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Townhall...
Contraception is Not
the Solution
By Kathryn Lopez
Why are Republicans waging war on contraception? It’s not the first
time the question has been asked, and it won’t be the last. Truth be
told, Republicans aren’t engaging in battle on that front -- but the
phrase gets close to a legitimate fight.
Congress, for its part, held an unprecedented vote in the House in
February to end funding of Planned Parenthood. It’s not a permanent or
final vote; it was attached to a short-term move to keep the government
funded. The debate in Congress was given momentum by the Live Action
investigatory videos, which raised significant questions about what
exactly Planned Parenthood is doing; but the rest of us need to discuss
why we’ve let Planned Parenthood step in as a mainstream Band-Aid,
throwing contraception and even abortion at problems that have much
more fundamental solutions.
While women may want love and marriage, they don’t expect it. Justice
Sandra O’Connor wrote in the Planned Parenthood v. Casey opinion that
women had “organized intimate relationships, and made choices that
define their views of themselves and their places in society, in
reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that
contraception should fail.” And why wouldn’t they? Who, nowadays,
encourages them to want more?
We’ve come to expect less for and from ourselves, and for and from one
another. In part, it’s the fruit of the contraceptive pill. New York
magazine recently observed in a cover feature: “The pill is so
ingrained in our culture today that girls go on it in college, even
high school, and stay on it for five, 10, 15, even 20 years.” That, of
course, has had all kinds of fallout: a false sense of freedom,
security. And it has ravaged women’s fertility, as it seeks to mute
exactly what women’s reproductive power is all about.
That’s why I want to turn back the clock -- to a time when we valued
love and marriage and didn’t expect, support and even encourage
promiscuity. Life and history don’t work that way, obviously, there is
no actual rewind. But we do have opportunities to learn from our
mistakes.
The spending fight over Planned Parenthood in Congress is about a
number of things. It’s primarily about good stewardship, as so much of
the spending debate is. But beyond legislation, beyond anything
Congress can or should do, it is a call to arms for a new sexual
revolution. It’s about wanting more for ourselves and for those whom we
love. It’s about ending the surrender to a contraceptive mentality that
treats human sexuality as just another commercial transaction.
Perhaps nothing better illustrates that than a recent commercial for a
contraceptive called Beyaz. Women walk into a store and literally shop
for men. “It’s good to have choices.” A woman happily shakes her head
at the stork and its offerings in a sassy “we girls can do anything”
kind of way, promenading through an adult Barbie commercial complete
with Ken, a dream house and a trip to Paris.
That commercial does not, needless to say, do justice to the pain and
desperation many women suffer when they find themselves thinking about
an abortion, or popping pills in pursuit of something that masks itself
as satisfaction but is really just a bad substitute, oftentimes making
true happiness all the more illusory.
As evidence of the reckless and dangerous callousness at institutions
supposedly dedicated to women’s health -- failure to report the sex
trafficking of minors, failure to report child abuse -- continues to
emerge, we can’t afford to lose sight of another, more fundamental
conversation that we’ve got to have, among friends, in our homes and
churches -- a talk about what it means to be human.
Read it at Townhall
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