Boston -- For reasons that remain somewhat mysterious to me -- curiosity? duty? sheer masochism? -- I am spending this holiday season reading the Republican Contract with America.
So far, I must say, my very favorite chapter is the one called "The Personal Responsibility Act."
Though it lacks the bodice-ripping spice of Newt Gingrich's upcoming novel with its "pouting sex kitten" and "exotic mistress," it's still pretty sexy stuff. At least it's about sex.
The PRA is ostensibly about welfare reform. But in the conservative world view, welfare is neither a safety net nor a trap for poor single mothers and their children. Welfare is the cause of their predicament. The lure of AFDC is the reason poor unwed teen-age girls bear children in the first place.
The way the moderates among us figure it, the PRA proposals would cut off benefits for five million children. They would, among other things, deny aid to the children of unmarried teen-age mothers and to those whose paternity isn't established.
But the authors of this treatise have a different view. They believe their plan will reduce the number of poor children who ever get born. In short, if you unbuild it, they won't come. If you bulldoze welfare, the babies won't be conceived.
What we have here isn't really welfare reform. It's the New Republican Birth Control Plan. An economic disincentive program based on a belief in withdrawal as the most effective method of birth control. Withdrawal of money, that is.
Needless to say, there is no mention of sex education, pills, Norplant, or condoms in this Birth Control Plan. Indeed men, a.k.a. sperm donors, only make a cameo appearance as people who must be forced to acknowledge paternity. And the word ZTC abortion appears only when the contract bars its federal funding.
Nevertheless the contract is, in the authors' own words, "designed to diminish the number of teen-age pregnancies and illegitimate births."
By now we are all familiar with Newt Gingrich's composite profile of the "13-year-old drug addict who is pregnant." In a welfare scenario which is only slightly more lurid than his novel, the child of this child faces the options of "a dumpster" or an orphanage. (Excuse me, not an orphanage, a "boarding school" like the one run by Spencer Tracy in "Boys Town." We'll call it "Infant Town.")
I have no idea exactly how many 13-year-old pregnant drug addicts there are. But the same folks who created this welfare poster child seem to believe that the teen-ager makes a spreadsheet of her economic future. Remove welfare -- an average $366 a month for a family of three -- and she will recalculate these glorious prospects and decide that it's no longer fiscally sound to get pregnant.
Moreover, the authors have decided that the best way to get her to delay maternity is by threatening her with even greater destitution, fewer choices, worse prospects and, if that fails, the removal of her child.
Compare this, if you will, to the plan that the rest of the world has signed. In Cairo this September, more than 150 countries adopted a United Nations plan for curbing population growth.
At the heart of that document was the new consensus that the best method of family planning was not withdrawal but empowerment. A combination of education and economic development, access to modern birth control and safe abortion would enable and encourage women to plan families, smaller families.
The developing countries that met in Cairo had long experience with population-control-through-poverty. They had come to the conclusion that it was not only inhumane, it was a failure. The poorest were still overwhelmed by children.
What was missing from the lives of these women was not just a birth control method. It was also a motive. The belief in a better future. And so the world promised to invest in that future.
The Cairo plan for the world and the Republican plan for America are as different as empowering women and punishing them. As different as a hope and a threat.
If there's a consensus in this country, it's that girls should become women before they become mothers. But the single method most conspicuously absent from the Republican Birth Control Plan is the infusion of hope.
In this unraveling country, I am afraid, we need everything they need in developing countries. The sorry truth is that we too have to offer our young some proof that their lives will truly be different, better, if they wait.
For that, American girls need more than "Boys Town."
8, Ellen Goodman is a syndicated columnist.