Tag Archives: birth control

Why the Fight for Women’s Rights to Our Own Bodies Goes So Deep

Lynne Murray says:

Social futurist Sara Richardson recently wrote a piece so profound that I felt I should have known her points all along. I lived through the change in attitudes she’s describing. Her conclusion surprised me because it’s so true and yet so invisible. Richardson explains:

When people look back on the 20th century from the vantage point of 500 years on, they will remember the 1900s for three big things…. One was the integrated circuit …. The second was the moon landing ….

But the third one is the silent one, the one that I’ve never seen come up on anybody’s list of Innovations That Changed The World, but matters perhaps more deeply than any of the more obvious things that usually come to mind. And that’s the mass availability of nearly 100% effective contraception. Far from being a mere 500-year event, we may have to go back to the invention of the wheel or the discovery of fire to find something that’s so completely disruptive to the way humans have lived for the entire duration of our remembered history.

Until the condom, the diaphragm, the Pill, the IUD, and all the subsequent variants of hormonal fertility control came along, anatomy really was destiny — and all of the world’s societies were organized around that central fact. Women were born to bear children; they had no other life options.

This set me to thinking how difficult it was to get a prescription for birth control pills in suburban Southern California in 1967. The pill was legal but you had to find a doctor who would write a prescription for you. I wasn’t about to ask my family doctor, who was my parents’ age and kind of creepy. Worse yet, he might have told my parents, who had made it plain that they did not want me to be sexually active. I knew the Pill existed, but information about where and how to actually get a prescription was not easily found.

A girlfriend in our little theater community suggested I go to a public health clinic. She outlined a strategy: tell them I was going to get married in another month and needed the pill. The song and dance she suggested made it clear that asking for a prescription without pretending to be almost-as-good-as married might not work. I didn’t feel equal to that deception and finally ended up honestly asking and getting a prescription from my dermatologist, who said he prescribed it for acne and would be glad to furnish a scrip. He was 10 years older and quite amused that I was interested in contraception. In fact. when he heard I was moving to San Francisco, home of sex and drugs and rock and roll, he asked if I could get him some marijuana. Although he was perfectly nice about it, he demonstrated how women are divided into good girls–owned by and obedient to a father or a husband–and bad girls–who want to have sex without consequences. Bad girls, being outlaws, are reasonable people to ask for illegal drugs.

Once I moved to San Francisco, I discovered Planned Parenthood and my problems getting reliable birth control simply by asking for it were over

Robinson describes the dangers of complacency:

If you’re a woman of childbearing age in the US, you’ve had access to effective contraception your entire fertile life . . .[I] t feels like we’ve had this right, and this technology, forever. We take it so completely for granted that we simply cannot imagine that it could ever go away. It leads to a sweet complacency: birth control is something that’s always been there for us, and we’re rather stunned that anybody could possibly find it controversial enough to pick a fight over.

She reminds her readers that the backlash is real and the threat is not imaginary:

Modern industrial economies have undermined the authority of men both in the public sphere and in the private realms; and since they’re limited in how far they can challenge it in the external world, they’ve turned women’s bodies into the symbolic battlefield on which their anxieties over this play out. Drill down to the very deepest center of any of these movements, and you’ll find men who are experiencing this change as a kind of personal annihilation, a loss of masculine identity so deep that they are literally interpreting it as the end of the world. (The first rule of understanding apocalyptic movements is this: If someone tells you the world is ending, believe them. Because for them, it probably is.)
…

They are, above everything else, desperate to get their women back under firm control. And in their minds, things will not be right again until they’re assured that the girls are locked up even more tightly, so they will never, ever get away like that again.
…
These things can take a loooong time to work all the way out.) Our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will, in all likelihood, still be working out the details of these new gender agreements a century from now; and it may be a century after that before their grandkids can truly start taking any of this for granted.

Robinson’s article also gave me a renewed respect and appreciation for Margaret Sanger, who said: “No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.”

Sanger waged a lifelong struggle to make reliable birth control available. She was instrumental in encouraging the invention of, and finding the funding to develop, the Pill. She lived to see the Pill made available.

Now it is time to honor her legacy and make sure that our rights to reproductive freedom are not wrestled out of our hands.

Birth Control: Back in the News

Laurie and Debbie say:

We were very impressed by this article by Valerie Tarico at truthout.org . Tarico couches excellent contemporary birth-control information in the context of Rick Santorum’s recent attack on birth control (“It’s not okay. It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”).

