When he signed the Family Planning Services and Population Research Act of 1970 on Christmas Eve 40 years ago, President Nixon missed the irony of starting a campaign to reduce "unwanted and untimely childbearing" just as the country was about to celebrate the "unplanned" birth of a baby born in poverty 2,000 years before.
More important, the man sometimes known as Tricky Dick would find that his attempt to outsmart his predecessor, President Johnson, would prove too clever by a half.
Just as LBJ's Great Society never delivered as promised, Nixon's social engineering effort -- dispensing heavy doses of contraception to the low-income population on the theory that fertility is a cause of poverty -- also backfired.
Better known as Title X of the Public Health Services Act, the GOP-driven legislation fostered more disordering than "planning" of families, rendering the underclass less capable of self-reliance while leaving America sitting on a demographic time bomb.
Spooked by exaggerated fears of "overpopulation" in the 1960s, the Republicans started down this road when then-Rep. George H.W. Bush, a father of six, made contraception available to welfare recipients through his markups of the Social Security amendments of 1967.
Even though birthrates among all income groups, ages and races had been declining since 1957, that wasn't enough. Title X went much further, establishing the Office of Population Affairs devoted exclusively to pushing birth control -- overseeing more than 4,500 command centers nationwide dispensing free contraceptives to girls and women ages 15 to 44.
Yet the crusade went beyond one discretionary program dependent on annual congressional appropriations to encompass a total effort -- the social equivalent of war -- that tapped the deep pockets and reach of many other federal programs, including entitlements.
Congress, for example, not only made contraceptive devices and services a mandatory part of state Medicaid programs in 1972 but also promised to reimburse states an unprecedented 90 percent of the costs of dispensing and actively promoting birth control, even to minors without parental notification.
Like all Great Society schemes, this total effort would lead to total failure. In 1970, just 10.7 percent of all U.S. births were to unmarried women, where births are much more likely to be "unwanted and untimely" because of their catastrophic effects for the mother, the child and society. Yet by 2008, 40.6 percent of all babies were born to unwed mothers, a three-fold increase from 1970.
As the adjacent chart illustrates, the pattern is more pronounced among those segments of the population the War on Fertility has targeted. Moreover, the number of single-parent households more than tripled, from 3.3 million in 1970 to 10.5 million in 2008.
With these ruinous social effects, federal birth control has contributed mightily to the perpetuation of poverty.
The unintended consequences of Nixon's War on Fertility -- which also include a massive rise in sexually transmitted diseases and infections, especially among women -- expose the folly of social interventions that Congress continues to wage under the false rubric of showing compassion for the poor. But equally destructive is the intended consequence: the nation's fertility rates have struggled to rise to replacement levels since the mid-1970s.
The birth dearth is a key reason the United States can scarcely hope to cover future liabilities of Social Security and Medicare.
It turns out that in this Christmas season, just as 40 or 2,000 years ago, good social and fiscal policy is not tricky at all. It's all about upholding the married-parent, child-rich family as the social ideal.
Robert W. Patterson is editor of The Family in America: A Journal of Public Policy. www.familyinamerica.org.
