Libbye Anne: How I lost faith in the Pro-life movement

Libbye Anne recounts her journey from ardent pro-lifer through her discovery of the inconsistencies and hypocrisy of the "Pro-life" movement: "How I lost faith in the Pro-life movement." First she did discovered that they were against birth control...

Republican hearings on birth control coverage

Now, it's been law in the U.S. since 2000 that in insurance plans that cover prescriptions, birth control prescriptions must be included. It's a ruling of their Human Rights Commission. However, an attempt by President Barack Obama to ensure that employers follow the law even if they are wholly or partially owned by religious organizations has been met with howls of outrage and cries of "What about their religious freedom?" Never mind that corporations don't have freedom of conscience, people do. It has become a rallying point for the U.S. Republicans. Interestingly, their committee to consider the matter is all male, and so are all the witnesses they called to testify on the matter: GOP Response to Obama/Contraceptive issue? An all-male congressional hearing. It's amazing how clueless they are.

The Republican War on Contraception

From Mother Jones: The Republican War on Contraception.

The first sign of the new assault came last October, when Mississippi activists and congressional Republicans pushed legislation on the state and federal level, respectively, that would have treated zygotes—a.k.a. fertilized human eggs—as legal "persons." If the definition of legal personhood is changed so that it begins when sperm meets an egg, hormonal birth control or barrier devices that prevent zygotes from implanting in the uterine wall could become illegal, making using an IUD tantamount to murder. Yet some 40 percent of House Republicans and a quarter of their allies in the Senate back bills that would do just that.

I hate those busybodies.

Republicans against contraception

Republican politicians in the U.S. are moving to deny birth control to women who receive medicare, to protect the delicate consciences of those who might choose not to use it. See Balloon Juice: "Religious liberty expands to include all employers and all women and all contraceptive coverage."

For years, liberals have been claiming that conservatives were ultimately targeting birth control, and conservatives always denied it. Marco Rubio has now all but announced that they are, in fact, targeting birth control.

Keeping religion out of people's healthcare

Balloon Juice has the details in "I don't care about your invisible Jeebus."

Again, I’m not naturally inclined to be antagonistic towards religion. My parents are both religious and are definite believers. I like Sundays off, I like the Easter and Christmas break, I don’t care if we have to do silly things like pray before certain events (I can just think about other things while they babble), it doesn’t bother me that In God We Trust and other such statements are everywhere in public life, and so on. I’m not some crazed reactionary on the issue.
But from where I stand these days, the only thing I see religion doing in the public sector is gay bashing and telling women, mostly poor and desperate and in deplorable financial and personal situations, what to do with their bodies. I see busybodies deciding what drugs they can dispense to which customers, or deciding that they don’t have to issue a marriage license because of some petty deity that I don’t believe in told them to hate their fellow citizens and ignore the law. In a country in dire financial straits but still spending billions and billions of dollars on education, I see religious folks actively and openly working to make our schoolkids dumber. I see them shooting people who provided a medical procedure, and I see others rummaging through people’s personal lives to find out who hasn’t lived up the word of God. I see glassy-eyed fools running for President claiming that vaccines that save lives actually cause cancer, or that if you get raped and are pregnant, you should just lie back and think of Jeebus and make the best of a bad situation. In fact, everywhere you look these days, if Christianity or religion is getting a mention, it means something ugly is happening and someone somewhere is being victimized, marginalized, or otherwise abused. Go read some of the arguments against integration and you’ll see the same bible verses used today against homosexuals. Fifty years from now, they’ll be recycling them again to trash someone else they don’t like or who isn’t good enough for them.

How birth control works: the Pill

The Pill prevents a woman's natural reproductive cycle from releasing an egg. No egg means no fertilization.

Teen pregnancy rate drops 37% in Canada

Improved sex education and access to contraceptives under universal health care contributed to a drop of 37% in teen pregnancies between 1996 and 2006. The birth rate has dropped and the abortion rate has dropped, which means that better contraception is working.

Better access to contraception, higher quality sex education and shifting social norms have contributed to a 36.9 per cent decline in Canada’s teen birth and abortion rate between 1996 and 2006, according to a report released today by the Sex Information and Education Council of Canada.

Alexander McKay, Research Coordinator, Sex Information and Education Council of Canada, said:

“It’s important to look at teen pregnancy rates because they’re a basic fundamental indicator of young women’s sexual and reproductive health. While not all teen pregnancies are a bad thing, when we see [rates] dropping, it’s a fairly clear indicator that young women are doing increasingly well in terms of controlling and protecting their reproductive health,”

He went on:

“In comparison to the United States, we tend to have a more balanced, sensible approach to adolescent sexual health. Generally speaking what you find is that the more a society has an accepting attitude toward the reality of adolescent sexuality, the lower the teen pregnancy rate is. Canadians tend to have a more relaxed attitude towards adolescent sexuality than people in the United States.”

Mr. McKay said America’s emphasis on abstinence-only sex ed “tends to result in a higher percentage of teens becoming pregnant,” as does the country’s lack of universal health care. Poverty is another factor.

