Political Games - Where the fuck’s the reset button?

Encouraged by Pandagon, I’m going to do something to mark the 34th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision. And what better way to do it than smacking around some lies from the anti-sex “pro-lifers”. This garbage ran in Notre Dame’s daily student paper today. I’m going to skip the intro and last sentence as those were directed at a specific author from last week and have no bearing on the issue at hand.

When the Church condemns an act as wrong, therefore, it does so because that act is detrimental to the functioning of humanity.

Like witchcraft. Or women working. Or [etc, etc]

The Church condemns contraception because it implicitly condones promiscuity, allows the removal of love from sex and permanence from marriage, and makes humans the arbiters of life’s beginning.

Whew, that’s a lot of bullshit. Let’s see if we can debunk some of this. Firstly, most contraceptive use is done by married or otherwise committed couples. This isn’t to deny the legitimacy or legality of “promiscuous” sex, but rather to point out the massive strawman being constructed. Even before the legality of contraception became recognized in Griswold v. Connecticut, 90-some percent of Americans were having sex outside of marriage. This statistic has remained largely unchanged through the years. Second, the author asserts that contraception removes love from sex. She doesn’t specify HOW it does this, specifically; does knowing that your partner is on the pill or wearing a condom make the love-making that much less intimate? She also asserts that contraception allows people to dissolve marriages; actually, divorce being legal and bad marriages allow people to dissolve marriages, unless the author is more familiar with the little-known “my ex-wife was on the pill” or “he insisted on wearing a CONDOM” reasons for divorce. The last sentence is particularly disconcerting. She asserts here, implicitly, that human beings should have no control over their own reproduction. We, mere mortals, should not be allowed to “arbit[rate] life’s beginning”. This is a terrifying worldview that denies individual humans agency.

It makes children an enemy to be avoided, and inevitably requires the option of ending a child’s life in the womb should the preventative action fail.

This is wrong. Giving people the ability to control their own reproduction makes it more likely that each pregnancy is a wanted one, thus reducing the abortion rate and making every child a blessing to be cherished.

(Some methods, such as the pill, can also end the life of a new human being at a very early stage of pregnancy.) It can also damage a woman’s reproductive organs and make her infertile.

These are lies. I am not accusing Eleanore of lying, as I don’t know if she is aware of this, but these statements are factually untrue, and the people who started these false myths were liars. Hopefully, Eleanore is among the vast majority who have been told these are true, and does not actually know otherwise. The Pill, taken monthly, prevents ovulation. It does not terminate a pregnancy because pregnancy cannot begin at all. A similar situation arises with morning-after pills, which prevent eggs from being fertilized, or even ovulation if it has not already occured yet. No peer-reviewed study shows that it can destroy an embryo. Lastly, there is no evidence showing that any method of birth control, even abortion, damages the reproductive organs.

The practice of contraception erodes respect for human life and for its protection and nurturance in a stable, loving family.

Again, the author fails to support this claim. How does preventing pregnancy reduce respect for human life?

One need not agree that this social teaching was handed down from God to believe that it is true; one need only acknowledge the sequelae of America’s becoming a contraceptive society: more abortions, fewer children, more divorce, more AIDS cases, and the list goes on and on.

Nearly every “consequence” listed above is emphatically not a result of greater contraceptive access. Particularly, abortion and AIDS would decrease if more people used contraception that doubled as protection, i.e. condoms. Those rates have actually remained fairly stable in the United States, whereas places without contraception access such as Africa have seen AIDS cases skyrocket. Divorce rates have risen since contraception was given legal sanction, but there is no causal link between these two events. Murder rates, for example, increase when ice cream sales do, but this is not the result of our ice cream society. The only item on this list that is true is that there are fewer children with contraceptive access. This is not, however, a necessarily bad thing. People should be able to control their own reproductive systems, and if they do not want more or any children they should not have to have them.

The state has long had an interest in protecting the lives of children and the institution of marriage; therefore, it ought to restrict practices that undermine that protection.

As mentioned earlier, there is no evidence suggesting that greater access to contraception harms children or marriages in any way. I do agree that practices that undermine marriage, such as constitutional amendments banning marriage between two consenting adults because of their gender, should be restricted. However, I don’t think that is what the author had in mind.

Whew, that was fun. A modified version of this will be submitted to the Observer; I will link to it if it is posted.

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