I said they would eventually get around to us.
September 30, 2006
!(inset)http://static.flickr.com/48/148252221_a978e1ff60_m.jpg!:http://www.flickr.com/photos/mvcorks/148252221/
“Mac points us to”:http://www.peskyapostrophe.com/index.php/weblog/pay_attention/ the anti-contraception movement picking up steam in Rosemont, Illinois, where they are laying the groundwork for a campaign to convince people that contraception causes abortions and destroys families.
Until the last few years, the anti-contraception movement has been careful to limit their discussions about access to birth control to teenagers, saying providing kids with birth control was the same as giving them permission to have sex. But now they’re expanding their scope dramatically, including married adults:
bq. Another line of argument against contraception, that it harms relationships between men and women, is advanced by Janet Smith, professor of moral theology at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit.
bq. “When people use contraception, they’re not asking themselves, do I want a lifetime relationship with this person or would this person be a good parent,” Smith explains. “They’re simply hooking up, typically because of sex, and sliding into marriage.”
bq. The result, Smith says, is disappointment and divorce.
bq. Damon Clarke Owens, another speaker and president of New Jersey Natural Family Planning, believes contraception changes sex from a “unconditional gift of self” to a conditional act that turns away from “God’s gift of children.” [ "Abortion foes' new rallying point":http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0609240334sep24,0,2938701.story?page=1&coll=chi-newsspecials-hed ]
As far as these folks are concerned, no one ever has a right to have sex without the risk of having children — not even married people. Let’s be clear on this:
* If you are a young married couple and both of you are making minimum wage (2x $10,712 a year), you’re expected not to have sex until you can afford a child. (Ideally you wouldn’t be married at all.)
* If you are a forty-year-old and a mother of three and you don’t want any more children, then the only option you have is to stop having sex with your husband.
* If you are a couple who _never_ wants children, your only option is to never have sex. (Ideally you wouldn’t be married at all.)
* If you have been told by your doctor that the medical risks of having a child are overwhelming, you risk your life by having sex with your husband.
But this is not just an assault on your rights to make your own family planning choices. It is an assault on women’s rights — women who have to anticipate getting pregnant in any given month cannot make long-term commitments to anything but child-rearing. In the absence of birth control, women have to choose between education, careers, and economic independence on one hand and sex on the other. It is not a wholly intellectual decision, and so sex will almost certainly win enough times to make unwanted children and endanger families.
Your rights, your health, your marriage, and your family are at risk. Watch this.
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September 30th, 2006 at 10:07 am
A few thoughts about this:
To begin with, contraception is an religio-ethical issue primarily for Catholics. The “Sacred Heart Major Seminary” connection in the quote underlines that. Regarding birth control use among married couples, there are Protestants who oppose birth control, but they are a relative minority. Indeed, among Catholics, birth control is not a black-and-white issue. My wife, and all our friends back in Poland, consider themselves Catholic and not one is anti-birth-control.
Additionally, it’s really misleading to suggest that couples who don’t want to have children are condemned to sex-less lives without the use of artificial birth control. “Catholic birth control,” as various “natural” methods are often called, are also extremely effective. I’m speaking from experience here. For various reasons (not one of them religious), my wife and I elected not to use artificial means of birth control, and it was 100% effective for us. It does mean that there is a certain period of each month when intimacy is not possible (unless you want a child), but unless since we’re not hormone-laden teens anymore, we’re fine with that.
One possible advantage of this was the ease with which we got pregnant when we decided it was the right time. I’m not convinced that my wife not having taken the pill made it easier for her to get pregnant (though she is), but anecdotal evidence suggests that it is. For example, a Danish friend told us that many Danish women have a hard time getting pregnant. Combine it with the fact that most Danish girls, again, according to our friend, go on the pill around age thirteen and it seems to support my wife’s hunch.
As with you, the moral issue in all this arises only when someone tries to foist their ethics on others. However, I really don’t think the anti-birth-control lobby is that terribly strong right now. When we see Pat Robertson standing side by side with this Janet Smith, then I’ll start to worry. As it stands, I think it’s just a sub-set (again, primarily Catholic) of the larger anti-abortion group.
