Bloodless Coup

The Pill=Satan

No, I am not "shitting you."

"I cannot imagine any development in human history, after the Fall, that has had a greater impact on human beings than the pill," Mohler continued. "

So, remember when I was telling you about how it wasn't just a pro-"baby" thing?

The wheels of history have a tendency to roll back over the same ground. For the past 33 years — since, as they see it, the wanton era of the 1960's culminated in the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 — American social conservatives have been on an unyielding campaign against abortion. But recently, as the conservative tide has continued to swell, this campaign has taken on a broader scope. Its true beginning point may not be Roe but Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 case that had the effect of legalizing contraception. "We see a direct connection between the practice of contraception and the practice of abortion," says Judie Brown, president of the American Life League, an organization that has battled abortion for 27 years but that, like others, now has a larger mission. "The mind-set that invites a couple to use contraception is an antichild mind-set," she told me. "So when a baby is conceived accidentally, the couple already have this negative attitude toward the child. Therefore seeking an abortion is a natural outcome. We oppose all forms of contraception."

The American Life League is a lay Catholic organization, and for years — especially since Pope Paul VI's "Humanae Vitae" encyclical of 1968 forbade "any action which either before, at the moment of or after sexual intercourse, is specifically intended to prevent procreation" — being anti-contraception was largely a Catholic thing. Protestants and other non-Catholics tended to look on curiously as they took part in the general societywide acceptance of various forms of birth control. But no longer. Organizations like the Christian Medical and Dental Associations, which inject a mixture of religion and medicine into the social sphere, operate from a broadly Christian perspective that includes opposition to some forms of birth control. Edward R. Martin Jr., a lawyer for the public-interest law firm Americans United for Life, whose work includes seeking to restrict abortion at the state level and representing pharmacists who have refused to prescribe emergency contraception, told me: "We see contraception and abortion as part of a mind-set that's worrisome in terms of respecting life. If you're trying to build a culture of life, then you have to start from the very beginning of life, from conception, and you have to include how we think and act with regard to sexuality and contraception." Dr. Joseph B. Stanford, who was appointed by President Bush in 2002 to the F.D.A.'s Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee despite (or perhaps because of) his opposition to contraception, sounded not a little like Daniel Defoe in a 1999 essay he wrote: "Sexual union in marriage ought to be a complete giving of each spouse to the other, and when fertility (or potential fertility) is deliberately excluded from that giving I am convinced that something valuable is lost. A husband will sometimes begin to see his wife as an object of sexual pleasure who should always be available for gratification."

...

Many Christians who are active in the evolving anti-birth-control arena state frankly that what links their efforts is a religious commitment to altering the moral landscape of the country. In particular, and not to put too fine a point on it, they want to change the way Americans have sex. Dr. Stanford, the F.D.A. adviser on reproductive-health drugs, proclaimed himself "fully committed to promoting an understanding of human sexuality and procreation radically at odds with the prevailing views and practices of our contemporary culture." Focus on the Family posts a kind of contraceptive warning label on its Web site: "Modern contraceptive inventions have given many an exaggerated sense of safety and prompted more people than ever before to move sexual expression outside the marriage boundary." Contraception, by this logic, encourages sexual promiscuity, sexual deviance (like homosexuality) and a preoccupation with sex that is unhealthful even within marriage.

"Unhealthful." Define that one for us, please, do.

"There is evidence that there is a contraceptive effect of breast feeding after fertilization. While a woman is breast feeding, the first ovulation is characterized by a short luteal phase, or second half of the cycle. It's thought that because of that, implantation does not occur." In other words, if the emergency contraception pill causes abortions by blocking implantation, then by the same definition breast feeding may as well.

So, the reactionaries that are squicked out by the La Leche mom's public feedings now have pro-life ammunition. Sheesh. Not that they might think, oh, well, then, plan B isn't so different than nature.

Oh wait, did I say nature? My bad. There should have been some reference to Divine Design.

Here's a guy who doesn't understand the basic principle underlying his job.

Ron Stephens is both a pharmacist and a Republican state legislator in Illinois, one of the states that are currently battlegrounds between pharmacists who claim the right to refuse to fill prescriptions for emergency contraceptives and women's and civil rights groups that argue that pharmacists must fill all prescriptions presented to them. Stephens not only supports the pharmacists' right of refusal but he also refuses to fill prescriptions for emergency contraception himself. He does, however, fill prescriptions for the birth control pill. When I asked him recently to explain his thinking on the two drugs, he said: "It's the difference between stopping a pregnancy from happening and ending a pregnancy. My understanding of the science is that the morning-after pill can end a pregnancy, whereas birth control pills will make a woman's body believe she is already pregnant so that the egg will not be fertilized." And what if studies show that, in fact, both drugs can prevent implantation? "Everyone has their natural prejudice," Stephens replied. "I'm going to understand it my way, and the issue is that you should not be forced to do something you believe is immoral."

