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TechnoratiWhen pro-choicers accuse anti-choicers of being anti-contraception they're often taken as crying wolf -- even though no anti-choice organization explicitly endorses birth control and despite the prominent anti-choice role of the Catholic Church, which explicitly bans contraception. After all, goes the complacent point of view, most women, and most couples, use some form of birth control. Opposition to it seems like something out of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, a novel whose futuristic vision of women's subjection to rightwing Christian patriarchs no less a shrewd social critic than Mary McCarthy found preposterous when she reviewed it in the New York Times Book Review in 1986.
The Bush Administration seems bent on giving Atwood material for a sequel. Last month, Health and Human Services issued a draft of new regulations which would require health-care providers who receive federal funds to accept as employees nurses and other workers who object to abortion and even to most kinds of birth control. This rule would cover some 500,000 hospitals, clinics, and other medical facilities-- including family planning clinics, which would, absurdly, legally be bound to hire people who will obstruct their very mission. To refuse to hire them, or to fire them, would be to lose funds for discriminating against people who object to abortion for religious or --get this -- moral beliefs.
This represents quite an expansion of health workers' longstanding right not to be involved in abortion. And, incidentally, this respect for moral beliefs only goes one way. A Catholic hospital has no corresponding obigation to hire pro-choice workers or accomodate their moral beliefs by permitting them to offer emergency contraception to rape victims or hand out condoms to the HIV positive; a "crisis pregnancy center" would not have to hire pro-choice counsellors who would tell women that abortion would not really give them breast cancer or leave them sterile. Only anti-choicers, apparently, have moral beliefs that entitle them to jobs they refuse to actually perform.
There are several disturbing elements to this story. One is that even as it fades into history, the Bush Administration is catering to the anti-choice movement's larger agenda of making contraception harder to obtain. What Bush can't give them legislatively, he'll provide administratively, in bits and pieces, under cover of granting workers rights of conscience (the only workers' rights he seems to care about). Remember when it seemed just plain bizarre that a pharmacist could refuse to fill a woman's prescription for emergency contraception or even the Pill? Now pharmacists have that explicit right in four states, and possibly in five more.
Bureaucratic rules and regulations may seem arcane-- how many nurses who think the Pill "kills babies" want to work in family-planning clinics? Actually, they have far-reaching effects. For example, the HHS regulations could invalidate state laws requiring hospitals to offer emergency contraception to rape victims. Moreover, the importance of regulations goes way beyond the actual number of people they affect directly. They shape both how we think of rights and how we decide what normal behavior is. As it becomes more accepted for health care workers to inflict their moral judgments on patients, and customers, the burden shifts onto women seeking care. Instead of asking "what gives the pharmacist the right to refuse to fill her prescription?" and "Why should a birth-control clinic be forced to employ a nurse who won't give out the Pill?" the question becomes "why can't she go to another drugstore or come back to the clinic another day"?
As the blogger Amanda Marcotte argues, antichoicers know they can't ban contraception, but they can redefine it as a lifestyle drug, a luxury, rather than a medical necessity that gets a lot of credit for modern women's good health and longevity. Amazingly, Bill O"Reilly is not the only person who thinks health insurance plans should pay for Viagra but not for the Pill. If you can't afford birth control, just don't have sex, you hussy! The next Administration may not find it so easy to turn this mindset around, and if McCain wins, I doubt it will even try. McCain himself, as I've noted before, has a longstanding record of votes against abortion and birth control -- 125 out of 130 votes in Congress and Senate. The man has a O% rating from NARAL. That he is widely regarded as a "moderate" on reproductive rights is truly incredible.
Another dangerous feature of the proposed rules is that they redefine contraception as abortion. Standard medical authorities define abortion as something that takes place after you become pregnant, that is, after a fertilized egg implants in your womb and sets off a cascade of physical changes in your body. The HHS draft changes all that. It defines abortion as "any procedures, including prescription drugs, that result in the termination of the life of a human being in utero between conception and natural birth, whether before or after implantation.'" According to these rules, you can have an "abortion" without even being pregnant. (The Pill,emergency contraception, and the IUD mostly work by preventing ovulation and fertilization, but anti-choice advocates argue that they prevent implantation, and it is not yet possible to say with 100 percent certainty that this never, ever happens.) These are the knots we get tied up in when religious ideology replaces sound science.
