How the Pro-Choice Movement Saved America

Back then the public, as well as partisans, focused mainly on the battle over abortion. But after several years of research it became abundantly clear to me that pro-lifers were pursuing another camouflaged and comprehensive (and frightening) goal: banning contraception. The evidence was there to uncover in local media coverage; it was even posted at times on the websites of local prolife groups. One of the surest signs of an organized movement is the consistency of its message. And everywhere I looked, I could see the same talking points bubbling to the surface: contraception is abortion. It's a false statement, but it was being sold with force and skill, and I could see it subtly creeping into public debate.

Since then, the political landscape has changed in one crucial way. The war on contraception is now out in the open. Indeed it seems to be unfolding before our eyes. It is a central battleground issue in the 2012 presidential election, an election that will determine the degree to which women will have access to contraception as well as the immediate fate of the largest family planning provider in our country: Planned Parenthood.¹

The leading Republican candidates have taken a stand—many forced to by an increasingly powerful right-wing movement. And each has proudly proclaimed him or herself to be against contraception. Presidential contender Rick Santorum is most proud of his opposition to contraception. And why not? As I learned last time around, he had hoped to be the architect of the anti-contraception cause while in the Senate. During his presidential campaign Santorum said that states should be allowed to ban contraception² and, more frightening, while he'd been a US senator he defined the most common forms of contraception to be "abortifacients."³ Santorum went even further. He targeted not just birth control but sex, which he views as an activity fraught with moral danger. He explained recently, "One of the things I will talk about that no other president has talked about before is, I think, the dangers of contraception in our country. The whole sexual libertine idea that many of the Christian faith have said, 'Well, it's OK, contraception is OK.' It's not OK. It's a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be. They're supposed to be within marriage, for purposes that are, yes, conjugal and unitive, but also procreative."⁴

Of course, as this election year proves, one doesn't have to be a long-term or true believer to join the anti-contraception forces. The once-moderate Mitt Romney, the likely 2012 Republican presidential nominee, is now running to the front of the anti-contraception parade. As governor of Massachusetts, Romney had staked out the once-honored Republican positions against government intrusion into our private lives. He was pro-privacy, and yes, pro-choice and pro-contraception.⁵ This election year, the anti-contraception forces have become so powerful that, as with his Mormonism, Romney tries to distance himself from his pro-contraception past. At campaign stops he tries to outdo his GOP competitors, even promising to kill Title X—the nation's contraception program for the poor launched by Republican President Nixon.⁶ Once, Romney vied for the support of Planned Parenthood. Now he's intent on burying it. "Planned Parenthood?" he said. "Oh, we're gonna get rid of that."⁷

The takeaway is clear: the fervent anti-contraception minority of the Republican party—the group that I document in my book—now controls an important part of the party's agenda. Once upon a time Republicans were champions of contraception—from Nixon through the first Bush.⁸ Indeed, nearly a century ago, they were the chief proponents of Planned Parenthood. A 1927 poll found Planned Parenthood's membership (then called the American Birth Control League) was more Republican than the rest of the country.⁹ It's not just those with values as flexible as Romney's that kowtow to this extreme group. This year the Republican Party is uniting behind an openly anti–birth control plank.

The great irony of this position is that 99 percent of women ages eighteen to forty-four use or have used contraception.¹⁰ But the real lives and real needs of Americans hardly seem to matter. Ideological, religiously inspired purity is what counts now. The most frightening aspect of this new development is that a president has tremendous power to almost single-handedly reduce access to contraception. The federal government has relatively modest influence on abortion policy, which is still mainly battled out in the states and the courts. But the feds all but control policy on contraception. The federal government approves new birth control methods, decides the level of federal funding available for family planning services for poor Americans, chooses whether employers can refuse employees contraception in health insurance coverage for ideological reasons, and determines what and whether teens learn about contraception in school.

And with contraceptive policy, decision-making power is not equally distributed among the branches of government. Almost all of these decisions can be taken by one federal official: the president. This year, if President Obama's Affordable Care Act remains law, the federal government will provide unfettered access to contraception for those who want it. But the victory for women could be short-lived. The Department of Health and Human Services, at the discretion of the president, defines which medications are considered "preventive" and thereby covered.¹¹ With an anti-contraception minion in the Oval Office, any medication considered a contraceptive could simply be highlighted and deleted.

