FAMILY planning and birth control is one of many areas where America has gotten itself wrapped up in a decades-long hysterical moralistic argument over issues whose solutions ought to be obvious to any mature adult. It's rather silly that we're still arguing over problems that were really settled by about 1977, but there you are. Anyway, Andrew Sullivan argued the other day that since abortion has dramatically curtailed the number of adoptions,

If the pro-life movement dedicated its every moment not to criminalizing abortion but to expanding adoption opportunities, it would win many more converts.

Megan McArdle sensibly responds that this doesn't really make any sense. Demand for adoptible American babies vastly exceeds supply precisely because abortion has cut down the supply; there's no shortage of opportunities for pregnant mothers who want to give up their babies. However, she then sweeps birth control into her argument in a fashion that's very far wide of the mark.

I don't think it makes much sense to argue that pro-lifers ought to focus their energy on preventing pregnancy through better birth control distribution, or facilitating adoptions. The means to (almost always when used correctly) prevent pregnancy is quite widely distributed through our nation's drugstores, and adoptions are quite well facilitated through the current network of adoption agencies. Yet nonetheless, one in five pregnancies ends in an abortion.

Adoption is one thing. Birth control is a whole different kettle of fish. It's true that birth control is reasonably widely available in American drug stores. But the rate of usage of birth control is much lower in the United States than in Western Europe and the rest of the developed world. Hence, unsurprisingly, America's rates of teen pregnancy and unwanted pregnancy are much higher than in most other developed countries, as is America's rate of abortion. Rachael Phelps had a pretty great photo essay about this in Slate back in October. The average age of sexual debut in America and Europe, she noted, is the same: 17. But America's teen pregnancy rate is three to six times higher than Western European rates. And our abortion rate is about three times as high as that of Germany or the Netherlands and about double that of France. Ms Phelps describes how European public-health campaigns encouraging contraceptive use dovetail with national attitudes towards sexuality that treat it as less of a dangerous conflagration and more of a natural part of development. Here's one arresting figure, showing birth control use at sexual debut for teenagers in the Netherlands and the United States:

The first time they had sex, 64% of Dutch teens used hormonal birth control, ie the pill, Norplant, etc. Almost half used both hormonal birth control and a condom, which is what Dutch public-health authorities recommend. Just 26% of American teens were on hormonal birth control the first time they had sex. That may be related to the fact that 70% of American school health clinics are prohibited from distributing condoms or any other form of birth control.

Stating that a technology known to prevent a condition is widely available is not an adequate or moral public-health response. Conservatives believe this just as strongly as liberals do. After all, the technology needed to not have sex at all is widely available on everybody's body; it's called keeping your pants zipped. Yet conservatives have allocated billions of government dollars to attempts to persuade teenagers to use this technology, attempts which apparently have no public-health effectiveness whatsoever, given that the age of sexual debut remains the same in the United States and Europe.

I don't think it's true that the pro-life movement would gain any converts among liberals by dedicating itself to increasing adoptions (even more than it already has), even if adoptions weren't already widely available. But I do think that the pro-life movement would gain itself a lot of political allies if it were to dedicate itself to dramatically increasing usage of contraceptives among American teenagers. That, obviously, is never going to happen, because a plurality of the pro-life movement actively opposes teenagers using birth control, due to a number of false and superstitious beliefs about teen sexuality that are unfortunately deeply rooted in American culture.

(We have more on this topic here and here.)