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The Coming Fight Over Paying for the Pill
Just when you thought we were finally done with the right-wing freakout masquerading as a national healthcare debate, we may be in for another culture war. This time, the "controversy" would be less about whether your tax dollars will be lavished on evil abortion doctors, but, remarkably, whether helping women prevent unwanted pregnancy is a good thing.
For half a century, one little pill has given women unprecedented power over their reproductive destinies, and in turn reshaped their economic and educational opportunities. Not surprisingly, that doesn't sit well with policymakers who long for simpler times, when baby-making was the only full-time job that mattered for half the population. Now, advocates for reproductive rights are bracing for a battle with social conservatives as they push to make health insurers offer contraceptives for free.
Currently, many plans don't provide comprehensive coverage for the pill or other forms of contraception, forcing women to pay as much as $50 per month in order to avoid unintended pregnancy. Not only does this undermine the goals of family planning and preventive health--which, as Monica Potts points out, even abortion foes should support--it marginalizes the health needs of women and exacerbates the economic gender gap.
Yet one thread that hasn't been highlighted in the feminist blogosphere is that safe contraception, like abortion, is an especially fraught issue for women of color, whose choices are often further limited by racial and economic barriers. Indeed, the reproductive justice movement evolved out of a long struggle to develop a race-conscious feminist analysis of gender, family, community and motherhood.
As activist and academic Dorothy Roberts wrote in 2000, the pill was a watershed for all women, but Black women in particular came to see it as a tool for strengthening their power of choice:
For nearly a century, black women have found themselves at the center of controversies about birth control's role in the struggle for racial and sexual equality. They have battled not only men--white and black--who discounted the importance of women's bodily autonomy, but also white women who discounted the significance of racism. The dominant women's movement has focused myopically on abortion rights at the expense of other aspects of reproductive freedom, including the right to bear children, and has misunderstood criticism of coercive birth control policies. Attending to black women's perspective on the pill and other contraceptives can help to transform the movement for reproductive freedom. It can help us understand that there is nothing contradictory about advocating women's freedom to use birth control while opposing abusive birth control practices. Social justice requires both equal access to safe, user-controlled contraceptives and an end to the use of birth control as a means of population control.
At a time when Black women were regularly shamed and dehumanized by racist stereotypes about so-called welfare mothers and Black fertility, a medical innovation that could liberate sex from procreation was a major step toward realizing the full spectrum of human rights. The fight for health sovereignty continues today, and women of color have more at stake than ever in protecting the reproductive freedom they helped define.
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23 Comments so far
Show All`Grizzly Mama's` don't use the Pill.
Removing contraception from ready access has long been a motive of the right. There are several states who allow pharmacists to decline to fill prescriptions that threaten or offend their sensibilities. So far, this applies to Christians and Catholics who oppose both abortion and contraception. What if this were to spread to mental health drugs? I'm sure there are few Scientologists working in pharmacies; it's not much of a stretch for seriously orthodox Christians who are more likely to believe a diagnosis of demonic possession rather than schizophrenia. Having women in control of anything, much less their own bodies, scares the bejeesus out of the right wingers. Tax money for the Pill is scarier than tax money for blowing women and children into pink mists in Iraq or Afghanistan...
The pill is a curse upon all mankind. It has destroyed the sacred and precious gift God gave a man and woman to express their mutual love and open themselves to the wonderful gift of life. Black women suffer the most. Seventy per cent of black children live in homes with no father, black neighborhoods are targeted by Planned Parenthood specifically because black women have proportionately more abortions than any other race group. The pill has made slaves of women who buy into the "freedom" promised by the Golden Shadow. In truth, true freedom is the will and the inclination to do good as written on our hearts. God is pro-life...it's not just a bumper sticker on my car. May 50 million babies rest in the bosom of the Father who created them and may their mothers find some....
Peace
My bumper sticker says "Teach Science, not Superstition"....
Nice try, but blaming the current social woes of women on the Pill is stupid. Most communal societies over the past 100,000 years have raised the majority of their children without familial fathers. In terms of human history, familial fathering is a rather recent and novel social invention.
Most of the problems we face these days in the good ol' USA stems from religion. Religion abhors incomplete family units, and hence single-mothers are ostracized. Unfortunately, rather than helping single-mothers by having groups of women communally raise children, single-mothers are forced into isolation.
WTF: You raise significant points; and I'd take them a step further. The church chastises single mothers or women who define their own destinies because the church is a top-down, patriarchal, authoritarian institution there to program people to follow narrow norms. These norms are inherently sexist.
Rick above presumes that all children are conceived in love. Where is his outrage towards porn or rape or incest or the papacy's abuse of minors? It's preposterous to presume that children are only conceived in a loving bond.
The church may never own it, but it is a deeply misogynistic organization starting with its presumption that God is a guy. The absence of any notion of the Divine Feminine side of the Universal Force is a gaping wound to all women, and any men who are savvy enough to understand that this dismissal also demonizes the feminine feeling function in their own beings. We are left with a pro-action society that is ashamed to feel; and if and when it does, it rapidly sends persons towards alcohol, drugs, or anti-depressants to CONTROL (or subvert) those feelings. Empathy ends up entirely sacrificed to this equation so that the business ethos can count on efficient robots to do its bidding.
"Every sperm is sacred..."
The pill and other forms of reliable birth control are benefits to much of WOMANKIND.
