In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.
– Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist, section 16
Aubrey Beardsley, ‘Juvenal Scourging Woman’ (first published in this uncensored version in 1906),
illustration for the Sixth Satire of Juvenal: copyright © V&A
There is already some great stuff up on the internets about Contra-Contraception in today’s The New York Times Magazine (see here and here and also here). While it seems to be news to the NY Times that the Right in this country wants to eliminate contraception, this goal has been obvious to many of us for quite some time. As I wrote over a year ago:
We’ll talk more about that word “private” in a moment. Lets talk first about the assault on women’s health care. The current push from the so-called “pro-life” movement isn’t just about abortion, though it is a convenient place for them to start. After all, the idea of an abortion is a hard one to hold in mind. It is easy to move people with graphic depictions of the mechanics of the various procedures used to terminate a pregnancy. However, remove this possibility from the raft of choices left to a woman, and you go a long way toward taking a woman’s freedom to choose her own destiny away from her.
It isn’t just ROE v. WADE (1973) that is in danger. There has been endless debate over how good a decision it was, but that isn’t where this assault ends. It is no accident that many on the right seek to limit, or eliminate, access to birth control, or to insist that many forms of birth control are actually forms of abortion. The ultimate target of these assaults is GRISWOLD v. CONNECTICUT (1965). Of course, those counseling that we “reach out” to the anti-choice crowd will respond that this is alarmist, that we must make people who feel that a woman has no right to make this ultimate choice about whether to bear children “feel welcome” in our party in order to win. There will be assertions that this is “single issue” or “special interest” advocacy.
The right of an individual to maintain control over their own body is not a “single issue”. It is the FUNDAMENTAL issue. The inviolability of a person and their right to privacy is not a “special interest”, it is the baseline upon which this party can build a new and lasting majority.
So here we are, with the Right’s war on humanity proceeding apace and the “leaders” of the Democratic Party adopt the language of the right while ostensibly protecting women’s health care access. Once again, they are letting the Right choose the field of battle, and the way and terms with which that battle will be fought. What the political elites in this country seem to agree on, along with the religious zealots, is that American adults can’t make informed choices themselves.
This is a strange place for us to find ourselves in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The entire thrust of modern society has been one of human beings garnering more and more control over their environments, over the very processes of life itself (not always to good effect). We alter the land. We alter our food. Our cities and industry alter our weather. More and more, we alter our bodies in fundamental ways, ways far beyond mere tattoos and scarification. We replace body parts, and lifespans have been lengthened through the use of these technologies. We have, with the power of our minds, become what a human being in the past might call gods, or at least demi-gods.
It is interesting that many of those who oppose abortion because of the “sanctity” of life have NO problem with things like hip replacements, pacemakers, internal defibulators and other implants. After all, while good things, they are also things that can be controlled, rationed by cost, by the class of the recipient , the person who’s quality of life has that special kind of sanctity. We all know that the wealthy and connected will have no trouble getting abortions, birth control or lawyers to help protect them when they want to ensure that their end-of-life decisions are followed.
In first century Rome, conservatives like Juvenal, or our own brand here and now, viewed women as a threat, and any change that gives women power and opportunities (interestingly, in Juvenal’s time that was the growing popularity of marriage!) should be quashed. Lets face it, the last frontier between all of us and true autonomy is for us to control when we bring a life into the world, and when we choose to end our own. Trapping people in their bodies, lashing them to biological imperatives, makes them easier to control. A permanent underclass can be maintained, fear of falling into it can be held out as ever-present threat. It is no mystery that poor women have the least access to birth control, health care and abortion, it is no suprise that this population has children who are undernourished and undereducated, another generation of cheap labor and political scapegoats. Too much freedom, too much opportunity to choose would enable these people to move up and out, something the status quo can’t abide. As we shift more and more toward the Gilded Age again, it’s time to ramp up the controls on the shrinking middle class. A trapped and strapped population, saddled with more unwanted children, won’t develop the energy or have the resources to fight back.
As Contra-Contraception puts it:
The dark side of this, according to some commentators, is the declining birth rate in Europe. It takes an average of 2.1 children per woman to keep a population constant. Italy and Spain are tied for the lowest fertility rate in Western Europe, at 1.28. Even Ireland, the country with the highest birth rate, at 1.86, is suffering a population drain. (The U.S. rate is 2.09.) From 1994 to 2004, the average age at which European women became mothers rose by about 16 months, to 28.2. This, according to social conservatives, is the black hole into which the contraceptive mentality is drawn. As the Canadian priest Raymond J. de Souza wrote in National Review in 2004, “If children are a sign of hope in the future, Europe — and to a lesser extent Canada, Australia and the United States — is losing its will to live.”
This would seem to be a bind, because the benefits of family planning are profound: couples can organize their lives, financially and otherwise, when they are able to choose when to have children and how many to have. And, around the world, countries in which abortion is legal and contraception is widely available tend to rank among the lowest in rate of abortion, while those that outlaw abortion — notably in Central and South America and Africa — have rates that are among the highest. According to Stanley K. Henshaw of the Guttmacher Institute, recent drops in abortion rates in Eastern Europe are due to improved access to contraceptives. The U.S. falls somewhere in the middle in rate of abortion: at 21 per 1,000 women of reproductive age, it is roughly on par with Nigeria (25), much better than Peru (56) but far worse than the Netherlands (9).
The Netherlands, where the teen pregnancy rate also ranks among the lowest in the world, has long been of interest to sex educators in the U.S. for the frankness of its approach. The national sex education course, called Long Live Love, begins at age 13. One of its hallmarks has been dubbed “Double Dutch” — encouraging the use of both condoms and birth control pills. “It’s proven successful,” says Margo Mulder of STI AIDS Netherlands, the Dutch health education center. “It shows that when you discuss contraception and protection with students, they actually are careful. And I know that some people in the U.S. say that when you promote contraception, you’re also promoting sex, but we’ve found that when you educate people, they don’t have sex earlier. They think about it. So you’re not promoting sex, you’re helping them to be rational about doing it.”
The problem with this, as far as American social conservatives are concerned, is that it treats symptoms rather than what they see as the underlying disease: an outlook that is focused on the individual at the expense of family and society. Their ultimate goal is not a number — the percentage of abortions or unintended pregnancies — but an ideal, a way for people to think and behave. As Mohler says of the Dutch approach in particular: “The idea is to completely sever the sex act from reproduction, and then train teens to do it. It treats sex as a morally meaningless act. I find it profoundly anti-humanistic.”
So the only moral thing, from the Right’s point-of-view, is for humanity to continue to breed like Malthus’ rabbits. Only the production of “issue” from intercourse lends sex any moral worth. Forget about bonding and connecting and sharing life in its most unfiltered between human beings. We exist only to make more of us, and only acting in a way to produce that outcome can be moral. Morality, then, is ALL about serving society, not individual people. This agenda HATES humanity in the form of individual people. Like so many things spewed forth by activists on the right, saying that sexual freedom is “anti-humanistic” turns logic on its head. Of course, logic and reality has little or nothing to do with what passes for conservatism in this country. It’s all about maintaining control, about keeping people in line, about propping up a regime that threatens the very existence of life on this planet.
Scourging the Right – Liberal Street Fighter