In just one illustration of how this could play out, it's worth noting that President George W. Bush, as I point out in my book, realized much more of the anti-contraception agenda than the anti-abortion agenda. Meanwhile, President Obama, if he succeeds with contraceptive coverage in health care reform, will have done more to expand access to contraception than any president before him. It's no exaggeration to say that the election of the president has become a referendum on the right of Americans to plan their families.

Since the publication of my book in 2006 and the anti-contraception movement's emergence from the closet, I've noticed an interesting and important characteristic. They are taking lessons from their decades of experience in limiting access to safe and legal abortion. With abortion, they discovered that incrementalism, distraction, and distortion are a powerful potion to serve the public. As detailed in Chapter 1, it is the same poisonous drip they're feeding Americans about contraception. And so, despite the fact that access to contraception is now as accepted a public health policy as vaccination, the anti-contraception movement continues to make headway.

One important example of this is the brazen (and hostile) way that some are willing to decry contraception. Two recent sound bites illuminated—the way lightning does—the self-confidence of anti-contraception forces. After President Obama announced that women would have contraception coverage in the Affordable Care Act, Rick Santorum's top donor to his presidential bid, Foster Friess, in an interview with Andrea Mitchell of MSNBC, offered American women a contraceptive proposal of his own.¹² Friess explained, "Back in my day, they used Bayer aspirin for contraception. The gals put it between their knees and it wasn't that costly." Needless to say, keeping one's knees shut rarely works in practice, as the failure of abstinence-only programs reflect (detailed in Chapter 3).

This casual paternalistic insult was followed quickly by the overwrought, overpowering voice of Rush Limbaugh, the childless three-time divorcee who likes to speak for Republican family values. Rush as much as anyone has brought this issue before the public, revealing if not the core beliefs then the true emotions of many of his right-wing listeners. The apparent trigger for Rush's contribution was the testimony of a Georgetown University law student, Sandra Fluke, before a Congressional hearing on the contraceptive coverage bill. She explained that during three years spent in law school, birth control could cost $3,000.¹³ She added that 40 percent of the school's female population suffered financial hardship as a result of having to pay for birth control. These seemingly anodyne statements got Rush into a near-steroidal rage. "What does it say about the college co-ed Sandra Fluke, who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex, what does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex. She's having so much sex she can't afford the contraception." Like Friess, Rush had a proposal for American women too, explaining, "So, Ms. Fluke and the rest of you feminazis, here's the deal. If we are going to pay for your contraceptives, and thus pay for you to have sex, we want something for it, and I'll tell you what it is. We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch."¹⁴ Rush's porn.gov idea did not go over well with the American public. But over the course of a few days, as the rebuke of Rush grew more intense, he dug in deeper. Rush claimed Fluke to be "a woman who is happily presenting herself as an immoral, baseless, no-purpose-to-her-life woman. She wants all the sex in the world whenever she wants it, all the time, no consequences. No responsibility for her behavior."

Here in bold, almost cartoonishly chauvinistic terms was a revelatory insight into the views of the anti-contraception extreme. Anyone who uses contraception is a sexpot, a libertine, a social miscreant. It is a bit of Victorian morals channeled through an angry 1950s patriarch. Through his megaphone Rush was proclaiming loudly what I'd found whispered six years ago; that many people in the anti-contraception movement believe at their core that sex for pleasure is wrong and anyone using contraception, particularly women, should be shamed. It is difficult to escape the view that what they most pine for is a world in which the role of women is simple and straightforward. Women should stay home and raise children. This is a bedrock pro-life ideal.