The report appears in the current issue of The Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality.

Life before birth control: abandoned babies

Cecil Adams of The Straight Dope writes:

...baby abandonment is nothing new. The ancient Spartans systematically weeded out weak or deformed infants by leaving them in a chasm (or maybe tossing them into it -- Plutarch doesn't specify). Chronicles and stories from around the world tell of babies and small children set adrift in chests, dropped off in the forest a la Hansel and Gretel, or otherwise exposed -- a few to be found and taken in, the rest to die. Homes for foundlings, as children rescued from abandonment were called, were set up as early as the eighth century. Pope Innocent III, aghast at infanticide rates in 11th-century Rome, ordered the installation of foundling wheels --revolving-door contraptions that enabled an infant to be dropped off anonymously at a convent. As of 1790 the Hotel-Dieu in Paris was receiving more than 7,000 abandoned infants a year (even with subsequent care, death rates ran as high as 75 percent). Records maintained by the New York Foundling Asylum show that 2,457 infants were dropped off there between October 1869 and November 1871.

This was how women, or families, dealt with excess fertility and the shame of unwed motherhood.

Pill cuts ovarian cancer and saves lives

"the protection of Pill use corresponds to the avoidance of 3,000 to 5,000 ovarian cancer cases, and consequently 2,000 to 3,000 deaths a year in Europe."

Abstinence-only programs don't work

The headline says it all. Sex education programs that harp on abstinence without telling students about using contraception and preventing diseases do not work. They do not reduce the number of sexually transmitted diseases. They don't reduce the number of pregnancies. Programs that explain contraception and condom use do both.

Rhythm method kills more embryos than condom use

Luc Bovens, from the London School of Economics, looked at the biology of the rhythm method. The rhythm method is the only form of birth control allowed by the Roman Catholic church. Couples using it avoid sex during the woman's fertile period. But Bovens says it leads to more embryo deaths than other contraceptive methods. Most eggs that are fertilized die anyway. But "stale" eggs outside the fertile period are even more likely to die.

Bovens estimates that if the rhythm method is 90% (per year) effective, and if conceptions outside the fertile period are about twice as likely to fail as to survive, then around the world "millions of rhythm method cycles per year depend for their success on massive embryonic death."

"If you're concerned about embryonic death, you've got to be consistent here and give up the rhythm method," Bovens says. "Even using condoms and having an abortion in case of failure would cause fewer embryonic deaths than the rhythm method," he writes in the Journal of Medical Ethics (Volume 32, page 355).

Roger Gosden at the Center for Reproductive Medicine and Infertility in New York says the suggestion is reasonable.

Taking control of our fertility

Statistics Canada says:

• In the last ten years, fertility rates have dropped 13 percent.


• The biggest declines are in the high-risk years from 15 to 17 and in all ages up to 29.


• At slightly older ages, the rates are rising as women decide it's time to have a baby.

This is excellent news. It shows that sex education is working. Younger women are able to get contraceptives and willing to use them.

Source: the 2003 figures for total pregnancies in Canada (29 March 2006). These are pregnancies per 1 000 women, not total numbers, so they are not affected by the aging of the baby boom nor its echo.

Pathfinder International for reproductive health

Lack of reproductive health care is a huge global problem for women. About 78 000 women die each year from unsafe abortions. Without access to contraceptives or to good medical care, womehn face risks from abortion to escape from unwanted pregnancy. In fact, unsafe abortion causes about 13% of the 600,000 deaths each year from childbirth-related causes. Each hour, eight women die from unsafe abortions. For every woman who dies from an unsafe abortion, many more suffer serious injuries and permanent disabilities. In some countries, as many as 50% of the pregnancy-related deaths are caused by unsafe abortion.

Pathfinder International works to ensure that women receive post-abortion care and contraception.

Abortion-related complications can be prevented by:

• Improving patient and community knowledge about family planning.


• Strengthening family planning and reproductive health services.


• Providing access to emergency contraception.


• Providing postabortion care for incomplete and septic abortions.


• Making abortion legal, safe, and accessible.

Ursula Le Guin on birth control

Ursula K. Le Guin:

"The preservation of life seems to be rather a slogan than a genuine goal of the anti-abortion forces; what they want is control. Control over behavior: power over women. Women in the anti-choice movement want to share in male power over women, and do so by denying their own womanhood, their own rights and responsibilities."

And again:

"If we can get that realistic feminine morality working for us, if we can trust ourselves and so let women think and feel that an unwanted child or an oversize family is wrong—not ethically wrong, not against the rules, but morally wrong, all wrong, wrong like a thalidomide birth, wrong like taking a wrong step that will break your neck—if we can get feminine and human morality out from under the yoke of a dead ethic, then maybe we'll begin to get somewhere on the road that leads to survival."

H. L. Mencken on birth control for Catholics

H. L. Mencken:

"It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics and chemistry."

Margaret Sanger on birth control

Margaret Sanger:

"No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother."