This is not very politically correct, if inspired by Jonathan Wolfman's post again, although he doesn't provide a statistical breakdown on the ever important the In-Laws a Moron reproduction issue, if one accepts that as an issue.

As a fact of life, its an issue, if often unstated, hence though the importance of in-laws, and it always has been a political and social issue beyond that, as we're all in-laws in some ways, all the way back to with the Spartans, and always will be.

It's not really a totally private decision as to having, or not having, children.Consider for example how people on the Left agitate for pre-natal care, or how people on the Right agitate for unmarried and unemployed people to not reproduce, or, and more fundamentally, how some in-laws agitate for some people not to get married or reproduce.

Thats an in-law fact of life, and in society, were all in-laws in the sense of living under the same laws.

That doesn't make me anti-contraception or wildly pro-natalist, just a realist. Man as Aristotle said, is a social animal, happy alone only if a wild beast or a god, and so the ongoing regeneration of mortals as  is the case with children is part of politics, implicitly or explicitly, and with birth control too.

Roe v Wade, although it was a thunder clap when it happened in 1973, didn't appear out of nowhere as to the Supreme Court having to address various questions of sexual freedom, which Left and Right often, if not always, have a certain if not exclusive "Eugenics" aspect to them,  derivative of the In-Laws a Moron issue: call it "Eugenics Light."

In its highest and most general sense, the In-Laws a Moron Question is:

"If the State has no reproductive policy, will it be the case that the Smart ones or more Disciplined Ones will have private lives providing so much more entertainment and enjoyment that they will be out-reproduced by the Morons, who don't have as many good opportunities for private enjoyment, save for the one form of enjoyment everyone likes, babymaking, if not babyhaving, and especially babyraising, so tjat therefore society is dominated by the Morons and their undisciplined Spartan mistakes?"

Sparta note exposed infants at birth to the elements, to make sure that the investments of the State would be efficient.

That's not very politically correct to say, and yet is part of the debate around natal policies, and always has been.

Its particularly acute in a society that encourages its best and brighest girls to postpone babyhaving in order to pursue careers, if it always seemed to me that part of the answer to that part of the Moron Issue was to incentivize corporations to be more accomodating of the reproductive needs of society as to letting mothers back into the workforce, having doen their babyhaving duties for the State to have soldier, scentitst, and most especially taxpayers."

After all, if there aren't taxpayers, the elderly can't collect on either Social Security directly, or even very well on their investments indirectly, in the latter case since there's no one to buy their investments.

The case that most people address first in the legal history of the Constitution in matters of sexual freedom and natalism leading up to Roe v Wade is Buck v Bell in 1927, in which the Court held that the State of Virginia could order Carrie Buck to be sterilized, and not violate that U.S. Constitution.

That's Right Wing people of their day having the State provide birth control, if the most severe form, because rightly or wrongly, they figured that some people's babymaking wouldn't turn out very well, given some real or alleged track record.

That's an informal fact of life of course, in that if you meet someone from a family with say mental illness, drug addiction, or crime, or worse, and crime, you are inclined to be wary, and, not for all bad reasons either; trust me.

Do you want someone as an in-law who has a history of crime, mental illness, and/or drug addiction to reproduce with your family line personally, or collectively?

Not really, if that's not very politically correct to say in the large scheme of things, if its most definitely a fact of life with the small version of the In-Laws a Moron Question.

In any event, as to Buck v Bell, that was a "Rightist" sort of case, in that Oliver Wendell Holmes quote, "Three generations of idiots is enough," is reflective of many, if not all, people on the Right, and secretly the Left's, enthusiasm for a lack of enthusiasm of some people having babies, and truth be told, that's not always an incorrect intuition, although that's also often a self-fulfilling prophecy too, and there are plenty of diamonds in the rough.

Note, the Catholic Church is really the only party that is consistent in being always pro-natalist; that doesn't mean they're right, just consistent in a certain way.

Its worth noting too that in reality, although the case Buck v Bell, "Enough, three generations of morons (criminals, drug addicts, mental ward cases) is enough!" was sold as a "welfare queen" kind of deal with Carrie Buck, it seems like it was really more family embarassment over an unwanted pregnancy, always a fact of life too, if impolitic to say save indirectly.

At around the same time as Buck v Bell, Connecticut passed a law banning birth control, even for married women.

When you look at the stated motive for the law, the reason for the law was a variant of the dummy in-law question, namely, Protestant women being outproduced in the babymaking arms race by Catholics, who already of course had their church oppose the law.

Now the Supreme Court invalidated Buck v Bell in Skinner v Oklahoma ten years down the pike in some instances, saying that to sterilize Mr. Skinner for stealing a chicken during the Great Depression, his third petty theft conviction, was a bit too much, if they didn't I bet invite him to court their daughters either, but, in fact, states did sterilize people into the 1970s, again, on the grounds of being a burden to the State, although often a burden was really more of a matter of being annoying in some way.

That's true with the micro version of in-laws too: "I don't want my daughter to come home with a baby with a matching dog collar" is a recent commercial expressing this micro fact of life.

So, now we come to Griswald v Connecticut, the case that made the Pill legal in all states in 1965.

The Court in Griswald cited notions of sanctity of the marital home and various penumbras and emmanations that make condoms and pills safe from search and seizure, but when you look at what happened next, the Court was really liberating people to do the babymaking activity without babyhaving.

Of course, one might also say that women sought to birth control to be legal as a way to mutual disarmament in the babymaking race.

One can see this in how having rationalized Griswald in terms of sanctity of the marital bed from the long arm of the Condom Police, within two years, the Court found a generalized right to make whoopie without as much fear of diapers for non-married people, in which baby makes three has historically speaking been a very important part of having the in-law is a moron question arise in the first place, "She looked a little heavy in the white dress, but...", which even at the time some Justices saw as a classic example of Justices writing contemporary mores into law whatever silence there really is in the Constitution, pro or anti-condom.

And now we come to Roe. In one sense, Roe was about privacy and such emmanations as one can seek to find from the Constitutions various provisions, but in another sense, it was the ultimate in natalist policy too, if never stated as such, and only very obliquely hinted at by Blackmun:

" One's philosophy, one's experiences, one's exposure to the raw edges of human existence, one's religious training, one's attitudes toward life and family and their values, and the moral standards one establishes and seeks to observe, are all likely to influence and to color one's thinking and conclusions about abortion."

"One's exposure to the raw edges of human existence," is one version of saying "this guy's a moron and I don't want his genes mixing with mine at all."

Demographically speaking of course, as a factual matter, Roe has had awesome consequences, as one can track the decline of fertility to that decision.

Its true that one can show that crime rates probably are lower than they would be otherwise, since the in-law to be that was a moron didn't get to enter the gene pool after all, just as its obvious that the labor force now has a hole in it as far as paying for the future of the Baby Boomers retirement too.

Now, as to birth control and all this then, if the Right used to be "no more morons inclined" as in Buck v Bell, and with Mr. Skinner, now it has generally speaking moved to the natalist side, just as the Left, who protests so much about the violation of Carrie Buck's sexual freedom in Buck v Bell is on balance pretty clearly in the anti-natalist side, since one can't be a doctor say, and have ten kids.

Just don't kid yourself that how many babies, and who has them, aren't part of this supposed debate on principles, save of course for the ever consistent Catholics on this matter in their Meaning of Life sort of way.

finis