Don't let the Bush administration take away women's right to get legal reproductive health care in a timely and respectful fashion. Support Hillary Clinton and Patty Murray, who are leading the fight in the Senate by emailing your senators here . Better yet, send them a real letter, on paper. As for Congress, So far only 104 Representatives --fewer than one in four --have signed a letter protesting the changes. Call or write yours and demand that they join you in the 21st century.
UPDATE: More info, including lists of Senators and Representatives who've signed on to letters opposing the new regulations here.
Pollitt's writing has appeared in many publications, including The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Ms. and the New York Times. her most recent collection of Nation columns is "Virginity or Death!." Her volume of personal essays, Learning to Drive and Other Life Stories, has just come out from Random House. For more, visit her web site at www.kathapollitt.com.
Copyright © 2008 The Nation
36 Comments so far
Show AllThis reminds me of a google I did about Puerto Rican woman who decided to sterilze themselves back in the 60's and 70's because of the same crap woman are facing today. I think that this will heopfully make woman really question whether if they want to spend the rest of their reproductive lives under the banner of control will they be willing to make this kind of move. If things dont turn around woman will become more subjagated and knowing the woman of today they are not going to want that due to the fact that the woman of today are more independent than those of the past they are not use to this. And maybe this needs to happen yes it is true that they do not want woman to get a tubal ligation. but in most cases she can get it done. I will ask if a representative can come up with a bill that if a woman do not want to have children and she is being told she cant abort nor take the pill. then she should be able to get a tubal ligation after all their is nothing the religious right can say about a womans tubes liek they can with birth control pills or the abortion issue they may give woman a breather of course she will have to know for sure that that is what she wants. sad that she would have to have a surgical procedure in order to be lefted alone.
MiMICCS: I often agree with points you raise, although not often where their conclusions head. The callous disregard for life as posited by the Catholic Church in consigning poor mothers to the fate of more children they cannot feed is cruel beyond measure. Apart from the economics and elite wish to control the masses, the misogyny is breathtaking. "Right to life"? At what price? If ever an oxymoron was devised it is that one as covert cover for a policy of vengeance laid upon women. Tragic that so many lives begin with poverty, depravity and a lack of love or grace.
"prominent anti-choice role of the Catholic Church, which explicitly bans contraceptives"
Actually, the Smiling Pope was assasinated in 1978 after only 33 days on the job for planning to do just that. The liberal Cardinals were coerced to elect an ultra conservative, Pope John Paul II, who stayed with the status quo.
The reason is much of the 3rd world is Catholic, and having them overpopulate their countries helps keep them poor. While their numbers are high, they do not make it much past 45 and their poverty means they consume little. That was Kissingers plan in his NSSM 200 in 1974. If numbers got too high, we used genocide, food or civil war, and HIV.
America is targetted to be the next 3rd world nation by those who plan to give us One World Government. Those leaders in DC are simply agents of the NWO, they are not loyal to America. When they do good, the Queen will knight them. Having us breed like bunnies might be helpful to them.
Meanwhile, as our country is being sold down the river, they got everyone fighting with each other, left vs right, religous vs non-religous, men vs women, black vs white, war vs anti-war, "patriots" vs truthers, AGW faithful vs AGW denialists. Same thing they did in the 60's, it worked then, they do it again, and it will work again.
When, oh when will these long-decayed,dead and dying old men - of whatever religious tradition - learn to keep their putrid fingers off our bodies?
Short answer - not until we teach them, by legal means of course.
GKL: Well you know, some performance enhancing drugs are legal, not wise, but legal. You just wait; there will be hell to pay if a male doesn't get his rx fix when he wants it!
GKL: Well you know, some performance enhancing drugs are legal, not wise, but legal. You just wait; there will be hell to pay if a male doesn't get his rx fix when he wants it!
How about adding to that new proposal on letting your conscience guide whether you fill birth control prescriptions or not that it is ok not to pay your taxes if your conscience rebels against bombing and killing thousands of people to grab their oil and be a war president.
Isn't it ironic that the Christinsanity superstar George Bush is going to China to pay homage to a
"godless" country that forces women to have abortions in the third trimester. I guess profit trumps religion.
.
The current Administration is populated/staffed by a large number of Ultra-Conservative Right Wingers. They are narrow minded and MEAN.
George W. Bush is an idiot and a bully.
Probably the worst President in U.S. History
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All the comments are amazing, however Samson is incorrect, it is not all "crap," and Pollitt is hardly a Dem apologist. HHS's proposal is completely insane and the fact that the Bushpigs think they can actually get away with it is more than alarming, whether it is tied to election politics or not.
