Today is International Women’s Day, and I’m going back to a post I published on this date in 2011 as a jumping-off point. I’m sorry to say there hasn’t been a lot of positive progress since then.
March is Women’s History Month – a time to reflect on where we’ve been and consider where we go next. As the saying goes, those who forget history are doomed to repeat it…and those who haven’t forgotten may be forced by circumstances to re-fight battles they’d hoped were already resolved.
If a “war on women” led by conservative forces was declared early in 2011, it only seems to have escalated in this Presidential election year. As Mona Gable said on BlogHer.com last week, “As far as women’s rights are concerned, you’d think it was 1912 all over again! Where is Margaret Sanger when you need her?”
Margaret Sanger’s first-hand experience–as a nurse on New York City’s Lower East Side, and as one of eleven children–with the effects of unplanned pregnancies on women’s physical and economic health led to her work as an advocate for birth control, which eventually led to the formation of Planned Parenthood.
Considering that just 3% of the total services it offered in 2010 were related to abortion, the amount of attention Planned Parenthood gets for those services is rather disproportionate, to put it mildly. And for the record, terminating a pregnancy through abortion is, more often than not, a response to the prospect of unplanned parenthood.
My own parenthood, which commenced when I was barely 20 years old, was unplanned. The fact that my unplanned pregnancy was also my only one is a direct result of planning, and the use of contraception, for the remaining 17 years of my first marriage (beginning six weeks after my son was born). My chosen method was the Pill, and for most of those years, my health insurance didn’t pay for it. For several years early in that marriage, when my insurance was old-fashioned “major medical” that didn’t address prescriptions at all, my source for contraception and general health care was the Planned Parenthood office in Ithaca, NY.
These days, my body is providing its own birth control–hormone tests have decreed that is has officially entered menopause. However, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that those hormones might need some outside help at some point in the coming years, and I could find myself taking the Pill again one day–and hoping that my health insurance will cover it for non-contraceptive usage.
For most of the four decades that access to safe and legal abortions has been legal, loss of that access has been a near-constant threat, and never something to be taken for granted. But despite the fact that I belonged to a church that denounced it, I never really worried about being able to obtain and practice effective birth control–and I’ve never equated it with abortion, as some of the scarier rhetoric does these days. My thinking is that effective birth control is the best way (OK, not counting abstinence) to prevent abortion.
One definition of “conservative” is “keeping things as they are” – that is, preservation of the status quo. By that definition, actions such as those that would restrict access to contraception by equating it with abortion look like the polar opposite of “conservative” to me; they’re about radical change that would dismantle existing systems and reverse decades of social momentum–progress which, for the record, has often benefited both sexes.
As the saying goes, “Well-behaved women rarely make history.” The “bad behavior” of history-making women isn’t “girls gone wild,” frat-boy stuff–history and infamy are not the same thing. History-making women have made their mark by taking control, not by being controlled; not by keeping quiet and “knowing their place,” but by speaking up and questioning it. We’ve fought long and hard for control over our own bodies and our own lives, and if we want to hold on to that control, it looks like we won’t be getting a break from that fight any time soon.
EDITED TO ADD a link to a related Huffington Post article by Suzanne Braun Levine:
“The contraceptive furor of recent weeks highlights the forces that are trying to impose another narrative — theirs — on us.
In the century since Margaret Sanger crusaded for birth control, women got the vote, entered the halls of higher education, broke into male-dominated professions (including the clergy), and made great and celebrated strides in sports. No one is trying to roll back those achievements. So how is it possible that anyone could argue that contraception is a matter of anyone’s business other than the woman’s own “moral conviction”?…Why has it been so hard to establish the narrative of a woman’s right to control her reproductive health?
This is a uniquely American state of affairs. Other western countries have left reproductive politics behind decades ago. But this is the home of The Scarlet Letter,and to this day women’s sexuality makes some people lose all reason.
Most of us — even those who grew up during the so-called “sexual revolution” — have encountered one mixed message after another…(but) with the help of our daughters and such brave young women as Sandra Fluke, and the outrage registered by millions of women to the all-male debate about whether to “let” women have birth control covered by their health insurance (as Viagra is), this may be the moment that we take control of that narrative once and for all.”
