1950 – 3.7 kids vs. 1980 – 1.8 kids – Did Birth Control Kill a Generation or Create a Stronger One

My grandmother, God rest her soul, had 11 children.  She was pregnant for 12 years straight.  When I was pregnant, I gained 80 pounds!  Yes, I know.  I was swollen, it was uncomfortable and it took me eight years to get back to my pre-birth weight.  I cannot imagine how my grandmother felt, but I will tell you that when she died, she did not include any of her children in her will.  Why?  No one really knows, but my guess is that she never had time to get to know them.

Take a look at this chart created by the Pew Research Center:

Their point in creating the chart was to show how birth rates decline in bad economic times, but the chart says so much more to me.  In the 1950s, the average woman could expect to have four children.  Today, that number has been cut in half.  In the 1960s, only “39 percent of 30-to-34-year olds were employed.”  By the 1980s, 70 percent of women with college degrees from the same age group (30-34 years) were working.  “The Pill” gave women options.  Now, the Obama Administration wants to insure that all women covered under insurance have their birth control covered.  Oddly, Rep. Steve King (R-IA) not only considers it a bad idea, he claims it will cause an entire civilization to die out.

I agree with King on one point, our actions today will have an affect on the next generation and the one after that, but it has nothing to do with the birth rate and more today with politics. Rep. King , many Republicans and some Democrats voted for House Amendment 88, which was added to the House spending bill H.R. 1, prohibiting “the Environmental Protection Agency from spending any money to enforce its standards regarding the reduction of mercury emissions from cement plants in the United States. Washington has bipartisan support today for the weakening of the Environmental Protection Agency. The Clean Air Act REQUIRED standards on toxins released into the environment. Now, our government is not going to fund it. It took a quiet unassuming woman to raise the issue of pollution in her book Silent Spring (imagine silent trees, no songs from the trees, no new generations of birds or animals) and for her efforts, Rachel Carson was marginalized by the federal government. U.S. Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson said, “Why is a spinster with no children so concerned about genetics?”

Washington is saying that the EPA is killing jobs. If the politicians can only create jobs or maintain them by killing our environment, than they don’t deserve another term. We KNOW that toxins are already present in pregnant women, we know that mercury toxins kill. Why are we silent? Perhaps Carson’s book wasn’t about the silence of wildlife at all. Perhaps the silence referred to us.

Want to learn more? Read Is Someone Getting Away with Murder or visit Momscleanairforce.org