The repercussions of women’s burgeoning sexual freedom and
the rise of venereal diseases during the late 1960s still echo politically
today.
When former speaker of the House of Representatives Tom
DeLay stated in 2003 that, “For the last 40 years, the anti-Christian left in
America has waged a sustained attack against ... traditional moral norms,” he
was referring to the sexual stew that boiled over during the Summer of Love.
Today, abstinence-only sex education advocates blame the
excesses of the 1960s for the rise of new kinds of STDs such as AIDS and
herpes. They commonly assert that syphilis and gonorrhea were the only two STDs
in existence until the 1960s, but that dozens have emerged since.
Of course, that wasn’t true. The hippies may have spread a
lot of nasty bugs amongst themselves, but they didn’t create the STD epidemic.
Other STDs, such as human papillomavirus , existed long before, but were as yet
unidentified. Rates of syphilis and gonorrhea were so bad during World War I
that the government had to mount a nationwide campaign against them or face a
shortage of soldiers.
Abortion was another issue that erupted during Summer of
Love. By the end of the summer many
women, some of them young teenagers, needed treatment for botched abortions.
Though then-governor Ronald Reagan signed a liberalized abortion law in June of
1967, trips to Tijuana, Mexico, for back-alley procedures were common. Smith’s
clinic even treated Big Brother and the Holding Company singer Janis Joplin for
a mishandled Mexican abortion. She became a benefactor of the clinic.
Such experiences with abortions gone bad helped lead some
states to further liberalize their abortion laws until 1973 when the U.S.
Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade, a ruling that still divides Americans.
Almost always, there's a price to pay.
ReplyDeleteTrue. And the interest is the one that kills you.
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