The Right's War on Contraception

The world was riveted when Natalie Holloway went missing in Aruba last year. Dan Brown's best-selling novel, "The Da Vinci Code," mesmerizes readers and movie-goers by spinning the tale around how Mary Magdalene went missing from Christian theology except as a reformed harlot.

In an equally riveting mystery, women have disappeared from the story of attacks on contraception.

When the New York Times Magazine published a watershed story in early May, "The War on Contraception," the Times Web site noted it was their most e-mailed story of the day. Of course it was snapped up. What rational person can believe that any but crackpots could oppose using birth control to prevent pregnancy?

I tore into the article hoping it would unearth and expose the true reproductive rights battle lines. This is a struggle often masquerading as a moral controversy. At its roots, however, it's about sex and power; whether women will be allowed to keep striving for an equal place in society or confined, as much as possible, to the nursery.

The author, Russell Shorto, did a fine job detailing the dueling philosophies of abstinence-only sex education versus comprehensive sex education. Comprehensive programs teach decision-making skills and provide medically accurate information, including facts about abstinence, sex, relationships and childbearing. Abstinence-only programs exhort unmarried people to "just say no."

Primal Motive Missed

My high hopes for Shorto's article plummeted when he failed to discuss the underlying, almost primal, opposition to women's equality inherent in both the abstinence-only movement and the attacks on birth-control access.

Shorto also failed to discuss the female casualties of this contraception battle. A clue to their whereabouts can be found in a Guttmacher Institute study, "A Tale of Two Americas for Women," published the same week as the Shorto piece.

Guttmacher finds a 29 percent rise in unintended pregnancies and abortions since 1994 among low-income women whose access to low-cost contraception has declined dramatically as a result of the attacks on contraception. For example, funding for Title X of the Public Health Services Act -- the backbone of subsidized family planning health services for low-income uninsured women -- is less than half what it was in 1980 when adjusted for inflation. The program faces a pitched battle in Congress every year just to maintain level funding.

Meanwhile, funding for abstinence-only programs that provide no health services has catapulted from near-zero to almost equal Title X. It's no surprise then that low-income women feel the heel of this particular anti-woman boot.

Among higher-income women, in contrast, unintended pregnancies and abortions have declined by a significant 20 percent. They can afford the rising costs of birth control including very effective newer methods such as injectable contraceptives. They have greater access to uncensored information on the Web and the wherewithal to drive across town to get their prescription filled when their neighborhood pharmacist refuses.

Politically Invisible

Restrictions on access fall most heavily on young and low-income women who are the most vulnerable, have the fewest resources with which to advocate for themselves and are thus politically speaking invisible.

Birth control frees women to forge their own paths by separating sex from procreation. This strikes fear into those who, underneath it all, oppose the increased social power women attain from expanded equality and justice. Proof of this?

James Leon Holmes, nominated by President Bush and confirmed by the Senate to the U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Arkansas, says it straight out in an article: "It is not coincidental that the feminist movement brought with it artificial contraception ... To the extent we adopt the feminist principle that the distinction between the sexes is of no consequence and should be disregarded in the organization of society and the Church, we are contributing to the culture of death." His stated solution is that " ... the wife is to subordinate herself to her husband."