Birth Control and Morality

by Groff Schroeder

What you do with your sex organs, pregnancies, and reproductive tragedies is nobody else's business. Although wealthy Americans always have been – and always will be – able to access family planning and birth control products and services in safety and privacy, in 1970, the United States enacted Title X of the Public Health Services Act, to "assist in making comprehensive voluntary family planning services readily available to all persons desiring such services." Yet religious groups that claim moral authority over your sex life are so politically powerful that it was illegal for married couples to use birth control until 1965, it was illegal for unmarried couples to use birth control until 1972, and under various laws before the 1973 Roe vs. Wade Decision legalizing abortion on privacy grounds, it could be a crime in the United States to abort a pregnancy to save the mother's life - or even to have a spontaneous abortion ("miscarriage").

Thanks to Title X, since 1972, Planned Parenthood, and other women's health facilities have been providing medical services including family planning, birth control, and cancer screenings irrespective of their patients' ability to pay. Yet despite the legalization and wide societal acceptance of birth control and the well known life and death need for abortion related medical care, clinics receiving funding under the Public Health Services Act have long been "under fire" (both figuratively and literally) from opponents of birth control and abortion. Women's reproductive clinics, their caregivers, and patients are targets of regular, ongoing invasions of religious and sexual privacy, vandalism, and deadly domestic terror (such as the triple homicide at Colorado Springs' Planned Parenthood on November 27, 2015). "Pro-life" domestic terror attacks have killed 11 people since 1993, so many women's reproductive clinics are heavily secured, "bunker like" buildings that are sometimes defended by armed guards.

Recent religiously motivated attacks on women's reproductive freedoms, access to affordable medical care, and access to birth control suggest opponents of birth control and abortion have abandoned any pretense of morality. A new national "gag rule" requires that recipients of Title X funds lie to and or withhold information about abortion from their patients (even when the patient's life is at risk), forcing many women's clinics to refuse Title X grants (which already specifically exclude abortion) rather than violate a founding medical ethic and revoke the Constitutional rights of their medical caregivers and patients. Worse, several states have passed "personhood" laws that criminalize virtually all abortion. Some personhood laws require any woman impregnated by rape to carry the rapist's child to term –essentially granting any man willing to commit rape the power to force any woman he chooses to bear his child, while simultaneously revoking women's right to choose to whom they will bear children, and essentially enslaving any woman impregnated by rape to her rapist and his child for the rest of her life.

Whether they be apparently unconstitutional legal machinations, exploiting a funding "catch-22" to deny medical care givers and their patients freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and the medical ethic of informed consent, apparent invasions of privacy disguised as "counseling," apparent religious and sexual harassment disguised as "protest," deadly domestic terrorism, passing laws that would enslave women to rapists, or "all of the above," the tactics of abortion opponents appear to be much more harmful and immoral than birth control or abortion themselves.

Published September 11, 2019 in the Freethinkers of Colorado Springs Freethought Views column with the quotation below.

"Religion and political expediency go beautifully hand in hand."

Friedrich Dürrenmatt