging girls from their mid-teens all the way through into their thirties to take every day.
Hadley Heath Manning:
Yeah. So this is all very interesting stuff to me. I agree that it’s interesting to see, especially younger people, I feel like, are more likely to be drawn to these arguments about, they’re less inclined to get on birth control because it’s not natural. And I’ve seen the YouTubers who have really focused in on birth control as a health issue. And my arguments have been, well look at the ways this has changed our norms and changed sexual culture, and that’s where my number one concern is. That’s not to say that there’s no health risk or health concerns. I don’t know as much about it.
I do feel like a couple generations of women have been robbed of a lot of important self-knowledge about our bodies because of the way that birth control kind of mutes some very basic functions. Not just pregnancy, but ovulation even. And so I would like to see more holistic sex education because when I was in school, it was like if you mentioned natural family planning, you get laughed out of the sex ed classroom. But I think that there’s actually, there comes a time in the lives of a lot of women where they’ve been avoiding pregnancy, avoiding pregnancy, avoiding pregnancy, and then boom, they want to flip the switch and let’s get pregnant. And that’s when it’s really nice to know more about your body and how it works.
I won’t get into any details about cervical mucus or anything like that, but you need to know a lot about your body as a woman when you are trying to get pregnant. It’s also helpful information if you’re trying to avoid pregnancy in a natural way. But it’s something that for too long a time I think has been treated as an unserious part of sex education because, since you have these other chemical birth control options available, you simply don’t need to know that about your body. And I think that’s sad because we’re kind of robbing women of this opportunity to know their bodies in a more deep way. So that’s one piece of it.
I don’t know that I can walk down the path, the naturalistic path but so far, because while I do think that there’s a good argument to be made for what is natural, I’m also like—and you know this, Inez—I’m married to an MD, I see a lot of value in medical interventions. I’ve had a couple primary postpartum hemorrhages, and it’s because of modern medicine that they’ve been able to stop my bleeding. And what was natural for generations of women was higher infant mortality, higher maternal mortality. What is natural? Death is natural. There’s a lot of bad outcomes that are natural.
So just because something is natural doesn’t mean that it’s good. And I thank God that I live in a time where there is modern medicine and where we have interventions available to us that can save and prolong life. I don’t think that should be our ultimate goal in every case, but I think it is… Modern medicine provides a lot of good things that we might say are not natural but are good because they allow us to be healthier and to stay alive for longer.
But I do think it’s worth thinking about, and I’m speaking to you right now as a pregnant woman, and I definitely think more about what I put into my body and I try not to take medicines unless I absolutely have to while I’m pregnant, because I’m trying to keep this baby that’s growing in my uterus safe from potential bad outcomes that can come with medicines. Any medicine comes with a risk of side effects. So to a certain degree, I think I’m drawn to the naturalistic arguments about, “Well, this isn’t natural.” We hear the same arguments about, gosh, the gender transitions that kids and some adults are taking. Often these are hormones that are naturally found within the human body, we’re just dosing them in the opposite sex or in a weird, not weird, but in an unnatural, I should say, level.
And so I thought about this actually when I was writing my New York Times essay. I was like, we make arguments about gender transitions that we shouldn’t put hormones in a person’s body because of the potential health effects that could happen. Or we at least think that those health effects deserve more scrutiny than they’re getting from the medical establishment in this country. And I think that the same is true of birth control.
I think that, unfortunately, after the COVICD pandemic, I have a lot more sympathy for people who do question what the medical establishment line is on everything, because we worry, I think rightfully so, that sometimes because of politics, the guidelines that are available are not always free of political biases. And that’s the nicest way I can put that. But there’s been a deep loss of trust in our medical establishment. And I think that we’re going to see birth control just like vaccination and a handful of other issues get reexamined, and people are going to have more questions. And maybe ultimately that’s for the best because I think patients do deserve to know more about their own bodies and about their options and about the potential side effects of these drugs that have been used for generations by millions of women.
