Birth control--the perpetual vote getter
Echidne has some really interesting points about conservatives can never actually win the war on terror or the war against reproductive choice, because these are perpetual issues that scare people into the voting booths to vote for them.
It got me to thinking--in a way, it's brilliant. Any student of history could quickly conclude that the best way to get and keep power is to create fear and loathing for some sort of Other that you then promise people to protect them from. With the constant history of warfare between people, it's easy to see that the favorite target for turning into the hated Other is foreigners. But the other favorite target is women.
In earlier times, loathing for women was shown more openly--examples range from early church fathers using excretory terms for referring to women to more recent examples of women being denied the vote because it was assumed that we are too stupid for politics. Nowadays, one has to be more subtle about it, so the strategy is for anti-woman rhetoric to be couched in "pro-family" or "pro-baby" terms, which subtly pits women as enemies of family life, which is to say that it's well believed now that in order for women to win, families must lose.
Another way that the ancient strategy of pulling a society together in its hatred for women is to divide women into two groups--the good and the bad--and then get everyone to join in the game of figuring out which women count as good and which are the enemy. Again, the early church pulled this off by making Mary the one good woman compared to loathsome, sexual, living women. Over time, a few more sainted women were allowed in as long as their chastity was their main personality trait. (It's upsetting once you realize how many female saints gained status by dying rather than losing their virginity to rapists, as if a victim of rape could actually be held accountable for lost chastity.)
The abortion debate combines these two methods and creates a perfect villian for all to hate--an unchaste, wicked woman who kills babies for sexual pleasure. It's not just ideaology that causes the right to try to take away the most effective methods of contraception away from women and increase efforts to spread ignorance about effective contraception. For instance, if the morning after pill was widely distributed, we would have a similiar situation to what happened in France--the abortion rate plummeted. If there weren't huge numbers of abortions in this country, the villianous sluts getting abortions wouldn't be such a handy target to scare people into the voting booth with.
And that's why I sincerely worry that they actually intend to take things like the birth control pill away from women, because it would cause the abortion rate to skyrocket and keep people in a perpetual panic about loosening sexual morality that would drive them to the polls to vote Republican.
posted by Amanda Marcotte at
14.9.04
13 Comments:
This reminded me of you: http://www.theonion.com/nib/index.php?issue=4037&nib=2
-Anne
9/14/2004
The problem is that many people who are opposed to legal abortion consider birth control pills, IUDs and certainly morning-after pills to *be* forms of abortion. They do not see the abortion rate as having plummeted in France after the increased availability of the morning after pill; quite the opposite. It's equivalent to aborting a late term fetus, in their opinion. Taking away such methods is its own justification - we don't even need to link it with the possibility of a skyrocketing rate of illegal abortions to invoke that sense of perpetual alarm.
For some, the morning after pill may be an even more reprehensible act of evil, in that a woman gets to murder her own offspring in the privacy of her own home, without paying any significant price in terms of shame, pain, or risk. In fact, the morning after pill would, to them, allow a woman to commit murder without any private self-recriminations because she can always say, "Well, who knows? I might not even have really been pregnant."
Yeah, I think that the morning after pill is invaluable for those very reasons, but there's no way anyone is going to sell this point of view to the other side.
I guess I'm no longer certain who exactly is on the other side. Does the vast majority really want to ban birth control *and* legal abortion? I used to think most folks could separate the two, just as I still think most people would prefer that automatic weapons stayed under the ban. Most people know the difference between the right to own a hunting rifle, and the right to stockpile machine guns.
My brain hurts. It's been doing that a lot lately. Please let me know if I totally missed your point.
larkspur
9/15/2004
I can't help but think that those who think the birth control pill and the morning after pill are abortions are fudging in order to justify greater restrictions on women's rights. They carry on like women are sloughing off fertilized eggs every time they use it, when in actuality they are preventing ovulation in the first place. In the rare case that fertilization does occur and it doesn't implant, there's not really a guarantee that it would have implanted in the first place.
But both measures do not stop a pregnancy that is already under way. This is critical that people remember. They are NOT abortion. In order for there to be an abortion, there has to be a pregnancy. Both measures prevent pregnancy.
The "pro-life" leaders are deliberately spreading misinformation and causing people to believe that the birth control pill and the morning after pill are the same thing as RU-486. By doing this, they are actually leading people to believe that a woman who takes the pill is possibly having monthly abortions, a deliberate attempt to extend the negative image of women who have abortions to those who practice effective birth control.
9/15/2004
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The typical herbal form of cannabis consists of the flowers and subtending leaves and stalks of mature pistillate of female plants. The resinous form of the drug is known as hashish (or merely as 'hash').
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