Do you think a mason who didn't believe in the optimal mixing ratio of water to cement would keep his job? Or an aeronautic engineer who denied the existence of downforce? Because this guy, talking about "his understanding of science" is pretty much showing he doesn't have an understanding of science.

In the current, evolving movement against contraception, therefore, some groups soft-pedal their position. "Concerned Women for America does not take a position regarding birth control," Wendy Wright, president of that influential, 500,000-member, biblically-based organization, told me. She went on to say, however, that C.W.A. does "educate regarding how certain birth control methods operate." Specifically, the group offers a brochure titled "High-Tech Birth Control: Health Care or Health Risk?" to those who call seeking guidance. Most methods of birth control can pose health risks. A 2005 World Health Organization study, for instance, found a connection between some forms of the pill and cancer. But the C.W.A. brochure goes well beyond this. Its section on emergency contraception advises that "its main function is to abort a living human embryo." One function of the birth control pill, it states, is to induce "a chemical abortion." The section on the IUD indicates none of its practical benefits (its 99 percent effectiveness in preventing pregnancy, its reversibility) and consists mostly of a litany of health complications, many of which health experts refute.

Gee, what a surprise. Because of course, we know that experts are all liberals who think that things like facts and science actually mean something.

And check the arrogant authoritarianism out here:

An editorial in the conservative magazine Human Events characterized the effect of such legislation as "enabling more low-income women to have consequence-free sex."

Got it? If you're poor, you need to be punished and burdened by the consequences of sex.

Oh, wait, isn't the consequence of sex a desired and loved bundle of joy that's God's own blessing?

Fucking hypocrite assholes.

And I'm just skipping over the whole "purity ball" creep out. Check out Digby and Digby again, not to mention Feministe, Hugo, etc and so forth.

Abstinence education, meanwhile, gets withering criticism from the other side. "There is still not a single, sound peer-reviewed study that shows abstinence programs work," says William Smith of Siecus. Peter Bearman, director of the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy at Columbia University, who has analyzed virginity pledge programs including Rector's, says: "The money being poured into these programs is out of control. And the thing is this is not about public health. It's a moral revolution. The goal is not stopping unwanted pregnancy but stopping sexual expression."

Well, duh.

In much of Western Europe, abortion and contraception are available and fully covered by insurance. The dark side of this, according to some commentators, is the declining birth rate in Europe. It takes an average of 2.1 children per woman to keep a population constant. Italy and Spain are tied for the lowest fertility rate in Western Europe, at 1.28. Even Ireland, the country with the highest birth rate, at 1.86, is suffering a population drain. (The U.S. rate is 2.09.) From 1994 to 2004, the average age at which European women became mothers rose by about 16 months, to 28.2. This, according to social conservatives, is the black hole into which the contraceptive mentality is drawn.

So, it's a dark-sided thing that women aren't forced to bear children they don't want. I can see it now, the quasi-Martha slogan: Repressing women's free will...it's a good thing.

And, around the world, countries in which abortion is legal and contraception is widely available tend to rank among the lowest in rate of abortion, while those that outlaw abortion — notably in Central and South America and Africa — have rates that are among the highest. According to Stanley K. Henshaw of the Guttmacher Institute, recent drops in abortion rates in Eastern Europe are due to improved access to contraceptives. The U.S. falls somewhere in the middle in rate of abortion: at 21 per 1,000 women of reproductive age, it is roughly on par with Nigeria (25), much better than Peru (56) but far worse than the Netherlands (9).

Oh, damn those pesky facts again! They interfere with religious absolutism every fucking time!

And, now, regular readers will once again hear me say what I've been talking about for a long time, that the social conservatives in this country are more like communists than anything else. Why?

The problem with this, as far as American social conservatives are concerned, is that it treats symptoms rather than what they see as the underlying disease: an outlook that is focused on the individual at the expense of family and society. Their ultimate goal is not a number — the percentage of abortions or unintended pregnancies — but an ideal, a way for people to think and behave.

Voila! The New Socialist Man New Fundamentalist American.

It's too bad there isn't a hell, I suppose. At least then we could take comfort that these sanctimonious assholes who want to tell you that your wife shouldn't give you a blowjob are going to be frying in the fiery depths right next to their ideological papa, Stalin.

Posted by binky at May 7, 2006 11:42 PM | TrackBack | Posted to El Infierno de kansas | Extremism | Fishwife Central | Health | Religion | Reproductive Autonomy | Science