Mostly, I think, in a safe way, but unfortunately in I think a way that makes it easy, when you put every woman on birth control from a young age, it makes it easy to miss or misdiagnose or not see other potential health issues that can be going on for women. And so that’s a long answer to a kind of binary question that you asked, but hopefully gives a little more background on my position there. Yes, I do think that talking about birth control as a natural or unnatural technological innovation can be helpful to having a broader discussion about whether or not it’s been good or bad for people. But I don’t think that whether something’s natural is the be-all end-all question for whether or not it’s been good.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah, I think I’m largely in a similar camp. I may be slightly more skeptical generally, but I’m incredibly grateful for antibiotics and for anesthesia and a variety of other medical advances in the 19th and 20th century. Germ theory has been a—
Hadley Heath Manning:
[inaudible 00:30:39]
Inez Stepman:
—great advancement for the human race. But I do find myself so… Maybe it’s because my family doesn’t come from this country, so I kind of grew up in a different culture around this at home than what I observed. Although not with regard to birth control interestingly, but just generally about the number of medications that is just common to be on in America for relatively young and healthy people has been really shocking to me. And I understand a lot of the incentives in the system and why it’s so. I think part of it is the fact that we do have, and this is something I think for us as conservatives and free marketeers who would like to see a more free market in healthcare, right, something for us to think about: the consumer relationship to medicine I think has had some ill effects.
The fact that we now think of it as a consumer good means that people walk in and they demand it. I really think—I have a lot of doctor friends, I know your husband’s a doctor—they’ve told me, “Yeah, look, I don’t necessarily want to prescribe all of this stuff, but my patients walk in and they want a pill that’s going to make them walk out and feel better. And it’s way more complicated than that. And they are, as you said, every intervention has side effects. Sometimes those side effects are more than worth risking because the problem is so bad or the effects of the drug are so good. But I have a more skeptical orientation than it seems like a lot of people around me do towards putting things in my body.
Hadley Heath Manning:
Yeah, well, these things tend to swing on a pendulum, too, in my opinion—there was probably a time, and maybe still in some cultures, this is true—if you need medication for depression, anxiety, or something like that, there’s probably a time where that was taboo and that was seen as something you should be ashamed of or something that’s really not done around here. That’s not good. But now I feel like the pendulum has swung so far on that, that it’s like if there’s any hint that someone is experiencing some kind of mental health distress, it’s like, “well, what’s the medicine for that? And let’s make sure that they have access to it, because we don’t want to be accused of restricting access to this or creating a stigma around this.” So it’s almost like the pendulum swung to the point of encouraging it.
And that’s not just the case with depression and anxiety drugs, I think that also can be said of birth control. I can’t tell you how many people after I wrote this essay sent me messages or tweets like, “I was a teen and I was having sex and I really needed birth control, but there was such a stigma around it. My parents didn’t want me to have it. The school nurse wouldn’t give it to me. I went to Planned Parenthood, thank goodness for Planned Parenthood.” They’re so happy that they finally found a place that would give them birth control behind their parents’ back. But I think that the pendulum swung on that too. Maybe I’m wrong, but I think that now if there’s a whiff of a teenager needs birth control, it’s like boom, give it to them. Give to them in spades, give it to them in all FDA-approved forms with no copay, and where can you… Then you get on your Facebook and you brag about how you helped a teenager get access to birth control, because that’s the virtue signaling currency of our day.
But I think it’s just that the pendulum swang from, maybe there’s a stigma around this to now I feel like drugs are encouraged. It’s like at the drop of a hat, what do you need a drug for? Let me make sure you have it because I don’t want to be the bad guy that stood in the way of you, whether it’s through a regulatory or legal barrier or through a cultural stigma or some kind of barrier, nobody wants to be the bad guy that says, “Hey, do you really need this? Is this really good for you? Is this really what’s best for you?” Because that might be seen as pushing back on what someone sees as their salvation in whatever the drug is.
And I mean obviously, when it comes to—I think it’s obvious—but when it comes to mental health, I think some medications have been lifesaving and really helped a lot of people. But that doesn’t negate what you said, Inez, which is I think that there’s a cultural expectation of, “I can fix whatever the problem is, whether it’s a backache or a toothache or a pregnancy or some depression, with a drug.” And if that’s your first line of defense, if that’s your first plan of action, maybe you’re missing out on some other potential solutions to the problem that aren’t just taking a drug.
Inez Stepman:
For what it’s worth, anecdotally, I had the exact opposite experience. Every medical professional in my life when I was a teen aggressively pushed me on birth control and not—
Hadley Heath Manning:
That’s because you were after the swinging of that pendulum. That’s because you and I came along after the swinging.