Good news: Even if you feel hazy or muddled right now, you likely have access to technologies your parents could only have dreamed of. Bad news: The confusion is no accident.

Although the headline implies that she is simply writing about birth control misinformation coming from the right wing, the article is much more nuanced than that. She covers five things the right wing doesn’t want you to know about birth control, five that big pharma doesn’t want you to know, and five that the medical gatekeepers don’t want you to know. One thing all of these groups have in common is that they don’t want women to be able to control our bodies. Here’s one from each group:

Right wing: IUDs work by preventing eggs and sperm from hooking up. Opponents of abortion and contraception would have us believe that virtually all modern contraceptives are abortifacients. They especially have targeted the most effective contraceptives available, IUDs, with this accusation. In reality copper IUDs like the Paragard work primarily by inhibiting sperm motility, thus preventing fertilization. Hormonal IUDs like the Mirena work primarily by thickening a plug at the opening to the cervix —another means of preventing fertilization–and secondarily by decreasing ovulation. …

Pharma: The best contraception is also the cheapest. The most effective contraceptives on the market have the potential to kill some of Pharma’s big profit streams. The Paragard copper IUD, which is top tier from an efficacy standpoint (over 99%) offers the cheapest month over month contraception. The problem for Pharma: you put it in once and then don’t spend any money on contraception for the next 10 years. The Mirena hormonal IUD (99.8% effective once established), is more expensive, but has the side benefit of reducing menstrual bleeding and cramps over time by an average of 90%. Family planning practitioners who promote LARCs joke about putting themselves out of business. In contrast, Tarico says that one in twelve women on the pill gets pregnant each year, a higher number than we would have guessed.

Medical gatekeepers: The FDA lags behind. European women have an array of contraceptive options that either never make it to market in the U.S. or are delayed by anywhere from 5-20 years. American regulators are influenced by a litigious environment and by religious fundamentalists, which skew the equation toward inaction. For example, Nexplanon, the latest iteration of the implant, only just became available in the U.S. Similarly, the Mirena IUD has a long track record with women of all ages in Europe but is not yet approved for childless women here. By the time it was officially sanctioned in the US to regulate heavy menstrual bleeding (2009), it was already in use for contraception or bleeding by 15 million women worldwide. A frameless IUD optimized for small women is approved in the E.U., but hasn’t yet reached the U.S. market. If you want to know where contraception is headed, take a look at what Europeans are doing.

Many of the other fifteen points are just as rarely discussed.

So it got us to wondering why birth control has gotten so little attention and discussion over the past couple of decades.

One answer is obvious: the three groups that Tarico singles out are happiest if there isn’t a lot of conversation.

Another is that abortion is getting so much attention and is under such intense attack. This means that the heroes fighting to keep abortion safe and legal are too busy to look at birth control, and that the anti-abortion warriors are really busy with their main campaign. The war on abortion has pushed some of the truly fine birth control resources under the radar: Planned Parenthood (link below) not only has to spend energy fighting it enemies, it has to do what it can to stay out of the public eye, because every time it shows up in the news, the attacks get more fervent. Tarico’s other recommended resource, Bedsider (a new site launched by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy), is one neither of us had even heard of, and it looks excellent.

But why aren’t feminists talking much about contraception? Our guess is that it’s generally thought of as a “solved problem.” In most places in the United States, women who want contraception can get something. And feminists, with so many hot-button issues to concentrate on, may have been too busy to notice that that something is served with large doses of preconception, misinformation, and monetary gain. So wrong-headed Rick Santorum is, for the worst possible reasons, calling attention to something we need to look at more closely.

So, to close with more of Tarico’s words,

You really can manage your contraception. A decision about contraception can shape the rest of your life—your happiness, your ability to contribute to the world around you, the wellbeing of your children. Only you can weigh the risks and benefits of any given contraception against each other in the context of your lifestyle and life goals. To make the best decision possible, you need accurate information, and that means knowing what questions to ask, who to ask, and what factors may be biasing answers. An hour on the internet can fill your mind with rubbish about almost any medical technology. Alternately, an hour spent on sites that are rigorously fact based could mean you have more up-to-date information than your peers or even your doctor. (Bedsider.org and Planned Parenthood are among the best.) Tarico doesn’t mention Scarleteen’s excellent birth control bingo interactive site, so we will.

Thanks to F.S.J. Ledgister, who linked to this on Google+