I agree with GKL about "what if" pharmacists refused to dispense viagra. That is exactly what needs to happen.
Also, Pollitt's point about how the "moral" issue is totally one sided is excellent and bears repeating:
"This represents quite an expansion of health workers' longstanding right not to be involved in abortion. And, incidentally, this respect for moral beliefs only goes one way. A Catholic hospital has no corresponding obigation to hire pro-choice workers or accomodate their moral beliefs by permitting them to offer emergency contraception to rape victims or hand out condoms to the HIV positive; a "crisis pregnancy center" would not have to hire pro-choice counsellors who would tell women that abortion would not really give them breast cancer or leave them sterile. Only anti-choicers, apparently, have moral beliefs that entitle them to jobs they refuse to actually perform."
Especially love that last sentence. So true.
"MOSCOW, August 5 (Itar-Tass) -- President Dmitry Medvedev has ordered the Foreign Ministry to sign on behalf of Russia the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities approved at the UN General Assembly on December 13, 2006,"
But the last I read was that George W. Bush and the Vatican have refused to sign this convention. That's Compassionate Christianity for you.
50 more points for Obama and freedom of choice.
shakker,
Excellent points. Ovarian cysts are often treated with birth control. And, would the pharmacies employing these objectioners begin refusing to sell condoms? Hey, our local Walgreens sells alcohol (as do two grocery stores that have pharmacies in them). Do you suppose the right-wingers who like to drink would be upset if the clerk or manager of the grocery stores decided they couldn't sell them beer or wine because of their religious beliefs? Sounds like slippery slope, but think about how far this could go...
Opposition to abortion as a form of birth control is reasonable but not practical. Legally, I think is dicey to enforce because only the poor have ever been prevented from getting abortions. The rich always have discrete safe doctors. Other methods of birth control are much more cost effective, and some reduce disease transmission. The other methods of control, abstinence included, must be available, understood and used. As I learned more and more about the REAL facts of sex I was glad I had been careful. After I was married my wife got a urine infection. The antibiotics that cured her made me very sick and we both had to take them to make sure we didn't reinfect each other. I thought at the time NOBODY told me about this. I thought that if this was one time casual sex the woman would never have told me. You need to TRUST your sex partner, you are at their mercy!
Several of my female relatives have been put on birth control pills for medical reasons not related to birth control. Pharmacists need to understand they dispense drugs prescribed by a Doctor and are not moral police.
Here in Colorado, if Amendment 48 passes, it's very likely that RU486 will be illegal. It would define any fertilized egg as a human being with full rights. Those rights would include, I suppose, the right to remain attached to the uterine lining.
NMlib,
Good one! But, I think that being intimate with that man ONCE was enough for a lifetime. Ewwwww! Personally, I would have to be really, really drunk for that!
GKL,
Well -- maybe thinking about Dubya's sex life is a form of birth control unto itself?
Joni Rose,
Knowing how much of an intellectual Bush is, Laura probably convinced him to have sex twice, then told him that must have been why they had twins!
atheist,
Getting a tubal isn't as easy as you think, especially if you are a woman who decides early on not to have children. When I was married and having difficulty with many forms of birth control (the pill, to me, was most reliable but caused greatest amt of side effects) I decided I wanted to be sterilized. I knew this would be a permanent choice, and I also knew that I didn't want to give birth. Period. All of the doctors would say they wouldn't perform the procedure on a childless woman in her 20s. What if I changed my mind? I said, "I'll adopt." What if something happens to your husband and you remarry? I told them it wouldn't matter, I still would not want children. Yet they were willing to talk to my husband about a vasectomy. And they didn't ask him, what if something happens to your wife and you remarry?
Seriously, Joni Rose, thinking about Dubya's sex life grosses me out! Yuk!
Well, we know Laura and Dubya had sex at least once to produce the twins. Wonder what they did for birth control after that? I know if I were Laura, I'd decline to have sex with George on the grounds that it would be mating outside my species.
Wow, we really are going to become a 3rd world ghetto. Without birth control people will be populating like other poorer, non developed nations.
What a great country-no jobs, no healthcare and now no birth control.
Maybe big insurance is tired of picking up the tab.
Even though Bush and McCain oppose birth control and abortion -their wives are pro choice. I do not see them having 10 kids or so just to support their husbands agendas.
