Side Effect: How the Pill Altered America’s Moral Intelligence
by Geoffrey Botkin, June 25, 2010
*America celebrates three red-letter dates in the history of “The Pill”
*The Sanger Generation Marks 50 Years of “The Pill”
*How Margaret Sanger Won the War against Babies
This year, as the birth control Pill turns fifty, America is discovering a lethal side-effect. It’s called moral stupefaction. In just fifty years, the Pill has altered an entire nation’s ability to think. With the complicity of the American people, the Pill has spread from a utopian dream to a staple in the medicine cabinets of 110 million homes. But the Pill is not another medicinal tablet. In fact, it cures no medical ailment.
Fifty years ago, it was endorsed by the government as a drug that would change society. It has. Dramatically. As America embraced the drug, America also embraced the Pill’s utopian cultural framework.
Now, fifty years later, the drug’s effects are visible within an entire generation of grown women and grown men. Both men and women are mentally different, morally different, and even physically different from the preceding generation.
This “Sanger Generation” has lost the ability to think intelligently about babies. Adult men and women are infantile. They have created an anti-baby culture that is destroying the nation, yet do not have the moral intelligence to understand that a death culture truly kills a nation.
The Mother of the Death Culture
Margaret Sanger was a twentieth-century revolutionary with strong opinions about babies. She realized that by controlling national attitudes toward babies, she could control the political, genetic, religious, social, and cultural future of an entire people. For most of her life, she was bitterly frustrated in her utopian dreams. But she lived long enough to see her wishes realized when the birth control Pill began to control the minds of a new generation.
The year of her triumph was 1960. I was there at ground-zero in her war against babies and watched the culture deform before my eyes. My surviving peers and I were in kindergarten. I say “surviving” because the Pill was beta-tested the year my classmates and I were conceived. This was the year some of my other peers were not conceived.
Sanger had been demanding a “miracle Pill” since 1923. In 1953, she persuaded a rich, frustrated, anti-child feminist to bankroll hormone experiments on women. Sanger found 897 test subjects who did not want to have babies. They simply popped Sanger’s new experimental drug. Eureka! No babies.
The FDA finally approved commercial sales in 1960, even though the Pill’s mechanisms, including its potentially abortive properties, were not fully understood. The first buyers were suburban housewives, who bought not only the drug, but the dream that went with the drug. These mommies began using the drug to have the children they wanted and to deny life to those they didn’t. They passed their new theology of convenience on to their children who grew up without the children who died because of effects of the Pill. This is how a new generation of school kids carried the Sanger legacy forward into the twentieth century. Seated in the kindergartens of a government school system, this Sanger Generation gave longevity to a culture of death. My surviving peers grew up being taught that Sanger’s “Eureka Drug” was a great historic success — success in the name of science, success in the name of the future, and success in the name of the state.
America’s Last Family Celebrations
I remember the strangely materialistic birthday parties I attended that year. Each one was a little more ostentatious than the previous one. By the end of the year, the parties were not about the children. They were about the parents’ lifestyle. Parents seemed to be concerned with pretense, trying to keep up with the Joneses, who had the lifestyle of showy affluence. Everyone wanted what the Joneses had, including what the Joneses had in their medicine cabinet. The Joneses had the Pill, which was one lifestyle accessory other competitive housewives could acquire cheaply. With the Pill, the other mommies were able to have fewer kids, more stuff, and more of a party mentality. 1960 was the year the baby boom went bust, demographically.
I wonder how many of my kindergarten friends lost little brothers and sisters in 1960 — the year the eugenics movement was embraced by neighborhood housewives. We all learned what all these mommies now believed: Eugenics was the new socially acceptable suburban therapy. The new “Pill” culture was a culture of freedom, convenience, affluence, self-fulfillment, fun and life.