Inez Stepman:
And aggressively behind my parents’ back. That was one time I remember my parents got really mad at the pediatrician because she was aggressively pushing birth control. And in my case, actually, it’s almost embarrassing to admit, but I wasn’t having sex. I just had really bad periods. And that was just the immediate response. And of course, nobody also in the doctor’s office even believed me that I wasn’t having sex and I didn’t need this birth control at 14 or 15.
But it was almost the opposite. It was pull a 14-, 13-year-old girl aside, tell her, “Absolutely tomorrow I can get you a prescription to birth control. Your parents don’t have to know. I could put it on their insurance.” I mean, these are California laws that go back and it strikes me that the Right, and I think rightly, we are arguing now in favor of parental rights with regard to gender transition, especially for children, as you say, to pump them full of cross-sex hormones, puberty blockers, and then worse, surgeries. And we’re very invested in making sure that parental supervision and control remains there for making those medical decisions. But we already broke that barrier with abortion and birth control. And I know in California in 2010, there was a proposition that passed that if a 14-year-old girl needs an abortion, in her own 14-year-old estimation, her parents have no right to know.
Hadley Heath Manning:
Well, I don’t really know the history of those changes, but I can imagine that on the birth control issue in particular, that a lot of conservatives would’ve gone along with that because, and I cite this polling in my essay, because a lot of pro-life conservatives see birth control as a tool to reduce abortion. And so if you’re a staunchly pro-life conservative and you have no moral or religious qualms about birth control, then the logic checks out. If you can make birth control more widely available even to teenagers, then you potentially reduce unplanned pregnancy, which reduces the number of people who would seek abortions.
And so I can understand why… I agree with you. It’s a good point that parental… My kids are so young, they’re not talking about these things yet. My daughter’s still fascinated by how this baby made its way into mommy’s tummy like, “How did that happen?” But I can imagine a time would come where I would absolutely want to be in the know about not just their decisions about birth control and abortion, but about their sexual activity in the first place. And so all that stuff is tied up together. But I could see how from a public policy perspective, you could talk a lot of otherwise conservative people into removing parental consent or notification around birth control if they thought that by doing so they could reduce abortion.
Inez Stepman:
How true is it that the link runs that way? Because in your piece, you cite some polling, to some extent or some evidence on the contrary. And this is one of the least intuitive pieces of data that I’ve actually encountered, but it appears to be true. I’ve looked it up, there’s a bunch of surveys even from the Guttmacher Institute, which is Planned Parenthood’s research arm, that unwanted pregnancy and birth control and the widespread availability of birth control actually run together and not in opposition. Why do you think that is?
Hadley Heath Manning:
Well, it goes back to what I said earlier about the promise of the pill is different from what is delivered. The promise of the pill is you can have sex without the risk of pregnancy. But the risk of pregnancy persists because of the failure rate of the pill, which has been the most widely used form of contraception for a long time. I think that’s changing because I think we’re seeing more people using what’s called long-acting reversible contraception like IUDs, and you can get a shot, you can get an implant. There’s a variety of new technologies that are more effective than the pill, but for a long time, the pill has reigned. And I also wonder, this is self-reported data, so I don’t know. If you come in with an unexpected pregnancy, the doctor may ask, “Well, were you using birth control?” And that’s just a self-reported answer.
So I don’t know if I believe that, but certainly there’s a lot of factors at play here. And a lot of the factors do surprise or did surprise some of my reading audience. There’s a much higher rate of people seeking abortions who are not married. And that’s not necessarily because people who are not married experience a higher rate of unexpected pregnancy. People who are married have sex more frequently, and every sexual encounter has some risk of pregnancy. It’s just that when people are married and they have an unplanned pregnancy, they’re less likely to seek an abortion because they’re more likely to say, well, we are in this stable relationship. Presumably we have a home together. We have possibly other children together, so we’ll just figure it out. We’ll figure out how to keep the baby. Whereas that’s the only difference between, I think, the pregnancy within a marriage and pregnancy outside of a marriage is that you’re in a better position to keep the baby.
And so there’s a lot of people walking this earth whose parents never really intended for them to be born. But if it happened within a marriage, then it seems like the cost or the consequence was lower than for two people who otherwise weren’t planning on having a lifelong co-parenting relationship, but now have to contemplate that among the other costs and consequences of having a child. So all of this is to say that, yes, the availability of the pill changed sexual norms and the increased sexual activity outside of marriage created more unintended pregnancies that, I hate to use this term, but really unwanted pregnancies. Not just unintended but not desired. And so that relates to the demand for abortion. And so yeah, I think it’s not that illogical how those things are related, but the missing piece for a lot of people is understanding that contraceptives are only so effective and they haven’t totally removed the risk of pregnancy.
Now, the answer to that from a lot of people, particularly people who disagree with me about the sexual revolution are, “Well, let’s get better technologies out there. Let’s get an IUD in every uterus, a chicken in every pot.” It’s like that’s their solution, is “let’s just make it easier for people to get IUDs.” And I am not surprised at that response or the push for that because I do think they’re highly effective. And that’s a big part of, we’ve seen demand for abortion decrease. It’s in part due to people having less sex, but it’s also in large part due to these more effective forms of contraception being more used.
Inez Stepman:
Yeah. Let’s touch on, before we wrap up, let’s touch on the having-less-sex aspect. Because you throw this into your piece, and it’s one of those things, again, kind of like we opened this discussion by talking about #MeToo as sort of this very—in my view and I think yours—is this very negative way of responding to the unpleasant realities about the sexual revolution, where I might agree with somebody on the Left who describes the modern sexual culture as heartbreaking and difficult, and in my view, terrible. But then those feelings associated with the consequences of the sexual revolution just got channeled into this box called consent, and ended up, in my view, making some very bad law and very bad situations.
It almost seems like one of those situations where you have folks, I think even I was reading some of the comments on your New York Times article. By the way, the comments on the New York Times articles are the most terrifying thing in the universe to me. It’s not because they’re… Anywhere on the internet you get the caps lock, angry, exclamation point, exclamation point trolling comments. In the New York Times comment section terrifies me more than anything else because they’re always well punctuated, the points are made well… I don’t mean logically. There’s just normal sentences formulated—
Hadley Heath Manning:
Grammar’s good.
Inez Stepman:
Then you have people being like, “Mao was a great person. The Maoist Revolution was really fantastic, and let me give you three reasons why.” You know what I mean? You have these completely outlandish opinions, but delivered in such a normal way that it freaks me out.
Anyways, so I was reading the New York Times comment section under your piece, and there were some objections basically saying—because you threw in some stuff saying at the end, “Yes, we’ve seen a decrease in teenage pregnancy, but that’s maybe more associated with teens not being interested in sex because they’re too online or they’re not having in-person interactions.” And some of those comments were like, “Well, how do we please the conservatives? The teens were getting pregnant and it was a problem, unwanted pregnancy, but now they’re not getting pregnant, and it’s a problem.” So why did you include that, and what do you think about the sort of future of where, because we’ve talked about millennials being the first generation, but it seems to me that the generation after us, Gen Z, is grappling not just with the technology of the pill as the baseline and fertility control as the baseline, but now a digital existence as the baseline. And it turns out that the digital existence contains, really, it has zero risk of pregnancy. That’s one of the things in the world that has zero risk of pregnancy.
Hadley Heath Manning:
You’re not going to have an AI baby. Yeah. There’s a lot there. I think that there were some important assumptions missing. There’s just this chasm between the Left and the Right on certain things. I wrote this essay, and then it was a surprise to me to find out some people described it as a pro-birth control thing, and some people described it as an anti-birth control thing. And I’m like, great.
So if you read it, I think I come off as mixed overall on birth control. And that would be, I would say, congruent with my personal experience. I’m not that big on birth control personally, not a big user of it. I’m pregnant with my fourth baby, so I’ve got some evidence that I’m not really that enthusiastic of a user of birth control. But I also, I think on the Left, there’s this tendency of, well, if someone says that something’s bad, someone says they don’t agree with something, or they think this might even just be like they’re skeptical about it, they’re out to ban it and take it away from you. And I’m like, I can say that I don’t particularly think that watching R-rated movies is good for people, but I’m not going to take that away from people. You pick your poison. In this world, I think there’s a lot of things that we could all do better for our minds, our bodies, and our souls. But I’m not out to regulate every single one of those things.
