Earlier this week, Senator Kelly Ayotte (R–N.H.) took freebies at campaign tables to a new low. While voters are used to getting pens, buttons, bumper stickers, and grab bags, the Ayotte table at the University of New Hampshire had a bowl of condoms, free for the taking. A sign beside the table read, “FREE CONDOMS. As part of Kelly’s commitment to making birth control available over the counter, please take a free condom.” At the bottom of the sign, in an apparent attempt at wit, was the slogan, “Use Condom Sense!”
The ploy is apparently geared at taking heat off of the senator for two of her positions. In 2015, Ayotte filed her “Allowing Greater Access to Safe and Effective Contraception Act,” which would allow contraception companies to make their products available for sale over the counter. But the products would not be “free,” as many birth-control advocates demand, and many see the bill as an attempt to add a “birth control tax.” Also, Ayotte has voted at least six times to defund Planned Parenthood — the nation’s largest provider of abortions — which was shown in a series of videos last year to be harvesting and selling baby parts.
But there is a disconnect between her efforts to defund Planned Parenthood and her attempts to make contraception more easily available. There are, perhaps, some things the senator should make herself aware of before either pushing for more contraception or handing out condoms on a college campus:
• Condoms are already readily available over the counter. Machines in gas station bathrooms all across the nation testify to the fact the there is no difficulty in getting one’s hands on a condom. If a young man can’t afford the three or four quarters he would have to pay for a condom, he probably doesn’t have a date tonight anyway. (Of course, this is not to suggest that he should be engaging in such activity in the first place.)
• Condoms have an abysmally high failure rate, so if the senator’s goal is to provide “safe and effective contraception,” handing out false hope in the form of latex prophylactics is, to say the least, not the best course of action. The data on the use of condoms show that on average a whopping 18 percent of women using condoms will become pregnant over the course of one year. Furthermore, even when “used properly,” the failure rate still accounts for two percent of the women using them becoming pregnant. Here’s a tip: If the condom results in pregnancy rates that high, it isn’t stopping the exchange of bodily fluids. In fact, the exchange of bodily fluids is even higher than the 18 percent pregnancy rate, since other factors (fertility cycles, low sperm count due to drugs and alcohol, etc.) can also prevent pregnancy even when sperm cells and other bodily fluids play Houdini and make it around the artificial barrier. That means that the chances of contracting a sexually transmitted disease is not greatly ameliorated by using a condom. No reasonable person would call that “safe” or “effective.”
• College is hard enough without the drama of sexual activity. The human person is a complex being, and sex is not a walled-off domain that can be isolated from other aspects of the person’s life. Promiscuity is — simply put — emotionally messy and is not conducive to a collegiate environment. The senator’s attempt to garner the votes of college kids by giving them a ticket to consequence-free sexual bliss is shameful on its face. Promoting immorality should not be a conservative value.
So, while it is politically incorrect to say so, the fact is that the safest sex for those who are not married and ready to begin raising a family is no sex. Of course, the sexual revolutionaries of the 1960s and 1970s called that idea prudery and claimed making contraception more readily available (as Senator Ayotte is now trying to do) would usher in a new era of personal peace, happiness, and prosperity. Those opposed to the sexual revolution rightly predicted the exact opposite: by jumping from one bed to another as “serial monogamists” people would invite greater spread of sexually transmitted disease, emotional baggage, and poverty as the rate of illegitimate births skyrocketed. Promising to remove the “consequences” of sex opened a Pandora’s Box of evils on the world which has only grown worse over time.
It’s not difficult to see — looking back over the past decades — who was right and who was wrong. All of the promises of the sexual revolutionaries have been broken and all of the dire predictions of those who fought against that revolution have come to pass.
With “conservatives” like Ayotte pandering for votes by joining the sexual revolutionaries in driving America’s downward moral spiral, the future could be even worse. It has been said that politics makes strange bedfellows. This recent action by Ayotte seems to validate that.
Photo: AP Images