My peers were being lied to, but the lie began to sound better and better to kids who never had lessons in personal responsibility. Soon my hot-blooded classmates were matriculated into junior high. This was another landmark year for the Sanger Generation, the school-year ‘66-‘67. I remember the “lifestyle” parties from that year too. We were coming of age in a promiscuous world we were taught to own, celebrate, and perpetuate. This new culture embraced us when we were infants and succeeded in making us more infantile with each passing year. Puberty only accelerated this process.
America’s Coming-of-Age Party
My peers were now old enough to taste social freedom themselves. For them, the Pill culture was their culture, even though it was being endorsed by an establishment government handing out Pills and virtual licenses for licentiousness. Sanger’s Pill was the Eureka Pill. Perpetual fun, no consequences, and no babies.
From the very beginning, the Sanger Generation was a party generation. Mature family life with children was no longer a part of growing up. Approved drugs could be obtained — free — by the healthy adolescent for a new cultural purpose: to bypass the responsibilities of family.
The Pill was the most popular chemical in this sex-drugs-rock-no-babies culture. My peers knew it was a party drug, and this drug educated the Sanger Generation in everything they needed to know about reproductive science and, also, political science. The Pill was not created or prescribed to cure sickness or infirmity. It was made to satisfy a demand for personal independence. This childish demand was approved by a welfare-state government which saw the benefits in propagating childishness in the population. Paternalistic governments work best when the governed are infantile, immature, and unthinking. And childish immaturity has no limits when a nanny-state government gives you everything you demand.
The FDA, the Post Office, the Courts and the school curriculum all approved of the new “Pill” culture. Take a Pill and be yourself. Take a Pill and be independent — right now. Take a Pill and gratify your desires immediately. Take a Pill, and protect yourself from the consequences of infantile stupidity. Create a Pill and engineer the attitudes of an entire nation.
The year ‘66-‘67 was a grand celebration of the Pill culture. Sex and recreation were co-joined with the concept of permanent adolescence. An entire generation was growing up on Mick Jagger groaning, “Let’s Spend the Night Together,” and Jim Morrison screaming, “Come on Baby, Light My Fire!” That year Hugh Hefner reached the Sanger Generation with his version of the Pill-culture philosophy: Girls are entertainment for boys. This glossy idea circulated wildly in my school’s locker room, teaching my peers the joys of predatory, zero-consequence freedom.
Until the Pill was legalized, Hefner’s Playboy magazine was struggling financially. But the Pill came to Hefner’s rescue, and he returned the favor by investing countless thousands of his exploding fortunes in deadly-serious legal battles to make birth control legal in all fifty states. The school year ‘66-‘67 was a year of exultation for the unholy trinity of Sanger, Hefner, and the Federal bureaucracy. Bureaucrats eagerly joined the revolution, not just giving Pills to poor minorities (per Lyndon Johnson), but to school girls (per Margaret Sanger).
Margaret Sanger died that year in the knowledge that twelve million women were ingesting and making the most of her “magic pill.” Her eulogizers would remember these famous Sanger statements:
[Our objective is] unlimited sexual gratification without the burden of unwanted children.”
[Women must have the right] to live...to love...to be lazy...to be an unmarried mother . . . to create . . . to destroy.
The marriage bed is the most degenerative influence in the social order.”
Eugenics is . . . the most adequate and thorough avenue to the solution of racial, political and social problems.
The most merciful thing that a family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.
The next year, Pill revenue exploded to $150 million. Hollywood’s Prudence and the Pilll made artificial birth control a point of comedy, a cool icon of pop culture. No one was ashamed of Margaret Sanger any more. Very few saw what was coming.
America’s Terminal Party
My headstrong peers graduated from High School to yet greater social freedoms, with fewer and fewer responsibilities. The first year of dorm life in college was the ultimate Sanger Generation party: an opportunity for unlimited indulgence and uninhibited childishness. When the Pill didn’t work against pregnancy, my peers threw tantrums to demand a backup “solution” to the wages of indulgence. It came that year, right on time, with Roe v. Wade. I remember campus discussions about legalized abortion.
It’s murder, isn’t it?
Of course it’s murder. Everybody knows it’s murder. But it’s legal. And it’s just a baby. The Supreme Court said it’s totally okay to abort. So it’s totally okay. Stroke of the pen, law of the land.
