With over-the-counter contraceptives having been available in this country for several decades now, it seems like the right’s culture warriors would focus their attention elsewhere. After all, in 2007, are there still national political figures are seriously going to speak out against birth control?
Apparently, yes. In an item that most of my favorite blogs have already linked to, the Baltimore Sun’s Cristina Page highlights the contraception controversy that’s just below the mainstream media’s radar.
At National Right to Life’s conference this year, Mitt Romney set out to convince anti-abortion leaders he was their candidate. At the podium, he rattled off his qualifications. To a layman’s ears, it sounded pretty standard for abortion politics. He wants to overturn Roe v. Wade. He supports teaching only abstinence to teens.
But for those trained to hear the subtleties, Mr. Romney was acknowledging something more. He implied an opposition to the birth control pill and a willingness to join in their efforts to scale back access to contraception. There are code phrases to listen for – and for those keeping score, Mr. Romney nailed each one.
One code phrase is: “I fought to define life as beginning at conception rather than at the time of implantation.” The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists defines pregnancy as starting at implantation, the first moment a pregnancy can be known. Anti-abortion advocates want pregnancy to start at the unknown moment sperm and egg meet: fertilization. They’d also like you to believe, despite evidence to the contrary, that the birth control pill prevents that fertilized egg from implanting in the womb.
Mr. Romney’s code, deciphered, meant, “I, like you, hope to reclassify the most commonly used forms of contraceptives as abortions.” In fact, he told the crowd, he already had some practice redefining contraception: “I vetoed a so-called emergency contraception bill that gave young girls abortive drugs without prescription or parental consent.”
It’s not just Romney — Thompson, Brownback, McCain, and Tancredo, with varying degrees of subtlety, have all taken policy positions against various forms of contraception.
This may seem absurd, but there’s every reason to make this a key part of the 2008 presidential campaign.
The GOP base is taking this very seriously. (thanks to SKNM for the tip)
Eighty six anti-abortion groups have committed to opposing all forms of contraception. Among the groups are Right to Life of Kansas, Pro-Life Ohio, the Life League of New Mexico, North Dakota Right to Life, Connecticut Right to Life, California Right to Life, and the Delaware Pro-life Coalition. However, few of these state’s media outlets are covering the groups’ opposition to contraception–no matter how eager the groups are to display their extreme agenda. Thus the public doesn’t know that their elected officials are pandering to anti-birth control forces in order to secure these groups’ support. Yet these groups and their unpopular and dangerous agenda escape notice. Because of this, we’ll wake up one day to discover that almost half the candidates running for president are opposed to contraception. Maybe tomorrow?
And Republican activists are surprisingly assertive in making false claims about birth control.
An August 20 article in The Denver Post about a new family planning services clinic that Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains (PPRM) is building in Denver uncritically reported anti-abortion activist Leslie Hanks’ comment that Planned Parenthood “get[s] young girls hooked on their birth control pills, which don’t work.”
The policy argument is bewildering — it’s hard to wrap my head around the idea that in 2007, a sizeable portion of the GOP base wants to deny Americans legal access to contraception — but it speaks to a radicalization of the Republican Party that bears repeating.
Hilzoy had a terrific post on the subject.
As the Republican party loses support in the wake of Bush’s various disasters, the party that remains becomes more and more conservative. The people who still support Bush are the people who will decide who the Republican nominee will be, and they are very, very conservative. […]
This is not your father’s Republican party. It’s not even the Republican party of 2000. It’s considerably more extreme, and it’s the party all Republican candidates now have to pander to. That should make us all very afraid. Especially those of us — male and female — who value our reproductive freedom.
We already know that about a third of GOP presidential field doesn’t believe in modern biology; maybe at the next debate, someone can ask them whether an American should be legally able to walk into a drugstore and purchase birth control.