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Written by Amanda Marcotte for RHRealityCheck.org - News, commentary and community for reproductive health and justice.
As those of us who’ve been following the anti-choice movement for years can attest, the biggest stumbling block for them has been finding a way to make a move towards restricting access to contraception while still trying to keep something like a decent reputation with the public. Attacking sexual liberation and women’s rights has always been at the heart of the anti-choice movement, but in order to sell such a radical agenda as mainstream, they’ve had to make sentimental and often bad faith claims about simply wanting to protect fetal life. While making frowny faces in the direction of pregnant women who want to terminate has been an effective strategy for restricting abortion rights, however, it has its limits when it comes to attacking women’s ability to prevent pregnancy in the first place.
Not that there haven’t been attempts at using “pro-life” arguments to fight not just abortion but contraception. Some anti-choicers have floated the idea that contraception leads to abortion—claiming that women wouldn’t have abortions if they didn’t get it in their silly heads that they should be able to have sex for pleasure instead of procreation. (Never mind that women throughout history have attempted abortion by all sorts of means, whether their cultures had contraception or not.) A slightly more effective argument has been to claim, with no evidence in support, that popular, female-controlled hormonal birth control is the same thing as abortion. This hasn’t done much to convince anyone, but at least establishes a convoluted, disingenuous cover story about embryonic life that anti-choicers can hide behind while they attack contraception. But even then, it has limits, since while the “pill is abortion” argument can be used to attack hormonal contraception, even anti-choicers haven’t been bold enough to claim that condoms or other barrier methods are also abortion.
Then, just this year, it seems that the anti-choice movement came to a nationwide realization: Their past attempts to create some logical-sounding connection between contraception and fetal life were a waste of time and energy. … Read more
3 Comments
Thank you for this diary. I don’t think women are paying nearly enough attention to these issues that impact us primarily. I wonder if young women take for granted everything their predecessors fought for and bequeathed to them. When I was young, I was surrounded by women who passed on to me the experiences they and their friends had suffered and the celebrations for the battles they had won. At some point, we went on offense to defend women who choose to become mothers (and their decisions regarding work and family made whether by desire or necessity), but we’ve ignored all the women who’ve made and make different decisions as our rights to those choices are attacked.
Interestingly, a recent promo for local news in NYC was about contaception causing unhappy marriages…. Say wha’? thought I, and made no attempt to watcht the segment.
But, in light of this post, maybe this is part of a PR plan to undermine confidence in contraception. I can’t recall if a particular contraceptive method was mentioned. It just seemed so ridiculous I paid litle attention.
Did anyone in the NYC area see that piece of (probably) planted “journalism”? I googled and found nothing.
Women who have too many closely-spaced children often die early and the effects of those pregnancies often exacerbates already existing health problems.
I saw this happen with my own mother, who had six children in ten years and who inherited heart disease from her father, and who died at 54, from congestive heart failure. She had already fought and won against cervical cancer, but that, too, took a toll on her health.
I simply do not understand conservatives thinking that it is better for children to grow up without a mother… what ARE they thinking?
I keep repeating this story every time there is a post about contraception. Frankly, I’d like to see some conservatives recant their talking points and agree that children should not grow up without their mothers.