And so, the research and perspectives herein are more (de)pressingly relevant than ever—indeed, more urgent to understand than ever. And one can best understand the current agenda, and its sinister appeal, by knowing its organizational roots as well as the personalities and influences that shaped it, and probing the devilishly clever stratagems this movement has concocted to advance its radical agenda. For even though the issue has burst onto the public square, it has been and will be camouflaged as something else, just as it was when I first dug into the subject. The deft masters of spin will present the issue of contraception as something more resonant, with message-tested talking points that cause the public to think it's about something other than hijacking our most important of life decisions and sabotaging our ability to plan a family. It will be disguised as a supposed question of religious liberty—that your attempt to plan whether or when to have a child violates a total stranger's individual conscience—or, more disingenuously, under the fig leaf called abortion.

This campaign has begun. The Catholic bishops oppose a law providing contraceptive coverage to women because of its supposed infringement on the rights of the Church. And Charmaine Yoest, president of the national pro-life organization Americans United for Life, speaking on a panel at CPAC, the influential right-wing conservative conference, of a winning strategy, advised the party brass in attendance (and everyone watching the video of the panel posted on YouTube) to conflate contraception¹⁵ and abortion when discussing the president's contraceptive coverage. "Our organization is going to really start being very disciplined about talking about the abortion mandate"—rather than what it really is: insurance coverage of contraception—"coming from HHS (the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services) and I would encourage everybody to do the same." Conflation, such as calling run-of-the-mill contraception abortion, is a technique that has proven as reliable for pro-life operatives as distraction is for pickpockets.

And so perhaps we should welcome the strident voice of anti-contraceptive forces. The debate is now public, the stakes open, the sides drawn. This is a long-overdue national conversation and we're having it just in the nick of time. Hopefully, this book will help broaden and inform that conversation. What needs to be understood, and what I hope this book makes clear, is that the anti-contraception movement has arisen in direct response to societal changes set in motion by the pro-choice, pro-contraception movement over the last fifty years; societal changes that represent a set of gains that most Americans will not live without. As Gloria Feldt, former president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America and author of The War on Choice, explains, "This is not about abortion, it's not about birth control, those issues are the tip of the ideological iceberg. It's about women's changing place in the world. The changing power structure terrifies them."¹⁶ The anti-contraceptive movement is not merely a personal choice; it is, in essence, an attack on our way of life.

It's the pro-choice, pro-contraceptive world in which we actually live today, and we're lucky for that. It's in this world that, thanks to family planning, women can be lawyers, doctors, pilots, whatever, as well as mothers. The wide use and distribution of contraception has been a building block of the revolution in how women live. And the benefits have spread far beyond women. Yes, women taking advantage of changes wrought by the pro-choice, pro-contraception movement, go to college in greater numbers than men, earn as much, decide elections. As Cecile Richards, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, boldly puts it, "Women are the majority of voters now, and we have the power to decide the future of this country. Women are watching and we vote." And others have much at stake too. Generations of children have prospered from better-educated, worldlier, more independent, and wealthier mothers. The expanded lives women enjoy have in turn allowed a generation of men to be better and more involved fathers, lovers, friends, and colleagues. (Some of the greatest damage to the pro-choice cause comes from friendly fire, from those who cast this issue as one that exclusively concerns women.)

Pro-lifers tend to believe, as Rick Santorum has recently articulated, that sex should be for the sole purpose of producing a baby. Pro-choicers tend to accept sex as something that people do for intimacy and for pleasure too. And because of that, they work for wider use of contraception. More than that, pro-choicers celebrate the power of family planning in our lives, the power to choose when and if we want to have a family (and to decide, once we've begun one, how large it should be). And this, let's face it, is in step with the way Americans live. The average American woman spends thirty years of her life trying to prevent pregnancy.¹⁷ Even 85 percent of Catholic women,¹⁸ in defiance of Church doctrine, support expanding access to artificial birth control (and 98 percent of sexually active Catholic women have practiced it as well¹⁹). The pro-choice side rejoices in every societal advance that has come from this simple control, which is nothing short of a flowering of equality in school, at work, and at home.

The pro-choice movement may have ceded much of the rhetorical advantage to the "pro-life" movement, but it's the pro-choice movement that has helped construct and that now defends our dearest values, those that Americans largely identify as their own. We value control over our destinies, independence, equality. These are pro-choice values, and they have come to represent the best values of our culture. What this book details is how the pro-life, anti-contraceptive movement is trying to undo all the gains, particularly for women, that we now take for granted.