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August 1, 2005
Thank god we don't have to pretend we're in this to save babies anymore
By Amanda, Pandagon
I've noticed lately a reduction in the amount of pooh-poohing feminist fears that once a genuine ban on abortion is within the grasp of the Wingnutteria, they will dispense with the fakey concern about saving babies and proceed to attack contraceptive rights. Of course, that's because with the looming appointment of an anti-choice Supreme Court justice, a lot of "pro-lifers" are abandoning the pretense that they care about babies and jumping feet first back into the more comfortable territory of punishing women for having The Sex. This week's casulties are the students that attend University of Wisconsin schools, as the legislature there just passed a bill banning all schools from dispensing any kind of birth control. (The bill is aimed at banning emergency contraception from university health centers, but critics like Alice Reilly-Myklebust in her testimony before the Assembly Committee on Family Law contend that it will effectively ban health centers from prescribing any kind of hormonal birth control to female students, due to the vague wording of the bill.)
And they didn't even come up with a pseudo-compassionate argument to justify it. Not even a maudlin speech about the poor suffering sperm who either bonk their heads on condoms or manage to get to their destination to be crushingly disappointed not to find an egg there to fertilize. Just straight-up stick it to the sluts reasoning. Actually, I'm joking about the sperm bonking their heads. As you can imagine, the only people who are banned from obtaining birth control on campus are women, not men.
Wisconsin State Rep. Dan LeMahieu, R-Oostburg, introduced this bill based on the belief that "dispensing birth control and emergency contraceptives leads to promiscuity."
In reality, what contraception does for college age women is leads to getting that diploma without being encumbered by child-bearing. Perhaps that is what's really pissing off the legislators who passed this. After all, we have Rick "Man on Dog" Santorum cruising around the talk show circuit right now making it clear that he dislikes birth control precisely because it gives women the ability to limit their child-bearing so that they can have careers and lives outside of the home. The mask is coming off the "pro-life" movement and their real anti-woman goals are becoming easy to see.
Speaking of Santorum, I was thinking over that funny moment in his interview with George Stephanopaulos where he couldn't cough up the name of one "radical feminist" (Santorum is one of those conservatives who has almost surely never said the word "feminist" without the adjective "radical" attached to it) besides Gloria Steinam. We all laughed at how stupid Santorum is to write a book where he bitches and moans about the feminist movement when he doesn't know jack shit about it. All he knows is that women use birth control, get jobs, choose not to marry if they'd like or choose to divorce if their marriages aren't working out for them, and that pisses him off.
And then it occured to me that since Santorum was most likely thinking of the ordinary, non-activist women of this country, many of whom don't even refer to themselves as feminists, then that probably means that the beloved term "radical feminist" is one of those infamous conservative code words. I thought it meant any feminist at all, but now that I think about it, Santorum probably thinks any woman who doesn't eschew work in order to marry and pump out kid after kid is a radical feminist. Which is to say, the majority of women in this country.
Posted by at August 1, 2005 3:14 PM
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Comments
Yes, good point. It's always a good idea to link issues of reproductive freedom--not only because access to contraception is extremely important in itself, but because it exposes the unprincipled positions of most alleged pro-lifers...
Posted by: Scott Lemieux at August 2, 2005 4:02 AM
Thanks for pounding the connection between privacy and the whole spectrum of choice. It's something too easily overlooked in the nomination war.
Posted by: Scott M at August 2, 2005 2:30 PM