Padaviya

The year 2011will be remembered by reproductive rights supporters as the year that the anti-choice movement really turned up the aggression, destroying the objections of moderate liberals who thought that pro-choice activists were being hysterical little ladies with our constant warnings about anti-choicers.

Up until late 2010, you could still find many a liberal who would argue that conservatives “don’t really” want to ban abortion, but instead dangle the promise of doing so in front of a bunch of religious zealots to get their votes. Now those liberals realize the religious zealots actually exert quite a bit of control, in both their direct control over the Republicans and their ability to make the Democrats jump around nervously.

Up through 2010, you could find many liberals who would laugh condescendingly when you would point out that the anti-choice movement not only wants to ban abortion, but has an eye out for destroying access to contraception, as well. No one is laughing at the supposedly hysterical ladies anymore. Turns out, we were right all along, and everyone knows it, including the White House.

There’s much that can be said about the escalating attacks on abortion access, which seemed especially over-the-top in a nation gripped by economic crisis that needs to be dealt with immediately. Irin Carmon did an excellent round-up of that story at Salon, and is on this week’s podcast talking about the same.  As she explains, many anti-choice efforts in that direction were surprisingly useless at the end of the day, since they’ve been tied up in court or, as in the case of the personhood amendment in Mississippi, simply voted down completely.

What I want to comment on for my last column of the year is the war on contraception, since 2011 was the year where it went from a series of skirmishes over contraception access to all-out war. Let’s be clear; anti-choice activists have always opposed contraception. But they were always wary of being outed to the public at large as anti-contraception, which meant that their attempts to discourage the use of it were somewhat stymied.

Under the Bush administration, they scored some victories by mandating anti-contraception propaganda (misleadingly called “abstinence-only education”) in schools, preventing emergency contraception from being sold over-the-counter without age restrictions, and defunding international spending on family planning that had nothing to do with abortion. Two of those victories have turned to losses. Abstinence-only especially turned out to be a joke; while anti-choicers were able to secure an apparently much-desired uptick in the teen pregnancy rate, it seems like it was mostly a blip in what is a longer trend of teenagers being more responsible about contraceptive use. It also seemed, until very recently, that anti-choicers would also lose on emergency contraception.

The election of Obama and the rollback of anti-contraception propaganda, however, seems to have set the anti-choice movement off. Even though most of them will still deflect if asked directly in mainstream media if they oppose contraception, they basically stopped trying so hard to manage mainstream perceptions of themselves as somehow just great lovers of fetal life, and are coming out with their anti-sex, misogynist agenda. The word “abortion” gets thrown around a lot, but the actions of the anti-choice movement this year made it crystal clear that it’s not about abortion, but about punishing women who have sex, full stop. Here’s a list of examples of how:

1) The Planned Parenthood federal budget stand-off. When House Republicans threatened a government shutdown if Title X funding for contraception and reproductive health services wasn’t stripped from the budget, the word “abortion” was tossed around a lot. Maybe some fools bought that story, but for most of us it was obvious that it couldn’t be about abortion. After all, no Title X funds can go to abortion services. It was clearly an attack on contraception access for those who couldn’t pay out of pocket, fitting with previous anti-choice hostility towards contraception.

2) The defunding of family planning clinics on a state level. House Republicans may have lost the funding battle on a federal level, but there’s been much more success depriving women of access to contraceptives and related services on a state level. For instance, under Rick Perry’s leadership, Texas has been so successful in stripping funding from family planning clinics that the state can expect to see a 22 percent increase in its abortion rate. Other anti-choice-controlled states are making the move to dramatically increase the unintended pregnancy rate, with Wisconsin adding cancer screenings to the list of subsidized services they are stripping from women of the state.  Sure, all these moves will dramatically increase the amount of money the states have to dish out for Medicaid, but women are punished for having sex with unintended pregnancies and cancer, which is all that matters to the anti-choice movement.

3) Personhood amendments. Mississippi very nearly passed an amendment that would define fertilized eggs as persons in their state, which would be an effective ban on abortion, IVF, stem cell research, and providing many forms of emergency medical assistance to pregnant women. Anti-choicers also clearly hoped it could be used to ban the pill, even though the only demonstrable mechanism that the pill uses to prevent pregnancy is to suppress ovulation. The amendment didn’t pass, but anti-choicers managed to get many news anchors, pundits, and even feminists to erroneously claim that the pill works by killing fertilized eggs. (All available evidence shows that it works by suppressing ovulation, and the possibility that it may make it slightly more likely for an egg not to implant than usual is speculation.) Getting that misinformation into the public was a huge rhetorical victory for those who have an eye out for banning female-controlled contraception, and returning control over women’s bodies to men.

