Red Families, Blue Families, and Plan B

[elfs]

The emergence of the blue family paradigm came with women's ability to control the timing of pregnancy and childbirth. For those with the resources and discipline to take advantage of these techniques, family formation occurs at the point when adults can be expected to do the right thing--and have the emotional and financial resources to manage their children--with a minimum of external assistance. The prescription to delay family formation until after graduate-schoola age, however, carries little suasion for those who will not complete college. Red families would accordingly like to reinforce parental control over wayward teens and make it harder to escape the consequences of improvident conduct. Yet, the most likely effect of restricting the avaiability of the morning-after pill to 18-year-olds is to increase the number of non-marital pregnancies, and the emphasis on abstinence education has dramatically raised the odds that a poor African-American teen will have her first sexual experience without any information about contraception. The irony is that blue families, who overwhelmingly oppose these policies, simply accompany their daughters to the pharmacy while more conservative families--with many minority parents disapproving of the measures--disproportionately bear the consequences...

--Naomi Cahn and June Carbone, Red Families, Blue Families

This falls into the "I told you so" folder.

Brad DeLong posted this