Female Sexuality Still Terrifying to Conservative Lawmakers

The Republican attack on Planned Parenthood, in the form of the House zeroing out funding for the organization in the continuing resolution on the federal budget, seemingly came out of nowhere. For decades, the kinds of services provided with federal dollars by Planned Parenthood---contraception, STD testing and treatment, cancer screening---had been assumed non-controversial by the Beltway media. The reproductive rights debate was framed mainly as a fight over bodily autonomy versus fetal life, between secular humanists and religious folks who believed fertilized eggs had souls.

So why then an attack funding STD treatment and contraception? Why, all of a sudden, do you have politicians like Rep. Steve King railing against Planned Parenthood not because of fetal life---after all, depriving women of contraception access will likely increase the abortion rate---but because Planned Parenthood is “invested in promiscuity”? Why do you have a conservative figurehead like Sean Hannity arguing not that abortion is wrong because it’s taking a life, but because teenage girls shouldn't be making out in the back seats of cars in the first place? Why is Gov. Scott Walker not only attacking collective bargaining rights in the state of Wisconsin, but trying to eliminate contraception coverage (but not erectile dysfunction medication) on the grounds of “morality”?

The dusty old argument that female sexuality is a subversive force that needs to be strictly controlled isn’t as dead as we thought. The mainstream conservative movement is bringing it out of hibernation, and this time with a twist: now they’re arguing that women need to have their rights taken from them for their own good.

In the decades prior to Griswold v. Connecticut and Roe v. Wade--the Supreme Court decisions that legalized contraception and abortion, respectively--the arguments for restrictions on women’s reproductive rights barely needed explanation. Millennia of male dominance, from the mythology of Eve to the The Seven Year Itch, held that female sexuality so threatened the bonds of society that controlling it took precedence over allowing women rights. But after these groundbreaking Supreme Court decisions established women’s right to privacy, opponents of reproductive rights were forced to switch gears.

Enter the fetus. Striking a pose of concern for “fetal rights” allowed the anti-choice movement to attack at least one tool women use to claim ownership over their own sexuality, and sadly, anti-choicers made dramatic inroads against abortion rights hiding behind the fetus. But claims about fetal life don’t produce a clear path to arguing against access to contraception and medical care for STDs. Not that conservatives haven’t tried. The fringe of the anti-choice movement has attacked (at times, with mild success) contraception access with claims that hormonal contraception is a form of abortion, but this kind of argument is stalled because of the scientific and common sense evidence against it.

Returning to arguments that paint female sexuality as a corrosive force that must be controlled by restricting women’s rights has been a steady desire in the anti-choice movement. But how, when the public sees the sadism in that argument for what it is?  The answer that conservatives have happened upon is to argue that women need to be denied their rights for their own good.

For years now, arguing against women’s rights for women’s supposed wellbeing has been worked with surprising success on the already contentious field of abortion. Arguments that women are victims of their own freedom have been successfully wielded to restrict women’s access to abortion. In various states, legislators have passed mandatory waiting periods and ultrasound laws by arguing that they need to protect women from their own rash decisions. Even the Supreme Court engaged with the paternalistic argument, banning a certain later-term abortion procedure because, as Justice Kennedy explained in the majority decision, women might later regret the decision.