4) The open fight over the HPV vaccine. The HPV vaccine couldn’t have less to do with fetal life, embryonic life, or even the life of fertilized eggs. But since those things don’t really matter to the anti-choice movement—which is primarily motivated by the desire to punish women who have sex—the HPV vaccine was resisted by anti-choice activists from the get-go. This war has been going on mainly out of the  view of the mainstream media, until 2011, when Rick Perry’s competition for the Republican nomination decided to make an issue out of his previous support for the vaccine. Michele Bachmann particularly made a giant fuss over the supposed evils of letting the sexually- active avoid death from cervical cancer. While the vaccine isn’t contraception, the controversy was yet another example of how anti-choicers are dispensing with the bad faith arguments about “life,” and openly fighting any tool women can use to be safe while being sexually active.

5) The fight over insurance coverage of contraception. In 2011, the Obama administration decided to add contraception to the list of preventive services that will eventually be covered fully without a co-pay by insurance companies. Naturally, this caused a fight with anti-choice activists, who are now looking for ways to chip away at the decision by carving out exemptions for Catholic-run universities and hospitals. (Who are required to cover contraception by the federal government anyway.) This fight couldn’t have less to do with “abortion”, but is just about maximizing the number of women who get pregnant against their will by making contraception needlessly expensive.

6) The Plan B debacle. Anti-choice activists lost most of their battles, except for the state-level destruction of access to contraception. However, they learned as the year wound down that persistence pays off: The Obama administration handed them an enormous victory when HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius overruled the FDA’s decision to allow Plan B to be sold over-the-counter without age restrictions. By keeping Plan B out of the hands of minors, especially those in consensual and age-appropriate relationships, and by making it much harder for women of all ages to get it, the administration helped the anti-choice movement in its goal of keeping this country’s unintended pregnancy rate sky high. Sure, that also means our abortion rate continues to be sky-high, but as this year has definitively shown, the anti-choice movement doesn’t care about preventing a single abortion, if doing so would get in the way of punishing women for having sex.

questions remain about the extent to which religious beliefs about sexual morality should influence global AIDS policy. Catholic positions against contraception and limiting sexual intimacy to lifelong monogamous heterosexual marriage have been seen as the major reason the Vatican, bishops in various regions of the world, and Catholic AIDS providers have refused to provide condoms as part of the three-tiered AIDS prevention strategy known as “ABC” (abstain, be faithful, use condoms).

There is no doubt that the Pope’s nod to the use of condoms by an HIV-infected person under certain circumstances will lead to significant loosening of the strictures on condom provision, although the rapidity with which the U.S.-based Catholic Relief Services issued a statement saying that their “current policy holds: we do not purchase, distribute or promote the use of condoms” was disappointing.  CRS receives 75 percent of its funding from the U.S. government. Nonetheless, some Catholic workers are already ignoring the ban and doing just that.

Canadian teens are waiting longer and having safer sex than previous generations, an audience at the University of Guelph’s 32nd annual Sexuality Conference heard Tuesday morning.

Elizabeth Saewyc, a researcher at the University of British Columbia, said the media and many adults perpetuate the idea that wild parties and reckless sex are rampant among Canadian teens.

“When it comes to teen sex, there’s a lot of buzz out there,” Saewyc said. “But the reality is that most teens today are sexually healthier than teens of a decade ago.”

“I can’t give you that, SIR!”

“And why not?”

“Because I KNOW you’re NOT going to use it yourself, and I don’t know who you might give it to.”

When she turns 18 in two years and her parents find her a husband, Amruta says she will insist she isn’t required by her new family to have more than two children.

“A small family is a happy family,” she said one afternoon this week, scrambling to watch her siblings and stretch a band of leather for her father, a local whip maker.

Activists and social workers say Amruta isn’t alone. Throughout India, many young women nowadays would prefer to have small families. The number of children an Indian woman bears has fallen to around 3.0, down from 3.78 in 1990 and 6.0 in 1950. Public-health experts say those figures could tumble even further if contraceptives were more widely available.

A new study on teen pregnancy finds the teen birth-abortion rate has fallen in Canada over a 10-year period, to a greater extent than in the United States and parts of the United Kingdom.

