U.S. policy should encourage marriage

When Sen. Robert Kennedy campaigned for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1968, the father of 10 (an 11th child was born months after his assassination) provoked howls of laughter among reporters when he made it clear that he would neither welcome nor support a government birth control program.

Had the promising leader not been shot down in his prime, RFK would have been surprised when the Republican who won the presidency in that tumultuous year, Richard Nixon, became the federal social engineer committed to widely promoting and dispensing free contraception. But the observant Catholic would have been shocked when President Obama required the distribution of birth control through private-sector insurance, even through policies financed by church-related organizations. Surely, this most gifted of the Kennedy brothers would have recognized that Obama's mandate - even as amended to address First Amendment sensitivities - remains a public-policy disaster.

When Nixon declared war on American fertility in 1970, he limited his efforts to setting up thousands of publicly funded birth control command posts, dubbed health centers, across the country and using Medicaid to persuade "low-income" women to have fewer children, on the theory embraced more recently by former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, that if the poor stopped procreating, poverty would be eliminated.

The strategy certainly succeeded in suppressing further the already weakened fecundity of the baby boom era. Birthrates dropped precipitously in the 1970s. Yet the country has made no progress on the poverty front because Nixon's scheme to reduce, in his phrase, "unwanted and untimely births" - a euphemism for children born without the benefit of a married mom and dad - backfired. Birthrates for unmarried women increased while birthrates for married women plummeted.

Obama could have distanced himself from his disgraced predecessor's "family planning" fiasco. But as liberals reflexively do when government programs fail, he has doubled down, revealing himself as the true heir of Tricky Dick. Not satisfied with a government strategy alone, Obama has demanded that every employer providing health insurance subsidize largely middle-class couples through contraception that carries no co-pay or deductible.