A Christian friend tells us she was grown up and married before she felt bold enough to ask her pharmacist father where he kept the condoms in his store. Now past 40, she notes the ease with which we currently discuss birth control.
Our readers don’t hesitate to talk about the subject, either. According to a recent poll, CT readers’ most-used forms of contraception are (no surprises here) condoms, birth-control pills, and diaphragms. We were, however, surprised to find that 37 percent had been sterilized, making a fairly permanent choice to halt fecundity.
Statistics for the general population are hard to compare, since those figures represent both married and unmarried women of childbearing age (while CT figures represent mainly married persons in and beyond their childbearing years). Nevertheless, our kitchen-table analysis suggests that CT readers’ rate of sterilization roughly equals that of the general population. But use of nearly all other methods of contraception are notably higher among CT readers.
These results are far from assured, but it may mean that CT readers are highly disciplined and plan their family size to conform to a conservative financial outlook. This is borne out by the fact that CT subscribers had smaller, more affordable families (2.8 children) when compared to their “ideal” family (3.2 children, on average) and their family of origin (3.7 children). Is this the “Protestant ethic” at work? Is it part of the economic “downsizing” of America?
In any case, our poll also told us that few readers have thought about the moral implications of family planning. To remedy that, we offer some reflections on the ethics of birth control, beginning on page 34.
DAVID NEFF, Managing Editor
