Jennifer Roback Morse needs some help finishing an article for the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs—can you pitch in? It's an unusual situation, since Morse—the author of Love and Economics: Why the Laissez-Faire Family Doesn't Work and Smart Sex: Finding Life-Long Love in a Hook-Up World, who describes herself on her website as "your coach for the culture wars"—usually seems to have all the answers. But in her most recent article, "Taxpayers Holding the Baby," coming up with a solution to the fact that in 2004, 55% of births in the state of Oklahoma were paid for by Medicaid, seems to have her stumped. I decided to take a closer look at her argument and see, as an advocate for reproductive health and pregnant and birthing women's rights, if I couldn't help out.

The weird thing is, according to Morse, Oklahoma women are actually doing everything right. As her article points out, since only 19% of all Oklahoma births are to unmarried women (versus 37% nationwide), "we can't blame single mothers or absent fathers" for the problem. Would that we could! It's so much easier when we can blame poor people themselves for their socially destructive insistence on being poor. And Morse is generally so busy blaming single moms, gay people, "safe sex," contraception, and Jessica Lynch for all manner of social problems under the sun, I can see how finding a scapegoat for the high Medicaid birth rate in Oklahoma might have her scratching her head.

But Morse is not one to give up easily, and she knows that if she looks hard enough, she can find someone or something to blame. Toward the end of the article, her search finally pays off: It turns out that the high Medicaid birth rate in Oklahoma is actually the fault of…drumroll please… people like me! As a 30-year-old feminist, childless, unmarried, cohabiting, condom-using, grad-school-attending, Massachusetts-born former New York resident, it turns out that I am actually partially to blame for the deep injustice currently confronting Oklahoma taxpayers—me and the nefarious culture of sex-without-consequences that I represent. Here's what happened:

The Baby Boom generation was freaked out over the Population Bomb. In the over-populated world of the future, we were all going to die from starvation. Nobody in 1970 predicted an epidemic of obesity. Inspired by feminism, scared by Zero Population Growth zealots, and seduced by the fun of sex without babies, the Baby Boom generation barely reproduced itself. Along the way, they created legal structures and social norms that supported minimal reproduction. Today, under-population is our looming social problem, with infertility and a lifetime of loneliness the major personal crises of our time.

Here's where I begin to feel sure that Morse and I are reading from two different scripts. Agreed that infertility and loneliness totally suck, but are they really the "major personal crises of our time"? What about the fact that a woman is battered every 15 seconds in the United States, usually by her intimate partner? I might even go so far to say that not having any form of health insurance might be reaching personal crisis proportions for 43 million of us. On second thought, I guess that's less of a "personal crisis" and more of a "social problem"—though admittedly, it doesn't hold a candle to "under-population," even though we have the highest birth rate and the highest adolescent pregnancy rate (not to mention the second worst infant mortality rate) in the industrialized world. And speaking of social problems and personal crises, what about the fact that African-American women are four times as likely to die in pregnancy or childbirth than white American women? Or that we as a nation have the highest incarceration rate in the world?

But I'm getting off-topic…let's get back to Morse. Living under the dark cloud of the Baby Boomer's legal structures and social norms, Oklahoma women face the following choices: "They can wait until they are old enough to pay for [settling down, getting married, and starting a family] themselves, and be too old to have kids. Or, they can have assistance from the government to pay for the ordinary costs of childbirth." Morse concludes that "The women of Oklahoma are trying to live sensibly by starting the adult business of forming families earlier in their lives. We need to think about how to help make that more affordable." Absolutely…but if sexuality education, family planning, Medicaid, childcare, public assistance, and state programs to support pregnant and birthing women are all no-nos, then how? A bake sale? You're the economist-turned-homeschooling-homemaker, Dr. Morse—why don't you figure it out?

Editor's note: Jennifer Roback Morse was a presenter at the "Contraception Is Not the Answer" (CINTA) conference last fall.  Check out Rewire's special series on CINTA.