In the past, I had the sense that, politically at least, there was quite a lot of talk about opposition to abortion, but contraception was by-and-large acceptable. When I noticed more anti-contraception talk, I had a vaguely formed notion that this was caused by drift having to do with the difficulty of opposing the legal underpinnings of Roe v. Wade (concerning abortion) without also opposing the underpinnings of Connecticut v. Griswold (concerning contraception.)
But, the Slacktivist has another theory.
White evangelicals have begun adopting Catholic language and Catholic teaching regarding contraception. This change has not occurred due to any new theological or biblical understanding, but due to a political change — due to white evangelical opposition to President Barack Obama.
Whether that’s true or not, I think there is a largely unstated desire among both groups that, as Libby Anne suggests, sex have consequences. If true, I don’t know whether that desire comes from Augustine or Paul or God or what.
Politically, I think that highlighting the overlap between those opposed to abortion rights and those opposed to pro-contraception measures is ultimately a losing proposition for the pro-life movement. Broad support for contraception isn’t going anywhere. And, to the extent arguments against legalized abortion also apply to contraception, those arguments will become less appealing to the voting public.
Since it’s apparently open season on speculation, an alternate theory: Evangelicalisms are embracing some Catholic thought because they lack internal or biblical cohesion. The eventuality of it is Evangelicals embracing Catholicism or, if the get really radical, Orthodoxy.
I have heard these comments about evangelical churches, the off-ramp mega churches and the unaffiliated non-liturgical churches. They do not have well developed theologies and are anchored more in the beliefs and magnetism of their pastors. I was churched in two traditions, both liturgical early reformation churches, so my tradition was far different.
I don not think that evangelicals and others are adopting Catholic theology to much extent. I recall reading that early in the christian right movement, the Moral Majority years of the late 1970s, this movement considered abortion to be mostly a Catholic issue. This of course has changed.
And of course few of these churches oppose the death penalty, accept evolution, and show great concern for the condition of the poor, important catholic principles.
It seems like a big part of this is being driven by church-owned health-care providers who want to pick and choose the services they provide using their interpretation of church doctrine to do it. This is why I’m planning on opening a discount hospital that adheres to the tenets of voodoo witchcraft. We will offer the most cost-effective health care on the planet, if by “cost” you mean “we accept cuttlebones for payment” and by “effective” we mean “we promise to chant for you until you expire, then attempt to turn you into a zombie afterward.”
Will your Chicago offices also offer voter registration?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The horse is out of the barn and the door is wide open. Evangelicals and Catholics equals an unholy alliance. in my opinion. I’m Catholic but I want these old men out of the reproductive lives of women. I have a child, now a doctor, who did an “internship” in a Catholic hospital’s family clinic (for poor people) while in med school. Everyone knew contraception was off the table. Everyone also knew what was behind the unmarked closet door, and it was dispensed liberally.
Maybe I’m wrong because after all, I’m just a girl, but this seems to me to be simply a reactive, desparate, “wounded in the corner” effort on the part of the far right to attempt greater control over the lives of women. And they have overreached. For nearly all American women under the age of, oh, I don’t, know, 100, this question has been asked and answered. One can make the logical argument that if abortion is murder then it should be made illegal. But telling women that they cannot prevent pregnancy by using medicine available since before most of them were born – good luck with that.
It’s even simpler than that.
Right-wingers are all about hierarchy, about maintaining the established set of rules rigidly and without exception.
That’s why they’re so pissed off about a President Obama. After all, black people are servants, manual laborers, etc. They don’t get to be in charge. They don’t get to tell white people what to do. It’s against the rules.
Same goes with women. Women are there for bearing children and cleaning house. It’s their long-established social role. Men need children to carry on their name, and so it’s up to men when a woman has children or not. Women don’t get to decide these things for themselves. It’s against the rules.
Bull. Those opposed to Mr Obama aren’t looking at his skintone, they’re looking at his policy decisions. Endless bailouts, endless war.
It’s not the policies — those went largely without objection when Bush had those approaches to governing. But, I agree that there’s a good chance that, for many, it’s not skin color either. Mere party affiliation might be sufficient.
To test that for a given individual, you might check whether they were all agitated about Whitewater, Lewinsky, and black helicopters; were silent or supportive of tax cuts in conjunction with Afghanistan, MedicareD, Iraq, and TARP; but then became much more vocally opposed to wars and deficits circa January 2009.
If that were the case, the unbelievably shrill Clinton-hatred would have lasted for a constant eight years, rather than for roughly a year and a half or so surrounding Monica and no more than a week or two at a time around Ruby Ridge, Elian Gonzalez, Vince Foster, Whitewater, and Waco.
It’s because he’s black, and because black people don’t get to tell white people what to do: It’s against the rules.
And who, Karen, is “telling women that they cannot prevent pregnancy by using medicine available since before most of them were born.” Where are these people? No one advocated for that during the election.
