I have previously spoken out about the need for safe and sensible measures to promote womens’s reproductive health and the immeasurable harm done to progress in this field by meddlesome religious bigots. Two of my angrier comments are here and here.
This morning at Leiter Reports, I came across yet another evidence of the foolish and mischievous attempts by social conservatives to derail all attempts to properly educate American teenagers about responsible sex – a precursor to the healthy physical and emotional futures of adult women. Like most sensible adults, I believe that young children have no business indulging in sexual activity. I also believe that prevention is always easier than the cure. Instead of lying and talking down to our children, we must address issues such as unwanted pregnancy, STD and the emotional harm resulting from careless and degrading sexual experience with our kids – both boys and girls. And we have to do it accurately, carefully and compassionately. Information about both abstinence AND safe and proper contraception is an integral part of that education.
One would assume that given their vehement opposition to abortion, conservatives would support contraception which when practiced properly prevents a majority of unwanted pregnancies. But astonishingly enough, they also oppose all effective contraceptive methods BEFORE and AFTER sexual activity that can prevent a pregnancy, insisting only on teaching abstinence, fear and divine retribution. Do they not know that even a chaste teenager may get pregnant against her wishes? Have they not heard of rape? Also, not just teenagers face unwanted pregnancies. Sometimes so do twenty four and thirty year olds and many of them may be "married" women.
Recently, the religious conservatives’ opposition to the Plan B method of contraception and the FDA’s feet dragging in making this drug available over the counter made national news. Disgusted by an FDA that takes its health & safety guidelines straight out of Jerry Falwell’s Medical Handbook (1692, Salem edition), The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has decided to speak out. Physicians plan to advise women to stock up on their Plan B medication and prescriptions. Predictably enough, some conservatives are up in arms and fuming. The fundamentalists’ contradictory positions on abortion and contraception confirms my long held suspicion that chastity is not their goal. They WANT women to become pregnant – as often as possible. A pregnant woman is vulnerable, dependent and in case of an unwanted pregnancy, frightened – therefore easier to control.
"Doctors raised the stakes in the nation’s ongoing battle over emergency contraception Monday with a new campaign that encourages women to get an advance prescription for the "morning-after pill," so it will be readily available later if they have unprotected sex. The "Ask Me" campaign is organized medicine’s most aggressive effort yet to ensure that women have access to emergency contraception when they think they need it. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which represents nearly 50,000 physicians, is the sponsor…. "Accidents happen. Morning afters can be tough," reads a poster for the new campaign. "Ask me today — so you can have it when you need it. Be prepared."
The morning-after pill — a high dose of the same hormones found in birth control pills —work s largely by preventing ovulation or fertilization of an egg, but it may also interfere with a fertilized egg becoming implanted in a woman’s womb. The pill must be taken within 72 hours after unprotected intercourse but is most effective within the first 24 hours. The difficulty is that many women can’t get to their physicians on short notice to ask for a prescription, and large numbers of low-income women don’t have a regular doctor. Some pharmacists have stopped dispensing emergency contraception, citing abortion opposition.
The campaign is in response to the Food and Drug Administration’s refusal to let the morning-after pill, also known as Plan B, be sold over-the-counter. "Many of us feel the FDA’s actions have been unfair, unkind, unconscionable, unsafe and biased," said Dr. Iffath Hoskins, of the ob-gyn department at Lutheran Medical Center in Brooklyn, N.Y.
Conservatives fumed at the medical group’s initiative. "We think this is a totally irresponsible move on the part of the doctors," said Jim Sedlak, vice president of the American Life League, an organization that says emergency contraception is a form of abortion.
Conservatives have mobilized opposition to emergency contraception because they say it is a form of abortion and that it could lead to more promiscuous sexual behavior. With their new campaign, ob-gyn doctors "will be pushing products that kill babies in the womb," Sedlak said. Instead of being backup protection against an unwanted pregnancy, Plan B will likely become a "primary method of birth control" for many young people, he said."
Women, listen to your doctors.
Accidental Blogger 
2 responses to “Pregnancy As Punishment”
It’s not just emergency contraception that they are ultimately after:
“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…in a 1999 essay…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.’”
See, “Contra-Contraception,” http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/07/magazine/07contraception.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
I completely agree with your analysis (here, and in your past posts) of the mysoginistic undertones of this crusade. If I were more of a Freudian, I’d say that these folks have some serious problems with Mom to work out on the therapist’s couch.
Moreover, I find the position loathsomely anti-poor. Anyone who has ever lived on a limited income and either had or crunched the numbers in considering having kids knows that, as rewarding as parenthood can be, it’s a huge expense. Disallowing parents to plan when and how many children they have is the surest way to keep them poor. And yet, the same people who rail against contraception and abortion are the first ones to scold and humiliate “welfare moms,” or working married parents who can’t afford childcare and raise “latch-key kids.”
Not to mention– how do these anti-contraception advocates expect their wives (a label that ssumes, demonstratively falsely, that they all actually refrain from pre-marital sex) to enjoy sex, when any intercourse may result in another, possibly dangerous, pregnancy, and another mouth to feed? I guess they don’t want them to. Make that reason number 1,894,289 not to get romantically involved with a conservtive.
LikeLike
Hi Anna, long time no see -Joe too seems to have disappeared.
You are completely right about the poverty angle. I made the following comment to Brian Leiter when he provided a link to the article, “With two spirited young daughters of their own, I wonder what Laura Bush tells her husband in private. But of course, rich girls and their parents will have few problems grappling with sexual mishaps – the price is always paid by the poor.” I did not expand the post to include the very disturbing issue of how these cunning, controlling and cruel measures disproportionately penalize poor women because the post was getting longer and I was getting angrier.
Aside from the general misogyny of the anti-contraception crusade, its specific effect on poor women also means that there will always be an available pool of poor and desperate people in the labor force for the same folks to exploit.
LikeLike