A funny thing happened on the way to Paradise

As often happens to me in blogworld, I began with every intention of writing about one issue - in this case, composing a post on new data describing how the increased use of ethanol can actually exacerbate climate change - and ended up shifting focus entirely to another topic. (So that you won't call me a tease, read the abstracts of the research here and here, with more to come next time.) Instead, I will direct my attention to the corrosive effects of liberalism on empire.

If described a part of the "civilized" world where out-of-wedlock teen birthrates rose from 16.7 percent to 91.8 percent in 40 years, many of you would conclude that I was referring to some inner city area, perhaps Washington, D.C., West Philadelphia, Detroit or South Central Los Angeles. The parameters of such a scenario were detailed recently in an article that bemoaned the mindset behind the egregious choices that young women make in conceiving and rendering a child before it is prudent to do so.

Obviously, there are millions of sensible young girls, but for many, having a baby seems to be the logical, and even desirable, result of their teenage flings.

If it wasn't, they'd stir themselves to do something to prevent themselves getting pregnant, like taking the morning-after pill.

But they don't. Because the benefits of doing nothing to stop it are obvious.

Suddenly, they can give birth to someone who will offer unconditional love in a bleak, busy, money-grubbing world.

The [government] will offer a free home away from nagging parents. They will have independence, sexual freedom and no more humiliating exams to try to pass - because, more than likely, their education will fall by the wayside.

Nowadays, ask some girls why they want a baby so badly and they will say vaguely: "Oh, I want to fulfill myself."

Clearly for the worse, such a fate has befallen the U.K. The land of stiff-lipped stoics that withstood the hegemonic designs of both Napoleon and Hitler has succumbed to the ravages of liberalism gone wild. In her Daily Mail op-ed, Fay Weldon argues for mandatory sterilization of British teen girls by informing her readers that Britain's rate of teenage conceptions - 41.3 per 1,000 in 20005 - makes it into "a disgrace among the nations - the worst offenders in Europe." As it stands, the teen pregnancy rate in the U.K. is "twice as high as in Germany, three times as high as in France and six times as high as in the Netherlands."

What was once the the realm of Shakespeare and Churchill is now the home of chavs and chavettes. Weldon lays much of the blame on England's destigmatization of behaviors that were once considered beyond the pale by contrasting the culturally predominant "condemnation of the sexually imprudent" - which she further describes as "a desperate attempt to stop girls from doing what came naturally until a father and a home could be provided" - with the laissez-faire attitudes of today's Britons, commenting that "pregnancy no longer holds the fear for teenagers it once did," and adding that for many "a child has actually become a kind of perverse badge of [honor]."

So to, she goes on to note that, as Lefties here in the States are wont to do, the British government "has tried everything to stop pregnancy rates rising - from school matrons to a blizzard of sex education, to free condoms and morning-after pills," all to no avail.

It seems that many of today's girls just like being pregnant, and emotionally and physically - not just practically - have more to gain than lose if they are. Sex education hasn't helped, and may indeed have harmed.

Freud's view of the psychosexual development of the child has been ignored. His opinion was that you interfere with the "latency" phase of ages nine to 12 at your peril, for fear of stopping further development.

In Freud's theory, the latency phase is when a child unconsciously denies the facts of life until he or she is ready to face them. If unpalatable facts are forced down the child's throat it's [traumatizing], and progression to sexual maturity is halted.

In other words, if you start teaching the birds and the bees too early, all that the nine, ten or 11-year-olds will do is want to experiment with what they have been taught before they have the emotional capability to deal with the fallout.

Sounding well past the point of exasperation, Weldon observes that "we know everything there is to know about preventing babies, yet still girls take risks." But it would seem that young women in Britain and elsewhere do not see out-of-wedlock conception or childbirth as risks at all, but rather as behavioral sine qua nons that are incentivized by a more than generous system of entitlements.

As much is the end state of rampant liberalism in all of its variants. By way of an atomizing multiculturalism, passivity in the face of a decades-long crime wave and an initiative-stifling welfare state, the character of a once-proud society has been reduced to cultural rubble. In the face of all the foregoing, that a young woman would do the "grown-up" with a unsuitable suitor might be only the first - if not the least - of the risks she will assume.