And that’s, I think, that was a piece that was missing. And when it came to the teen sex piece, the reason I included that is because I’m not just interested in what’s good for societies or people’s bodies or even what’s best for families, although I think those are all important concerns. I’m interested in what’s good for people’s souls. And I didn’t use the term souls in my piece because that would out me as a religious person, I guess. But I’m interested in what’s good for people beyond just avoiding the risk of pregnancy, because birth control can at least reduce that risk. And if we all have IUDs, then maybe we’ll totally mute that. Humankind will just go extinct.
But I do think the reduction in teen sexual activity has been a fascinating thing to watch because there was a time when—and I remember living through this—teen pregnancy was a really big problem when I was a teenager. And if you said, “Well, maybe we should encourage abstinence more, or maybe we should talk about the risks of sex, not just talk about safe sex, but try to kind of discourage people from having sex with people that they don’t want to procreate with.” Again, you were kind of laughed out of the room for saying stuff like that because the idea was we will never, the toothpaste is out of the tube, we will never get teens to have less sex. Teens are having sex and they’re going to be having sex, and they’re going to be having sex as much as they’re having sex right now forever into infinity. And that was the assumption.
And that wasn’t actually the reality though. That wasn’t the case. That’s not what history has revealed. History has revealed that teens are having less sex, but it’s not for the best of reasons, and it’s not because their souls have turned towards something good.
Instead, I think the souls of teenagers have turned to this, to this device, to watch TikTok videos all the time, or maybe even watching porn and masturbating, and it’s a different kind of sexual activity, but it’s not one that’ll get you pregnant. So I mentioned that in one sense just as a middle finger to people who said, “You’ll never get people to have less sex,” because it turns out they have started having less sex. But also, I had to include the caveat that it’s not for the reasons that conservatives wanted. It wasn’t because people said, “Ah, I’m going to take better care of my soul.” Instead, they just found other temptations and found other things to dedicate their souls to. And it’s not necessarily been good. If you look at the mental health of adolescents and young adults in this country, it’s not good. And I think it’s also not been good for their bodies and for families and for society and for those other things.
But I mentioned that also because one of my suggestions in terms of, if birth control can be a tool to reduce demand for abortion, so can more sexual restraint. And when I say sexual restraint, I don’t just mean less sex. I mean less sex of a particular kind. I mean less sex that leads to a woman in a desperate situation. And unfortunately, that’s where a lot of casual encounters have put a lot of women. And I’m interested in that because ultimately I’m interested in people’s souls and what’s best for their souls. Not just what’s best for their bodies or their pocketbooks, but really what makes them feel like, what really truly signals that they are having a good life.
I want people to have a good life, and that’s really, we could talk for another hour about this, but I really have moved a lot in my short time as a public policy and political commentator, I guess, from… I used to go on John Stossel’s show, and I really believed in live and let live. And to a certain degree, I still believe in that.
But there’s a part of me that is becoming less bashful about saying what I really think is good for people because I don’t just want to let people live their lives in a way that’s going to destroy their souls. And I don’t want to use the power of government to stop them, but I at least want to give them information that’s truthful and helpful towards making better decisions. And so that’s kind of why I do what I do in general every day. But that was also part of my motivation behind this essay was if I can get anybody, particularly elites in our society who are driving narratives about sex and about our dating culture, if I can get them to acknowledge that maybe what we’ve been telling young people, young men and young women for the past couple of generations about sex hasn’t been working out so well, and we need to take a step back and reexamine this, then it’s worth writing and it’s worth facing the goblins in the comment section.
Inez Stepman:
On that thoroughly non-materialistic note, Hadley Manning, thank you so much for coming on High Noon. You can read her essay, The Conservative Position on Birth Control is About Individual Responsibility, at The New York Times. One of the few times I’m going to direct you to go read The New York Times. Hadley, thanks so much for coming on High Noon.
Hadley Heath Manning:
Thanks, Inez.
Inez Stepman:
And thank you to our listeners. High Noon with Inez Stepman is a production of the Independent Women’s Forum. As always, you can send comments and questions to [email protected]. Please help us out by hitting the subscribe button and leaving us a comment or review on Apple Podcast, Acast, Google Play, YouTube, or iwf.org. Be brave, and we’ll see you next time on High Noon.
