Rick Santorum has started a fight over the morality of contraception; clearly, many people think it an immoral force, in that it permits – in Santorum’s words – people to “do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”

In other words, contraception and abortion allow people to have sex without consequences. And conservatives believe there should be consequences for behavior that conservatives consider to be beyond the pale. Nature, after all, had over millenia a tendency to inflict children, and disease, upon those who engaged in “inappropriate” sexual behavior. Now we’ve subverted nature. Now man has stepped in where once God ruled. And conservatives believe, with some justification, that “inappropriate” sexual behavior has increased specifically because we’ve eliminated some of its consequences.

And so, this belief continues, if we somehow managed to either convince people to forego contraception or abortion, or actually limited access to both via legislation (so much for small government), then we might actually tamp down on the incidence of “irresponsible” sexual behavior itself. Shorn of the “safety net” represented by the pill, or condoms, or abortion – people would have less sex, because they’d be afraid of what might happen.

At least one study has suggested that the legalization of abortion appears to have led to an increase in sexual activity; but that’s not the same thing as saying that if we recrminalize it, or restrict access to it, current sexual activity will decrease. Perhaps it will, for some.

But others, caught up in the heat of the moment, will continue along the high wire, without the net. We won’t become a chaste society by inflicting the “consequences” of sex on those who dare commit the act; and in fact, society may become even poorer because of it, for as one study notes, there is “evidence that lower costs of abortion led to improved outcomes … in the form of an increased likelihood of college graduation, lower rates of welfare use, and lower odds of being a single parent.”

It stands to reason, then, that if we restrict access to abortion and contraception – the costs to society will rise at a time when society can least afford it.

That’s a far cry from the moral and emotional argument made by social conservatives, but it’s a rational argument, and it comes down to this: Would you, as a conservative, be willing to pay a higher tax rate to cover these increased societal costs?

How can the answer be anything but “yes?”