Eureka! Perpetual intemperance, no babies, and no arrest warrant for murder.
Today the Sanger Generation is well into its fifties. The men still act like children. Sometimes they float to the top, like empty beer cans in a rain-swept gutter, and into positions of civic prominence. But the concept of civic responsibility is beyond their ability to understand.
What, exactly, caused men to lose their inclination to grow up? Primarily, the absence of babies contributes to selfish independence in men. A society that is rich in babies will produce enough babies to touch even those men who are not fathers, motivating them to think about the future. Men who see babies tend to think about maturity and consequences, and will carry their concerns with them even to Congress, the courts, media, law and business. They will face hard decisions and not leave them to women.
But men who think only about solitary and independent interests will default to infantilism. Childish tantrums. Denial. The paralysis of indecision. A refusal to do the hard work of thinking. “Just give me a quick, magic solution with no future consequences.”
But consequences of the death culture are piling up. Fewer babies on the scene cannot reverse the reality of a dearth of babies. The children my peers never conceived are not there to take care of them in old age. There is loneliness. The children who were never born are not there keep the economy strong, and so the American economy is dying along with maturity and courage in men.
The government, or rather the women in government, have decided to recognize and address this challenge. But these women are, too, Sanger Generation party-goers. They cannot think responsibly. Thus the government’s solution is the default position of the Sanger Generation: More Pills and fewer babies.
According to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the government must tax more workers to pay for more tax-funded birth-control Pills so there are fewer children to take care of, thus relieving the nanny state of the high costs of raising children for infantile parents.
Notice two reigning factors in this response: stupidity and infantilism. The solution is no solution and there is an unwillingness to think any father ahead than the immediate present. What kind of nation truly desires to promote a culture of no babies? A dead nation.
America’s Hangover
The cultural chemistry of America has been altered by Sanger’s Pill. But so has human physiology. The Pill’s party culture exposed both men and women to the sexually transmitted diseases of promiscuity. Some of these have been lethal. Some have led to permanent infertility. Today new questions are being asked about the Pill’s chemical effect on America’s once strong masculinity. Is there any connection with childish immaturity in men and the chemistry of Sanger’s drug? Men do not swallow the Pill directly. But an estimated 110 million women currently ingest the Pill. Large amounts of unprocessed estrogen and progesterone pass through their bodies, into the sewage treatment systems and back into the water supply. On NBC News, the head of Denver’s largest sewage plant reported that most of the nation’s sewage plants simply can’t remove all the estrogen in the water. “We’re concerned about the effect on aquatic life, but we’re also concerned about our ability to actually treat for these estrogens and estrogen mimickers,” said the official.
Male fish down river from these plants are becoming physiologically female. When male humans drink the water or eat the fish, what happens to them? Why is sperm count falling in American men? Why is breast reduction surgery on the rise in men? Why do men show such passivity? Such an immature refusal to face reality? Why are men no longer acting like men?
Sanger’s default position comes so easy to infantile men who cannot think. Babies complicate life. Let there be no babies. People complicate life. Let there be fewer people.
Question: Why do grown men insist that overpopulation is still the number one environmental problem when there are so few babies? Answer: Moral stupefaction always leads to intellectual stupefaction. And thus the culture of death moves closer to a final conclusion: Babies have become man’s worst enemy and his worst nightmare.
International Immaturity
Fifty-nine modern nations have swallowed the cultural toxins represented in Sanger’s Eureka Pill. All fifty-nine are plagued by the high-tech “benefits” of the birth-control mentality. Each of them have waged a cultural war against babies. Each of them suffer below-replacement birthrates. Each of them face potential extinction. But concerns such as national suffering, dangerous international geopolitics, and the disappearance of entire nations are matters that would require mature thinking, and perhaps American leadership toward a solution. But mature thinking was successfully bred-out of the American people when they accepted the Pill as, in the words of Hugh Hefner, the greatest invention of the twentieth century.