I don't know that I would call it a "stealth assault" on reproductive rights. The Bush administration has always been quite flagrant in its contempt for women. Really, is anyone surprised by this? From the morons who brought us the dumbshit, ineffectual abstinence only sex education?
Still, we've taken a lot for granted for a long time. I, for one, never thought I'd see the day when such basic rights as choosing when or if to have a child; or having the choice to terminate a pregnancy, would be so threatened. It's frightening -- and I'm worried for my teenager daughter and her peers.
I wonder what a man would do if he went to a pharmacy to get viagra and the pharmacist refused to fill it on moral grounds, claiming it was a "life style" drug and not a necessity. Of course, she may just trying to save the poor guy from going blind!
Nietzsche, good points, but your third paragraph is flawed. This is not congressional legislation, it is a rewriting of policy from Health and Human Services - another political subsidiary of the Bush admin and his fundamentalists. And as for the do nothing Congress - it's hard to get anything done when 1) the repub bastards filibuster everything, and 2) the repub bastards commit more crimes before you get a chance to investigate the previous crimes.
As for the article, I'm glad my mother isn't here anymore - this would have sent her after the local republicans with a gun. Mom would have been 80 last month and frequently opined that old men who "can't get an erection" (Mom would never use a term like "get it up") had no business dictating reproductive rights to women. Amen, Mom.
I'm always amazed at how the religious hypocrites care so much about saving the life of a fertilized egg, but they seem to give a crap about children.
I think birth control pills are toxic, IUDs even worse. We women need to take control of our own bodies ! The so-called rhythm method is very effective. Condoms are too. Or do what I did ... if you don't want kids, have a tubal ligation.
Isn't male masturbation abortion ? So many half babies thrown away so carelessly !!!
All crap.
Both the Dems and Repubs face the election year problem of how on earth do they make their two almost-identical parties seem different for an election. So they have to create these little bs differences to argue about.
So, first the Republicans pass this minor policy change. Now the Dem apologists like Politt howl about it.
But its all nonsense to distract you from the basic fact that the two parties have nearly identical economic, tax and foreign policies.
Expect several more such BS issues, with much howling and screaming about them from both sides, before the election comes.
ROCKER BABE & NAMASTE: Thanks for noticing (LOL). There are 2 reasons, first, it's my birthday this week and I can feel the renewal energies headed my way. And second, my grandson (who I now watch most days) is away with his parents (so I have time to relate in this forum).
NAMASTE: Excellent point about the powerless being "treated" to violence.
NIETSCHZE: One reason that many workers see the welfare persons as freeloaders is that they compare their lost time to jobs of quiet desperation against those they IMAGINE to be living freedom, the good life. These same persons have been long habituated to see war/warriors as their protectors, deserving of their respect and high esteem, so they do NOT notice the money lost to wars and today's Blackwater scoundrels, those that like vultures profit from the carcasses of others. Of course the fact the media is beholden to corporations that make their filthy profits from war explains why so few programs (apart from Bill Moyers and the occasional joke for Oberman) EDUCATE viewers as to what these numbers consist of. So much easier to blame the mama with 3 kids for getting her hamburger helper.
I read "The Handmaids' Tale". Fiction, but not different in philosophy from present reality.
I agree that this is not about morality but about control. Everything in this subversive plot against the government called the Bush Administration is about control: deliberate creation of extreme poverty; more and bigger prisons; more harsh, punitive, and restrictive laws being proposed every day.
Congress is composed of a sick bunch of bastards. They haven't done a damn thing all session, so now they hope to woo the voters with the old "tough on crime" message.
What about crime in government and corporations?
I can't believe people who are poor themselves still swallow the lie that all our problems are a result of government give away programs to welfare queens, pampered prisoners, and people too lazy to look for work.
Poverty doesn't cause crime they argue; crime is a consequence of moral decay.
These new proposed rules for women to put up with are no surprise, as we all know GWB was for abstinence ever since he was a cheerleader in college, so he never even had to consider birth control.
There is so much religious hypocrisy. Catholics will preach up a storm about how "life begins at conception" blah blah blah.
Then they have a miscarriage at 3 months. Do they have a funeral? No way. Hypocrisy.
This is not really about "life" it's about control. Women have always been under attack worldwide. Women couldn't even vote in this country until after World War I. All world religions restrict and diminish women's importance. That's why it always makes me laugh when I see a pro-life sticker on a woman's car. It's no different than a "bring back Jim Crow!" sticker on a black man's car. It's moronic.
