Two mysteries haunt the relationship of men and women. First, there has been an inexorable change in their productive and reproductive roles. In both areas, men’s place is declining; their share of income and wealth falls as women’s rise, and an increasing number of men are less involved with their mates and offspring.

The second mystery is why the number of single mothers and abortions has risen at the same time there are more and better contraceptives than ever in history. These two phenomena are linked, and the linkage helps explain the tension between the sexes.

The introduction of widespread contraception use in the 1960’s caused this revolutionary break between men and women. It put biological disputes at the center of our national life women’s right, abortion, out-of wedlock births, The “pill” emancipated women and placed into question existing moral religious system that focused on controlling sexual behavior. It allowed women to keep men in the dark as to whether sex could lead to pregnancy, and reduced confidence that the children attributed to them were their own the idea that biologists call “paternity certainty”

After the pill, women could be sexually liberated and still remain in control while at the same time men had less control of impact of their own sexuality.

The pill should have made abortion less necessary. But many women continued to have uncontracepted sex and got pregnant, and the men in their lives fled from them, contrary to the past, when shotgun weddings sometimes resulted in half the marriages in some communities. Women had the children but didn’t marry the fathers, and the result was an explosion of out-of-wedlock births, which now account between a quarter and two thirds of babies in industrial countries except Japan. Daughters are being raised to be able to take care of themselves. The divorce rate and the number of people living alone make this a necessity. But the result of dual male and female economic autonomy is that interdependence is less necessary.

Anyway, it’s not that easy being a guy these days. In the 1950’s, family life reflected the reality that a man and woman would marry, have children and reflected the reality that a man for the rest of his days. (Of course, many women also worked in the economy and their work at home was invaluable.) In this era, family life is under siege: Young men face real uncertainty about being able to earn a living to support themselves, let alone their families, and lots of women want to have their children alone. There are no real fathers for those kids. And the relationship between men and women who brought them into the world is going very poorly.