But there’s good reason to think Roe itself was instrumental in creating the kind of sexual culture that makes the Bristol Palin dilemma as commonplace as it’s become. While the frequent use of abortion can limit out-of-wedlock births, that is, the sudden mass availability of abortion almost certainly had the opposite effect — mostly by changing the obligations associated with pregnancy, and by legitimating male irresponsibility where sex and its consequences are concerned.

Naomi Cahn and June Carbone, whose book “Red Families, Blue Families” I’ve written about favorably in the past, have a new piece for Slate making the case that the continuing rise in out-of-wedlock birth rates is an unintended consequence of the pro-life movement’s modest success at stigmatizing abortion. The piece starts by acknowledging a connection that social conservatives often have reason to point out: The biggest reason why blue states often have lower out-of-wedlock birth rates than more conservative states is that the blue states have higher abortion rates, and the relative stability of the “blue model” of post-sexual revolution family life — which is really the upper middle class blue model, in which serial monogamy in your late teens and twenties is followed by late marriage and parenting — depends on a “willingness to abort” as well as a facility with contraception. But where pro-life writers like myself tend to raise this point in order to cast doubt on the comforting-but-dubious idea that liberal policies will inevitably lower the abortion rate, Cahn and Carbone invoke it to cast doubt on the idea that one can simultaneously be opposed to abortion and in favor of stable two-parent families. After all, if a “willingness to abort” helps keep out-of-wedlock birth rates low among well-educated blue staters, then surely opposition to abortion can plausibly be held responsible for the steady rise in single parent households in the rest of the country — and especially in white, conservative-tilting middle America:

… why do those wringing their hands over the rise in single-parent families never blame, much less even mention, opposition to abortion? … If abortion is not an option, then more single-parent births are pretty inevitable. Think of it as the Bristol Palin effect, after Sarah Palin’s 17-year-old daughter announced her pregnancy shortly after her mother’s selection in 2008 as the Republican vice-presidential candidate. Republican women applauded the Palins’ choice to support their daughter’s decision to have the child. They wrote that unlike other Republican leaders, the Palins were sticking to their values rather than doing what others had done and quietly arranged an abortion …

The big increase in African-American nonmarital births occurred in the 1960s and 1970s. For whites, the development has been more recent, and it has occurred at the same time as the emergence of anti-abortion sentiment as a key constituent of conservative political identity. Has the hardening of anti-abortion attitudes among white working-class conservatives helped cause the increase in white nonmarital births? Did it contribute to the erosion of the stigma on nonmarital births?

The answer, I think, depends on whether you take Roe v. Wade as a given or not, and how you assess the abortion ruling’s consequences for the culture.

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