It's been pretty clear that the anti-choice crowd has its sights on not only controlling the womb, but women's sexuality as well. That's why this should scare the bejesus out of women. According to Birth Control Watch, 86 anti-abortion groups are committed to opposing any form of contraception.
Abortion will never end as long as society approves the use of contraception. The practice of contraception means children are unwanted and provides the rationalization for abortion. It is a violation of human dignity to promote or accept the use of contraception.
OK. That extreme view is no surprise. But wait a minute -- there are occupants of the GOP clown car that are equally willing to deny contraception because of their anti-choice views - and they are on the record about it.
Do you want the policies of these men in your bedroom, in your womb, in your doctor's office, at your local pharmacy?
Cristina Page has an excellent piece in the Baltimore Sun that shows just how extreme the views of the GOP candidates are.
Mitt Romney: When he met with the National Right to Life committee, Mitt was ready to scale back access to contraception with this statement:
"I fought to define life as beginning at conception rather than at the time of implantation." The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists defines pregnancy as starting at implantation, the first moment a pregnancy can be known. Anti-abortion advocates want pregnancy to start at the unknown moment sperm and egg meet: fertilization. They'd also like you to believe, despite evidence to the contrary, that the birth control pill prevents that fertilized egg from implanting in the womb.
Mr. Romney's code, deciphered, meant, "I, like you, hope to reclassify the most commonly used forms of contraceptives as abortions." In fact, he told the crowd, he already had some practice redefining contraception: "I vetoed a so-called emergency contraception bill that gave young girls abortive drugs without prescription or parental consent."
Remember, emergency contraception isn't formulated to disallow implantation; it prevents ovulation. Mitt's clearly ready with the speculum.
Sam Brownback: Here's the man who said that every fetus is sacred -- abortion is the murder of fetal citizens). He has co-sponsoring a bill that would de-fund Planned Parenthood, which is the nation's largest contraception provider.
According to Mr. Tancredo, a Colorado Republican, emergency contraception "cheapens human life and simply uses a woman's body to dispose of the child instead of a doctor." By the same logic, so do the birth control pill, the contraceptive patch, the IUD, the NuvaRing, and the Depo-Provera shot - which, it's worth noting, together account for 40 percent of the birth control American women use.
John McCain:
[H]e has "consistently voted against taxpayer-funded contraception programs." And Mr. McCain reports that his adviser on sexual-health matters is Sen. Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, who leads campaigns claiming condoms are unsafe and opposing emergency contraception.
These pols are at odds with American women who use contraception -- and this is a huge base of voters to piss off. Dreams of womb control are not going to appeal to this group. Some stats from the Guttmacher Institute:
* Virtually all women (98%) aged 15-44 who have ever had intercourse have used at least one contraceptive method.
* Overall, 62% of the 62 million women aged 15-44 are currently using a contraceptive method.
* 31% of the 62 million women do not need a method because they are infertile; are pregnant, postpartum or trying to become pregnant; have never had intercourse; or are not sexually active.
* Thus, only 7% of women aged 15-44 are at risk of unwanted pregnancy but are not using contraceptives.
* Among the 42 million fertile, sexually active women who do not want to become pregnant, 89% are practicing contraception.
And one other matter -- the last refuge of non-permanent birth control left, aside from the rhythm method, is the condom. I think it would be prudent to ask whether the candidates would like to pull all of the rubbers from the shelves because it is interfering with God's plan for procreation.
There is an infamous video of clueless anti-choice demonstrators who are asked what punishment a woman should be subjected to if abortion is made illegal. Most make lame excuses -- it's a "crime" but the "perpetrator" should go unpunished. Actually, it's worse than that -- most of them say they never thought about the issue. Planned Parenthood and the National Institute for Reproductive Health have launched a campaign to ask pols the question "How much time should she serve?"
The protestors are clearly underinformed. But what about the anti-choice establishment? Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, has an even more ridiculous answer -- only the doctor should be punished, because the woman who seeks out the abortion is too "impaired" to be responsible for her actions.
[I]f abortion were made illegal and he were a state legislator, Land said, "I would probably charge voluntary manslaughter for the abortionist. If [a doctor] were convicted, he would lose his medical license for two years and spend a year in prison with the first offense, and with the second offense, he would lose his medical license for life. At which point it'd be very difficult to find a doctor who'd do them."
Such a legal stance is tantamount to "ignoring or infantilizing women, turning them into 'victims' of their own free will," [Anna] Quindlen wrote. "State statutes that propose punishing only a physician suggest the woman was merely some addled bystander who happened to find herself in the wrong stirrups at the wrong time."
Land doesn't deny that women who have abortions might be addled, but he, along with Yoest, Earll, and Gans, takes exception to them being described as bystanders -- or as enlightened women making free, educated choices.
"It's not demeaning to assume that any person who is a mother who could make the decision to do this must be suffering from some form of psychological impairment because of the crisis of the pregnancy or because of societal demeaning of human life," Land said.
Clearly women are just too damn irrational to be able to control their own body and destiny because of those damn hormones. Daddy The State has to be in charge of the womb.
Look, one either has moral agency or one doesn't. If there's agency, then an illegal act is a crime. If not, then not. But to write off an entire class of women as mentally ill - if only temporarily - because they make a decision you don't approve of? That doesn't fit any moral framework I'm aware of. Nor does the outmoded idea that estrogen makes you crazy or the risible theory that society brainwashes women into killing their children.
My question -- what happens to women that have multiple abortions -- are these repeated delusions? Should she be forced into state-approved mandatory therapy to "correct" her thinking so she doesn't head to the clinic again? No one is saying abortion should be encouraged; it should be safe and rare, but that's not the point of this argument. The right already has its sights on making contraception more difficult to obtain, and continues its push for abstinence-only education. Jill at Feministe asks, where then, are the boundaries:
What about pregnant women engaging in behaviors that are risky for the fetus? Can she be prosecuted for child abuse or negligence if she, say, drinks coffee while she's pregnant? If she eats tuna? If she smokes? What about if she goes skiing? What if she didn't know she was pregnant, but should have known, and she does something risky-- like goes binge drinking every night and survives off of Cheetos? Willful blindness? Neglect? What if she miscarries, and perhaps you can attribute it to something she did -- negligent homicide?
And what about the male partner in this equation? What if he agrees with the woman in question that she should have an abortion -- is he then an accessory to the crime, or is he temporarily insane as well?
All of this is madness; what it does do is pull back the curtain of the real agenda of the anti-choice crowd -- controlling the sexuality of women by insinuating they are not capable of ethical, moral or practical decisions about their lives. Obviously, we need the bible-beaters to instruct us on such matters.
