All kinds of Alarms!

A friend recently sent me a link to this article in the New York Times.

Contra-Contraception

No doubt many of you have already heard about it. If not, I will summarize in the next few paragraphs. It is, however, a quite long article, and I urge you to visit the NY Times and read the entirety of it.

I might ruffle a few feathers here...and I am tempted to enter into a long qualification as to why I fear this article, but I think I'll let it speak for itself initially.

"For the past 33 years — since, as they see it, the wanton era of the 1960's culminated in the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 — American social conservatives have been on an unyielding campaign against abortion. But recently, as the conservative tide has continued to swell, this campaign has taken on a broader scope. Its true beginning point may not be Roe but Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 case that had the effect of legalizing contraception. "We see a direct connection between the practice of contraception and the practice of abortion," says Judie Brown, president of the American Life League, an organization that has battled abortion for 27 years but that, like others, now has a larger mission. "The mind-set that invites a couple to use contraception is an antichild mind-set," she told me. "So when a baby is conceived accidentally, the couple already have this negative attitude toward the child. Therefore seeking an abortion is a natural outcome. We oppose all forms of contraception."

...

"R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, is considered one of the leading intellectual figures of evangelical Christianity in the U.S. In a December 2005 column in The Christian Post titled "Can Christians Use Birth Control?" he wrote: "The effective separation of sex from procreation may be one of the most important defining marks of our age — and one of the most ominous. This awareness is spreading among American evangelicals, and it threatens to set loose a firestorm.. . .A growing number of evangelicals are rethinking the issue of birth control — and facing the hard questions posed by reproductive technologies."

...my "favorite"

"Focus on the Family posts a kind of contraceptive warning label on its Web site: "Modern contraceptive inventions have given many an exaggerated sense of safety and prompted more people than ever before to move sexual expression outside the marriage boundary." Contraception, by this logic, encourages sexual promiscuity, sexual deviance (like homosexuality) and a preoccupation with sex that is unhealthful even within marriage."

...

"Dr. W. David Hager, a Christian conservative whom President Bush appointed to lead the panel in 2002 ... said he feared that if Plan B were freely available, it would increase sexual promiscuity among teenagers. F.D.A. staff members presented research showing that these fears were ungrounded: large-scale studies showed no increase in sexual activity when Plan B was available to them, and both the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Society for Adolescent Medicine endorsed the switch to over-the-counter status. Others argued that the concern was outside the agency's purview: that the F.D.A.'s mandate was specifically limited to safety and did not extend to matters like whether a product might lead to people having more sex. Meanwhile a government report later found that Dr. Janet Woodcock, deputy commissioner for operations at the F.D.A., had also expressed a fear that making the drug available over the counter could lead to "extreme promiscuous behaviors such as the medication taking on an 'urban legend' status that would lead adolescents to form sex-based cults centered around the use of Plan B." In May 2004, the F.D.A. rejected the finding of its scientific committees and denied the application, citing some of the reasons that Dr. Hager had expressed."

Here's finally someone with some wits about them:

"Dr. James Trussell, director of the Office of Population Research at Princeton University and one of the world's leading experts on contraception, said..."There is evidence that there is a contraceptive effect of breast feeding after fertilization. While a woman is breast feeding, the first ovulation is characterized by a short luteal phase, or second half of the cycle. It's thought that because of that, implantation does not occur." In other words, if the emergency contraception pill causes abortions by blocking implantation, then by the same definition breast feeding may as well."

OK, I understand the main purpose of the article is to discuss whether or not the "Plan B" pill should be available over-the-counter. That is a deep and difficult question, in my opinion. I am not going to put myself in a place of discussing it at this time, especially since I have no daughters at all and no children over the age of 10 at this time, so I don't really feel qualified to analyze that.

But the underlying arguments about the evils of contraceptives in general has my liberal panties in a wad, for sure.

I am going to let the obvious social/religious issues lie for a moment, and I don't really want to get into the discussion of the right/wrong of abortion as a contraceptive method...so when I use the term "contraceptive" here, I'm speaking of the typical contraceptive methods: barriers such as the condom and the diaphragm; and hormones such as the pill, the IUD (which is primarily hormonal these days), Depo, Norplant; etc.

Mmy personal perspective on the medical aspect of contraception: I am a woman that had two extremely difficult pregnancies, both involving complete bed-rest by 20 weeks gestation, both involving gestational diabetes which can greatly endanger the health of the baby and the safety of delivery. I had two nearly life-threatening deliveries, my second child has a lifelong speech disorder because of the difficulty of his pregnancy and delivery. Now, I am also a Type II diabetic. And they want me to exercise absolutely NO CONTROL over the possibility of another pregnancy? What kind of nonsense is that? My husband and I are undecided about any additions to our family ... but we are in agreement that my health at this time is not good enough to bear pregnancy without serious complications, both for myself and the child. And I am thankful that I am able to make that informed choice. In any case, if God desperately wants me to have more children, I don't believe "the pill" is going to stop Him (in fact I know it won't, as I have two friends who have "I was on the the pill" children).

I do believe God created sex for more than just survival of the species. What is all this jive about it not being OK to "objectify" your spouse sexually (I think we're talking "lust" here - or having sex purely for the fun of it)? So if we use contraceptives, it will encourage us to have sex for the pleasure of it rather than for the purpose of procreation? Why is that bad - even within marriage? It's still the single irreplaceable union of two people, both body and Spirit.

If we fear that contraceptives will be "abused" outside of marriage, maybe we should legislate only providing contraceptives to married couples before we try to ban them altogether? Hm, never thought of that....? Now, I don't want my liberal friends to get riled, so I will say that I think that's a ridiculous notion, too.

In the end, I am all for choice in contraception. God provides medical technology for a reason. To say that something as seemingly simple as oral contraception goes contrary to God's purposes, why use any medicine at all? Now that's a loaded question and I guess I just won't go there. But still...?

And just wondering, but as a side note I think there is a disgusting measure of patriarchal, male-chauvinist attitude in this entire run of contra-contraceptive nonsense, as portrayed in this article. Anyone else?