There were religious institutions that objected to having to provide insurance that included birth control to employees that violated their religious tenets. And rightfully so – the rule is an infringement on religious freedom in violation of the Constitution. But no one argued that those employees not legally be allowed to get birth control on their own.
As far as the “far right” wanting to get “greater control over the lives of women” you do realize, don’t you that women are every bit as pro-life as men and in some polls more so? Can’t you even acknowledge that maybe those on the “far right” (actually there are liberals and even feminists who oppose abortion) might honestly be motivated by a belief that abortion involves the termination of a human life?
But it’s not, any more than is the government’s failure to grant an exemption from murder laws to someone whose sincerely-held religious beliefs require him to sacrifice nineteen virgins every hour in order to appease the dread demon-lord Yasnogarth.
Paul,
The current scheme adequately balances the interests between religous employers as operating in their “church” capacity(the ministerial exemption) and the requirement to cover contraceptives when they operate as tax exempt entites in the non-church public sphere (operating hospitals and college.)
The 2000 EEOC decision requires religous employers to provide contraceptive coverage if they provide prescription benefits.
Kind of game over. A long time ago.
And can we please stop pretending that the anti-abortion position is somehow “pro-life”? It’s not. If anything, it’s positively anti-life.
Only the pro-choice position has a legitimate claim to being truly pro-life.
For reals? Seriously?
“There were religious institutions that objected to having to provide insurance that included birth control to employees that violated their religious tenets. And rightfully so – the rule is an infringement on religious freedom in violation of the Constitution. ”
So let me get this straight. As a Jehovah’s Witness it is against my religious beliefs to provide insurance that pays for blood transfusions.
So rightfully so I should be able to deny coverage to my employees for blood transfusions?
And why do I have to pay for hard on pills for angry old white men with my tax dollars? Again, against my religion.
The problem I have with the whole “religious freeedom” argument concerning having to pay for an employee’s birth control pills has to do with picking and choosing among which are “sincerely held religioius/moral convictions” and which are not, or at least not worthy of constitutional protection. I think it has been long held that withholding all or part of one’s fedeal income taxes because they support wars to which one has such objections doesn’t get them very far into the Supreme Court’s door.
A health insurance package is a form of compensation. Doesn’t seem to make sense to pay them in cash which they can then use to acquire birth control but find a religious problem when, instead of cash, you’re compensating them with an insurance package that can then be used to acquire birth control.
Using the “religous freedom” argument was a tactical and timely political issue in the campaign. It allowed Republicans to conflate their opposition the APA with a “religous freedom” argument that got traction.
Many of us were already aware of the EEOC decision and knew that this was a contrived issue, but it was a good politcal issue for the Republican candidates.
There were birth control mandates on the books in 17 states and had been law for 12 years. (or close to that)
Nary a peep. For 12 years.
It’s hard to name an issue from conservatives that isn’t contrived.
“But telling women that they cannot prevent pregnancy by using medicine available since before most of them were born – good luck with that.”
And yet they continue to try. Spending millions of dollars to try to limit or deny the availability of birth control.
Makes no sense and is quite disturbing to me.
It goes much deeper than any uneasy alliance between Rome and Colorado Springs.
The Religious Right is bringing forward a no-contraception platform because of their presumed “mandate” to “Go forth, be Fruitful, and MULTIPLY…”. Google “Quiverfull”. If you have a woman pregnant 9 months out of the year for 15-20 years, how much easier to keep her out of the workforce and dependent on some man, like the buy-bull tells her to.
Well, I didn’t google it, but, strangely, “quiverfull” came up in a recent conversation. It seems to me that advocates/practitioners of quiverfull might see keeping a woman out of the workforce as a secondary benefit to the movement’s real objectives of delaying the transition of the white majority to minority status and swelling the ranks of like-believers.
This is not a good trend – I hope the Slacktivist is making more of this than it deserves, but he does provide a good bit of source material to bolster his point.
I am strongly in favor of contraception (and taking responsibility for your sexual activity in general) exactly because I see it as a way to cut down on abortions.
Sometimes an abortion is the least bad option – but I don’t think its ever a good thing in and of itself. If you use effective contraception, though, the issue doesn’t arise, and we don’t have to yell at each other about it.
I can’t recally anyone seriously suggested during the 2012 electioin the government banning birth control. Yet through some terrible communication, that got pushed out there as an issue. Part of that I blame on miscommunication by Senator Rick Santorum. He was honestly discussing his own Catholc belief regarding birth control. He, however, never advocated that government banned birth control, but a lot of people took it that way and it became a focus of much of the discussion.