September 30th, 2006 at 11:13 am
It’s easy to think of contraception as just being the pill, but it of course covers a wide range of options — invasive, chemical, barrier, and natural. Presumably when someone is opposed to contraception, natural methods are pretty much the only choice left. Perfect use of natural methods can be tricky, especially over an extended period of time (say, several years), and they have a notoriously high failure rate.
Should anti-contraception advocates decide to launch a PR campaign on this issue, I have no doubt you’ll see a significant shift in attitudes. We’ve already seen victories for them in “concience exemptions” for pharmacists, and they are increasingly noisy about the (trival) potential for birth control pills to act as an abortifacient; now they’re floating the notion that use of birth control increases risk of divorce.
The goal will be to eliminate the use of all but natural birth control methods (and I am sure natural methods will be frowned upon), but in the short term a lot can be done to make this decision more difficult and birth control more and more difficult to obtain — the article makes special note of how these folks have targeted Planned Parenthood. Some women are already finding it more difficult to obtain birth control.
The anti-contraceptive movement, like the Dominionist Christianity to which it is married, is more or less under the radar at the moment. But it is growing, they do have national political clout, and their legal victories have already had an effect on families. When “Pat Robertson is standing side by side with Janet Smith”:http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/12/20/national/main1146526.shtml?CMP=OTC-RSSFeed&source=RSS&attr=Politics_1146526, thousands of Americans will have already been affected by their policies. I don’t think we can wait for that.
September 30th, 2006 at 12:11 pm
Interesting article — but I meant literally standing side by side. :) In all seriousness, what I more had in mind was Pat Robertson saying that contraception is wrong. I’m not sure he’s taken that stance, though I could be wrong. The article you pointed indicates that Robertson’s involvement stems more from his concern about “religious freedoms” than about contraception itself.
“Perfect use of natural methods can be tricky, especially over an extended period of time (say, several years), and they have a notoriously high failure rate.”
They’re not really all that tricky at all, in our experience. It involves measuring temperature to keep track of the slight changes that accompany the whole menstrual cycle. It requires, above all, conscious thought.
September 30th, 2006 at 4:49 pm
bq. [Natural methods are] not really all that tricky at all, in our experience. It involves measuring temperature to keep track of the slight changes that accompany the whole menstrual cycle. It requires, above all, conscious thought.
But you and your wife are well educated, intelligent, and conscientious. When you chose a method of birth control, you evaluated the options available to you and chose the one that suited you best based on your values, understanding of your capabilities, and acceptance of risk .
Regardless of your individual experience, the “typical use failure rate is relatively high”:http://www.fda.gov/Fdac/features/1997/conceptbl.html. The perfect-use failure rate is up to three times that of condoms and _significantly_ higher than birth control pills (0.1%-0.5% compared to 1%-9%).
And the NFP success rates are based on people who have _chosen_ NFP of their own free will; if it is the only option, practiced by people who are not suited to it, I’d expect the typical failure use to skyrocket.
This is why I don’t consider NFP a viable alternative option. If you do not want a child, NFP is among the least effective methods you can choose; in a society where other birth control options are unavailable _and_ abortion is illegal (the political goal of the anti-contraceptive crowd), abstinence _is_ the only effective, zero-risk choice.
September 30th, 2006 at 7:27 pm
Regarding the natural birth control measures supported by the Roman Catholic leadership….we used to have a little joke about that…What do you call couples who use the rhythm method? Parents.
October 1st, 2006 at 12:32 am
I believe it was Saint Thomas Aquinas, 1225?-1274, who said that it is sinful for a woman to take any action that would prevent her having as many children as she possibly could have. If it weren’t midnight, I would find the reference. At any rate, from the time that Christianity became an authoritarian system somewhere around 500 years after the events of the New Testament, pregnancy and childbirth have been understood by most Christian authoritarians as a woman’s punishment for her role in the fall. In the postlapsarian world view, the subjugation of women is a given, women are “condemned” to childbearing, and women should not expect to be able to escape this role. In fact, around 500 CE, a special council of the church met to determine whether or not women were human. Women were (thank you!) declared to be human by the Christian bishops assembled, but only by a margin of one vote. We have authoritarians in charge today who call themselves Christians, and many so-called Christians promoting a world view that would return us to the dark ages.