The rate declined almost 37 per cent in Canada from 1996 to 2006, compared to drops of 25 per cent in the U.S. and 4.75 per cent in England and Wales, and a rise of 19 per cent in Sweden.

The study, published Wednesday in the Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality, said the teen birth-abortion rate per 1,000 women aged 15 to 19 was 27.9 in 2006.

Today, March 24th, 2010, is Back Up Your Birth Control Day.  Each year, the National Institute for Reproductive Health as the sponsors of Back Up Your Birth Control Day¸ has focused on barriers to emergency contraception access including age, immigration status or socio-economic status. This year, we bring you a first person perspective of the barriers to EC access for women serving in the United States military.

I can hear their heavy breathing through the paper-thin walls. The twin-sized bed they make love on squeaks. My roommate and I place bets on how long he will last. I bet three minutes; she bets five. The male soldier was cut short as the siren starts to wail; another mortar attack. As my roommate and I run towards the bunker to take cover, we decide we both lost the bet. I sit across from the female soldier who I was just placing bets on, I wonder to myself, “Is she on birth control? What if their condom broke? What if she gets pregnant?”

After a firestorm of negative publicity following the Canada government’s  announcement that it would not fund family planning programs as part of its global contribution toward reducing maternal death and illness, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper appeared to backtrack on the inclusion of contraception as part of his G8 initiative on maternal health reports the Globe and Mail.

“We are not closing doors against any options including contraception,” Harper said. “But we do not want a debate here or elsewhere on abortion.”

Hardly solid reassurance, but it’s a step. 

OTTAWA- The Conservative government has offered an explanation for why it will exclude contraception from its initiative to improve the health of mothers in poor countries: Birth control doesn’t fit with saving lives.

In no uncertain terms, Foreign Minister Lawrence Cannon yesterday ruled out any kind of family-planning programs being included in Canada’s “signature” initiative at June’s G8 summit - a strategy to improve the health of mothers and young children in poor countries.

Nearly 600,000 women die each year due to complications of pregnancy, labor, childbirth or unsafe abortion. Family planning is the first and most critical prevention intervention. Programs to reduce maternal mortality and morbidity that do not include family planning will be as effective as plans to reduce motor vehicle mortality by abolishing seat belts, to reduce diabetes by force-feeding corn syrup to diabetics, and reduce dental decay by forbidding the sale of toothpaste.

The first barrier method controlled by women, the female condom is a loose, synthetic rubber sheath that women can insert into the vagina before sex—and that will stay in place by means of flexible rings on both ends. The FDA approved the female condom in 1993 as a revolutionary tool in the fight against HIV, but objections to it have mostly centered around aesthetic concerns.

For years, female condom promotion has focused on women in desperate need of the device—like sex workers or women in coercive or violent sexual relationships, whose sex partners refuse to use the male version. Now, female condom promoters have discovered that to protect high-risk women, they must first reinforce the idea that the device is a normal—and yes, sexy—option for all women. “We’re trying to reach that critical threshold,” says Shannon Hader, director of D.C.’s HIV/AIDS, Hepatitis, STD and TB Administration (HAHSTA). “So if you have 10 women in a room, it’s not necessary that all 10 try out the female condom—but if a few of them have tried it, if your best friend has tried it, if half of you are familiar with it and know about it, then there’s a higher comfort level with the product when you’re introduced to it.”

Allison, 26, and her boyfriend were having sex—an activity they had engaged in many times over the six months they had been dating—when her contraceptive vaginal ring fell right out of her vagina. Her boyfriend paused. He developed a sudden concern over the efficacy of the couple’s method of birth control. “He was like, ‘Oh, no. How is it going to catch my semen?’” Allison recalls.

For about a year now, Allison has used the NuvaRing to prevent pregnancy. Three weeks out of the month, the clear, flexible plastic ring sits in Allison’s vagina and releases hormones into her bloodstream that prevent her from ovulating. It does not “catch” anybody’s semen.

Last week on the Sexist, we discussed the contraceptive knowledge deficit among young men (and I got into the sex ed video business). Readers, bless ‘em, chimed in with more “magical” birth control theories they’ve heard over the years—from both men and women.

Lizrd’s mom is mystified:

As a nuva ring user, it rocks and I miss it now that I’ve been booted from my parents health care. But yeah, my boyfriend was probably a little mystified by the whole endeavor. The most resistance came from my mom, who seemed to think it “caught sperm” and told me, a freshman in college “well its your pregnancy to worry about” when I told her I was making the switch from daily pills.