I do not understand your point regarding Roe and Griswald. They both involve the “right of privacy” which the court “found” in the Constitution in Griswald on birth control issue extened to abortion in Roe and then promptly stopped using for anything else. In Griswald the Court came up with this theory because it had a stupid, out-of-date and unenforced state law on contraception it wanted to strike down and didn’t have any other way to do it. So they made up this “right of privacy” from various “penumbras” in the constitution.
Even if the shaky made up “right of privacy” legal underpinnings of Roe and Griswald get reversed, that doesn’t mean contraception is made illegal There wouldn’t be a state in the country that would ban contraception. And, regarding abortion with Roe’s repeal, you’d have a lot of honest discussion about the issues involved and compromises would be reached. Many of those state compromises will fall short of the abortion on demand for six months which is mandated by Roe v. Wade, and those who pushe for an absolute ban on abortion. The debate would be about where to draw the line, at what point life should be protected. I bet a majority of states would settle on 2 or 3 months. But because of Roe, we’ve never been able to have those debates, those compromises and instead the issue has remained a festering wound since 1973 that is no closer today to healing than ever.
You understand pretty well. If the Constitution doesn’t protect a right to privacy, then a state has the power to ban contraception and abortion alike. Your argument is that the state wouldn’t exercise that power again in the case of contraception. I’m not sure I agree, but that’s a little beside the point. My concern, and I’m sure others would be concerned as well, is with the notion that the state has the authority (exercised or not) to tell its citizens whether or not they are permitted to use birth control.
What I have never clearly understood is the dismissive way in which some folks regard the “penumbra” rationale in light of the language of the ninth amendment. “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” Clearly the Founders contemplated the existence of unenumerated rights.
The problem with abortion is that it snuffs out an innocent life.
Life is — by my definition — a brief interruption of infinite nothingness and, as such, has value beyond human comprehension. That alone makes abortion immoral in my mind.
I wonder if business owners will eventually be required to fund insurance coverage for late term abortion? Partial birth abortions?
The answer is in the population figures. What color people are growing as a per cent of the population, and what color is declining.
It’s either that, or just the last gasp of a dying belief.
Hi, I have been reading your blog for a while, but this is the first time I felt I really had to comment. I found your blog through Sheila Kennedy’s website.
I have a few other viewpoints on it, not my own viewpoint, but viewpoints I have actually encountered. First, I don’t think the activists that squeal the loudest for pro-life represent the average pro-life leaning person. The traditional Catholics and extreme evangelists seem to dominate the pro-life rallies and protests. So while birth control is very well accepted in the general population, I would bet that there is a much higher portion of those that are also against birth control among the extreme pro-lifers versus the general population.
Also, there is an overlap between abortion and birth control in the sense that there are some birth control measures that don’t actually prevent conception, but instead prevent implantation of the embryo. For those that are pro-life all the way to the point of conception, then some birth control measures represent abortion.
Third, there is a natural family planning movement that is especially popular among Catholics and I think it is endorsed by the Pope. It is not the rhythm method, although it might seem a little bit like it. The Creighton Fertility Model is the one I know a little about. The idea is that by tracking up to a possible 30 different biological markers, most of which a woman can do herself if trained, including tracking patterns in temperature and mucus output, a woman can figure out when she is fertile. This can be used for both avoiding pregnancy and helping out those that have infertility issues. If preventing pregnancy, the idea is to avoid sex for a couple of day a month when the woman is fertile.
While there are certainly a few that still believe that birth control of any kind is going against God’s will, those that I actually know that support natural birth control are really opposed to using artificial means that take over the cycle of the woman. I think that they are not opposed to all drugs, but that natural is better. I grew up with parents who were organic gardening and nature is best, so I can understand the natural is best viewpoint.
Fourth, there are a large number of tea party type people that oppose government paying for stuff that they think people should pay for themselves, and that group overlaps a lot with pro-lifers. Fifth, I have found that many people really like telling other people how to live their lives including morality.
As for my view points since I am new here. Personally, I am more of a social liberal, but a fiscal conservative. Growing up I thought of myself as a political moderate leaning Republican, and similar to Sheila Kennedy, felt myself completely pushed out of the Republican party about a decade ago, as the party moved away from me. I was never quite a Republican, however. Then with the tea party, somehow I got pushed toward being what I call a default Democrat. I am still wondering what happened.
I actually do lean toward pro-life, although I do not qualify as pro-life by the standards of the extremists. Ironically it may seem, it is my background in embryonic biology that really made me appreciate life in development. I do think pro-life is a fair enough term even if many of the extremists don’t carry the idea of pro-life beyond conception. Their inconsistency doesn’t make it a bad term to use. Getting away from the extremists, there are many people that lean pro-life that are also against the death penalty, absolutely for saving the life of mothers, support pre-natal care, help the homeless, help the sick, and would even stand in the middle of the road to save an injured cat.
I really hate how extremists have shifted these debates away from nuanced, rational discussions. Most of us I hope fall somewhere in-between on these issues, and even evolve our viewpoints over time.