Where Are The Babies?
The “manufacturing crisis” in Connecticut is not about losing business to foreign countries such as China or South Carolina.
The manufacturing crisis in Connecticut is not about Connecticut Light & Power executives, sitting in oak-trimmed offices, drinking cognac and smoking cigars and raising our electricity rates 876 percent per year.
The manufacturing crisis in Connecticut is not about a Democratic Party majority in the General Assembly that treats business in general, and manufacturing in particular, as a laboratory for weird European work-rule and wage experiments.
The manufacturing crisis in Connecticut is not about being home to 40 or 50 snobby little liberal arts colleges that produce too many poets and newspaper columnists and not enough engineers and tool-and-die craftsmen.
No, the manufacturing crisis in Connecticut begins in the drug store and migrates to the bedroom. We aren’t producing enough babies.
According to a recent ACNielsen survey, the Hartford-New Haven area is one of the strongest markets in the country for the sale of over-the-counter contraceptives. Aren’t we the lucky ones.
With a population growth pattern on the order of North Dakota and other Canadian provinces, Connecticut is at risk of losing another Congressional seat, of seeing the average age of its population rise from the current 85 to 87, and of dumping plans for Hartford’s exciting Front Street development project and replacing it with a geriatric medical center.
Connecticut patted itself on its old, sore, bony back when national studies found that the credit crisis and foreclosure frenzy has had less impact here than in many other places. Of course, the explanation is that while other states have actually been building new homes for a growing population, Connecticut has only been building new warehouses so that CVS and Walgreen have somewhere to store the extra supplies of condoms and contraceptive creams and gels and other yucky stuff.
Is it not enough that you can’t buy a bottle of wine in a grocery store, a bottle of whiskey on Sunday, the bars close early and the Hartford “Welcome Center” closes at 5 p.m.? So why do we need responsible sex?
The impetus for the lack of Connecticut baby production stems from the 1964 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Griswold vs. Connecticut, in which the high court tossed out Connecticut’s economic development strategy of discouraging and criminalizing contraception, to increase baby production.
The law in question dated back to 1879, when Connecticut first recognized that it had better produce enough babies to compensate for the outflow of population to warm, happy states with low taxes and cockfight arenas and indoor smoking.
As the state Supreme Court had ruled in upholding the law, “courts may not interfere with the exercise by a state of the police power to conserve the public safety and welfare, including health and morals, and to deal with the reality that everyone is moving to New Hampshire, where they have no income tax and the liquor is cheap.”
Connecticut’s perfectly reasonable effort to encourage baby production drew national snickers, in large part because the anti-contraception laws applied not only to oversexed, unmarried young adults who just met on an Internet site, but also to old married couples who only had sex on New Year’s Eve, after downing a bottle of mediocre sparkling wine.
And thus, the great slide began. Waterbury stopped making brass. Danbury stopped making hats. Hartford stopped making typewriters. And the whole damn state stopped making babies.
A manufacturing crisis? Go have sex. No stopping at the drug store. Just do it.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
WBJ Web Partners
Most Recent
Most Recent
0 Comments