Was the Sexual Revolution a Mistake? If you’re conservative, the answer’s obvious: Um, duh? Yes. If you’re liberal, the answer’s also obvious: What? Are you some kind of cave person? David Friedman isn’t really conservative or liberal though, so he he thinks it through. His introduction sets the tone:
One would expect the availability of reliable contraception and legal abortion to have sharply reduced the number of children born out of wedlock. In fact it was accompanied, in the U.S. and abroad, with a steep increase in that number. Correlation is not causation but it does raise the possibility of causation, especially when it goes in precisely the opposite of the predicted direction.