May 9, 2006
War on Contraception Posted by Ellen Feldman at 10:00 AM EST The May 7 edition of the New York Times Magazine published an excellent, and terrifying, article by Russell Shorto on the religious right’s war on contraception. “I cannot imagine any development in human history, after the Fall, that has had a greater impact on human beings than the pill,” the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary told Shorto. The pill, however, is the least of it. These groups want to outlaw all forms of contraception, including condoms, which have been proven to stop the spread of disease as well as prevent pregnancy. This is not a fringe movement. Shorto goes on to report that last year when a reporter asked if President Bush supported the right to contraception, Press Secretary Scott McClellan said he would “not dignify the question with a response.” The White House has still not replied to a series of letters sent last July by a Congressional group led by Representative Carolyn Maloney asking if the President supports the right to contraception. Once again religious conviction masquerades as public policy. The same groups that are trying to outlaw all methods of birth control are, of course, in the forefront of the war against the right to abortion, despite the fact that studies show that countries where contraceptives and information about how to use them are available have far lower abortion rates. Thus, this is not a campaign for a “culture of life,” as they claim. It is a war against sex, even sex in marriage. Isn’t the law supposed to prevent misdeeds against the community and its members, not legislate personal morality? What these groups, which are opposed to any form of birth control, lack is a sense of history. They lament our sex-obsessed society. (Then why not go after the advertising rather than the contraceptive industry?) But they have no knowledge of what life was like for families, as well as independent-minded single women, before the advent of legal contraceptives. Margaret Sanger, the heroic mother of family planning, liked to tell the story of a woman called Sadie, who lived in a tenement on the Lower East Side of New York. Sanger’s biographers agree that Sadie may well have been apocryphal, but if she was, Sanger, a nurse, had undoubtedly treated scores like Sadie while working among the poor. Sadie, the mother of a large family, fell ill from the aftereffects of a self-induced abortion. When the doctor arrived to treat her, she pleaded with him for contraceptive information. Women in the slums suspected their better-heeled sisters had ways to prevent pregnancy. The doctor told Sadie she could not “have her cake and eat it too.” It is safe to assume there was very little cake in Sadie’s impoverished life. When she continued to beg him for information, he advised her to “tell Jake to sleep on the roof.” A few months later, Sanger returned to treat Sadie after another self-induced abortion, but she was too late. Sadie died from lack of information and the unavailability of a health product. Sadie’s fate was not uncommon in the slums of America before the legalization of birth control, well into the twentieth century. It was, of course, rarer in more upscale neighborhoods. Though some women with access to doctors who would provide contraceptive information were reluctant to avail themselves of the option—Eleanor Roosevelt complained of always being either about to have a child or just getting over having had one, but did nothing about it until she banished FDR from the marriage bed—others were less shy. ER’s outspoken cousin, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, made fun of Eleanor’s naiveté and boasted of her own worldly German physician who was a source of much useful prophylactic information. If the religious right and this administration succeed in turning the clock back on contraception, the poor will once again be the ones to suffer. Those with means can always hop over to Europe or find an idealistic or acquiescent physician at home. Those without will have to choose between another child they cannot afford to feed or clothe or educate and telling Jake to sleep on the roof. Surely we have enough spousal abuse in the country to know where that form of birth control will lead.
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