Siouxrose: you go girl! You are hot today. . .good going; couldn't have said it better myself!
alaskamaid: One of ther reasons we don't have some of the BC methods employed in Europe and Asia, is the political climate and the FDA.
IMPEACH DUBYA AND DICKIE NOW!
Abortion without being pregnant… One can imagine the inquisition being not far behind…
This article is wrong about the IUD -- it mainly prevents implantation, it does NOT prevent ovulation and the only way it can prevent fertilization is by creating a low-grade 'infectious state' in the reproductive tract. I found that out the hard way many years ago while using an IUD and took antibiotics for a bladder infection; no one told me to beware that one of the 'side effects' of taking antibiotics might be pregnancy !
IUD's are stupid and and dangerous devices best left on the doctor's supply shelf.
We take the Pill for granted and that's okay but it never felt right for me. Women have been taught to think very dismissively about barrier methods, mainly because there's no money in them. I have been using a Dumas cap (from England, like a diaphragm only a much better fit) for many years now, with fresh aloe gel rather than toxic commercial spermicides. One hundred percent success rate ever since our son was born almost 21 years ago. Naturally, you do have to use it, but it's no big deal, no bigger at any rate than expecting men to use condoms. Cost : a one-time fitting and nominal cost for cap, plus the occasional cost of buying a fresh aloe plant (always hold for several months before using in case the plant was treated with toxic pesticides etc. before you bought it). The real irony is that this simple, safe, money-saving method could be used in any country and in any time period, including long before our own time.
Why continue to feed into the pharmaceutical companies' greed while hormonizing our bodies in unnatural ways when it's so easy to make an end run around the whole issue ?
Which is not to say that Plan B emergency contraception should not be widely and readily available at nominal cost, because it should be, but potential users should be strongly advised that it is for Emergencies Only. This would be readily understood if we were more in tune with our own bodies, but naturally that too is not a desirable attribute as far as our controllers are concerned . . .
For any males reading CD, if you think we women are using hyperbole to describe the sexism in American society, HERE (this article) is proof that those that would control us are alive, powerful, highly deluded and f--king dangerous!
Mars rules is also about men having power OVER women. I believe the hatred that fuels war began with what I term the "great wound." To me it's the Biblical nonsense about original sin, a pseudo spiritual means to create a rift between men and women.
The supreme triumph of Mars (which took place when Pluto, what astrologers refer to as its upper octave, had just been discovered) has been the atom bomb... and when it was loosed over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of l945 it became a satanic challenge to the God of Creation. Consider the adage, "Let no man tear asunder what God hath joined together." I see a poetic analogy between Adam and a-tom, and the split of MATTER has also exacerbated all that divides the tribes of mankind. In addition, the violence against women has been rampant... from rape as an "act" of war, to the covert misogyny of fundamentalist Christianity and its Catholic cousin, to the Arab degradation of the female in "honor crimes," to the brutal use of clitorectomy to control women's sexual pleasure, to the dowry murders in India, to the statistic that about 50% of women worldwide would KNOW violence at the hands of a male during their lifetime. Look to the US military, the ultimate Mars club, and note the levels of domestic abuse there, and of late, via its dark brother Blackwater, the charges of rape by women who for their own bizarre reasons identify with Mars and seek military careers to "be all that they can be." Not.
When men patronize ME in this forum, suggesting that I am creating antipathy, it's just a polite way of silencing something that is very pervasive and very painful to any thinking, feeling woman. Until the very NOTION of Deity is seen as a hybrid of Divine masculine AND Divine feminine attributes, the subliminal is that men are closer to god, and therefore have some kind of divine authority to do as they please. It's not been long ago that women were seen as property, and global sex trafficking/slave trade (as a recent CD article tragically explained) is still ongoing.
In this 21st century it is SO important that we all learn to relate to the "Namaste" concept, which means "I behold the God/Goddess essence in YOU." There is no other way that life can be seen as precious, and given the money and resources devoted to war & the means to kill, with repurcussions killing nature everywhere, consciousness must alter. It begins with how we behold LIFE, not that men should be given the power to control women or the birth canal, but that men support, honor and show respect for women and their choices. (When couples are involved in loving bonds, obviously the choice of birthing a child or otherwise falls to both.)
As I recall the Catholic Church said nothing abour birth control until it was out bred in Italy by the Protestants. It was a political ploy to breed more Catholic voter from poor Catholic cows.
This whole "Christian" thing has gotten so out of control that I think we must save ourselves by banning the practice of Christianity.