When faced with unwanted pregnancies, none of the options women have are good. Therefore, the situation is best avoided by practicing abstinence or using reliable birth control. Few people (female or male) can practice abstinence their entire lives, and some do not want children for a myriad of reasons. To want to become biological parents in "these times," people have to be either very naive or extremely optimistic. Some of us are neither, even when we as a nation and world had more hope than we did during the first decade of the 2000s. How can people even think about undergoing fertility treatments while the Deepwater Horizon oil well continues to pollute the planet, perhaps irreparably? "Welcome to the world, kid. . .sorry about the mess and the fact that you may die from being exposed to poisoned water before you grow up." One word: DENIAL.
As I have instructed other men who oppose abortion and reliable birth control, please call me to discuss these issues when you have two X chromosomes. The Bush family has a greater chance of someday needing food stamps than you have of EVER becoming pregnant.
Do you have adopted or foster children? Do you sponsor a child abroad? Do you donate time or money to children living in poverty? If your answer to all these questions is "no," then you either need to help children who are already born or change your views about abortion and reliable birth control.
If you believe "God creates life," have you ever considered that this may mean spiritual rather than physical life? After all, people need to mate in order to become pregnant, and some (as Siouxrose mentioned) mate in circumstances that are far from loving or respectful. Even Christians know only a single story of a virgin birth.
To me, "God" is the Great Mystery. I don't claim to know what God wants, and (as I once told a member of the clergy) I think ALL human interpretations of God, including mine and everyone else's, are in some way wrong precisely because they are HUMAN interpretations. I have encountered too many people in life who wear "God Says" masks to (ineffectively) hide and justify their OWN desires for power and control. Only you know whether or not this description applies to you, but many men opposed to abortion and reliable birth control seem to fit the criteria. If you realize this and admit it rather than hiding behind "God Says," people will respect you for being human:
http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/
Children are too valuable to be conceived carelessly, and much too important to live in a world that does not care for them enough AFTER birth.
NANO: Thank you for the enlightened post. I wish more thought the way you do!
There is nothing to stop women from practicing abstinence. Unless it's rape or incest, women who refuse to practice abstinence are lazy troublemakers rooting for 15 minutes of feminist fame.
Right, I'm a "monkey" for pointing out irresponsible behavior. I'm atheist btw.
So I'm a pope for asking women to take some responsibility for themselves by being abstinent? Why? So they can't blame men anymore for their problems? So let me get something straight. You're telling me that feminists are ok to call for women to be sexually irresponsible but that men have no authority to call for women to be responsible and make it easy for themselves, is that it?
Unemployment would vanish if all those women would just get back home and take care of kids. Of course, families would have to learn to get by on half the income, so we could all go back to 1950 and all those family values and thrift. (Sarcastic)
OOps! Just about forgot, men would have to stay with their families and bring back money from all those jobs women are no longer doing. That's how it worked after WWII.
"Do you have adopted or foster children? Do you sponsor a child abroad? Do you donate time or money to children living in poverty? If your answer to all these questions is "no," then you either need to help children who are already born or change your views about abortion and reliable birth control."
!!Thumbs Up!!
If a man poisons a woman, he gets jailed.
If a woman poisons a man or her children, she get counseling.
Boohoo to abortion pills !
What does immigration have to do with this ???
This article reads as if 20th century delusions should carry forth into the 21st century. The delusions of the 20th century were inflated larger than life by the massive combustion of fossil fuels.
The people's emancipation comes neither through petro-opiates, pills, nor races on gold-plated rat wheels.
USan women joined the "work force" in an unwitting partnership with elites to expand the people's appetite and dependence on ever more expensive/expansive housing and transport.
Now USans work twice as much for half the pay as compared to the 1950s. Most production has been exported, and most of the jobz that remain are not of any great value to anyone, like all that useless overkill housing/transport.
This is all due to elite hijacking of markets and policies in the last half of the 20th century to steal the people's wealth. We should not get distracted. Achieve victory for the people in the class war and sanity will return to all facets of life.
The pill is not the best option. Elective sterilization is a better option; one form of female elective sterilization can now be performed in a doctor's office without general anesthesia.
Some women may disagree with me, but I have always felt that preventing pregnancy is primarily a female responsibility (since women can become pregnant), and preventing STDs is primarily a male responsibility (since men are the ones who can actually wear condoms). If you are a woman who does not want any (or any more) children, make an appointment for elective sterilization now before access to it (like the pill in some communities) is threatened. If you are uninsured, contact Planned Parenthood or a community clinic that offers services on a sliding scale.
FYI, women do not necessarily want to "stay home" with their children all day. My own mother did this when it was the norm, and admitted when I was an adult that she would have loved to have had a part-time job: caring for young children all day is certainly very stressful, but more importantly, adults need contact with other adults who are not their spouses. Also, adults need and want to use adult cognitive skills.
In the mid-1990s, I knew a woman who had three children and worked two days a week. She referred to her workdays as "sanity breaks."
In a better world, mothers and fathers would both be able to work part-time until their children reached school age.
Men should also contribute significant numbers for elective sterilization. Vasectomies are cheap, safe, have zero effect on psychology and given that men are really just drone bees/bulls, we just fly off to another hive. The majority of men, by their nature, are aggressively profligate.
Its a crime to bring unwanted and unsupportable children into this threatened overpopulated world.
Either bring less children into the world or find a way to kill more before they reproduce, or stop their reproduction. Our world cannot support more human beings. Despite the best efforts of US at killing other peoples children, we are all still to many.