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Sort of like how each episode of Sesame Street amusingly was sponsored by a few letters and numbers, today's post is sponsored by irony. Generally when I want to write something about reproductive rights, the first sites that match my search terms are ones that inevitably lead me to websites like prochoice.com, which is not remotely pro-choice and contains inaccurate information about abortion, complete with an extremely freakish waving fetus and a lecture on how parenthood is hard and you can never be prepared for it anyway, so just go ahead and carry a pregnancy to term because there are absolutely no costs associated with child birth or raising children that people should prepare themselves for. Today, I wanted to find some sites that participated in The Pill Kills Day '08, which took place this past Saturday, June 7. Of course, initially all I could find was commentary on how horrific and misleading this campaign is.
Why June 7? Well, as Cristina Page at RH Reality Check explains:
June 7 is the anniversary of Griswold v Connecticut, the 1965 Supreme Court decision that granted married people the right to use contraception... Anti-contraception activism has been working its way up the priority list of the anti-choice movement in the United States in recent years and today's campaign is one of the most organized and visible displays of this broadening agenda.
Currently, there is not one pro-life organization in the U.S. that supports contraception. In fact, the multi-pronged attack against the right to use contraception is led entirely by anti-abortion groups. Their initiatives (to name just a few) include opposing health insurance of contraception, urging pharmacists to deny women's birth control prescriptions, and attempting (with no scientific rationale) to reclassify the birth control pill, and all other hormonal forms of contraception, as abortion methods with the goal of banning them. This represents an important and frightening shift in focus by the anti-abortion movement.
Despite the fact that contraception is the only proven way to prevent unwanted pregnancy and reduce abortion rates, anti-choice groups would forgo these benefits, and even risk dramatically increasing abortion rates, in favor of a larger, more insidious goal: changing Americans' sex lives.
As the American Life League, the nation's largest pro-life educational organization, explains in its materials, "The American Life League denies the moral acceptability of artificial birth control and encourages each individual to trust in God, to surrender to His will, and to be predisposed to welcoming children." The American Life League prefers to put the choices in the hands of God, a choice they want to impose on everyone. "It must be clear that couples understand that when they ask God to not send them another child just now they are also saying, ‘If it is Your will to send us another child at this time, we praise You for Your divine providence,'" the group says.
What? The anti-reproductive rights movement uses misleading and full of inaccurate information to achieve their extreme goals? Why would they do that if their cause is so obvious? Self-described "radical pro-lifer" Jill Stanek doesn't bother mentioning that birth control pills (or the ring or the patch or whatever ingested contraceptive a woman may use) works primarily by preventing ovulation so there is no chance that an egg might be released and fertilized. That would imply that women do not have the right to prevent themselves from getting pregnant, taking conception out of God's hands and putting it into her own. Instead, Stanek informs readers that:
"...one way the birth control pill works is it makes the wall of the uterus impermeable to implantation, in which case the very young preborn human is aborted... Neanderthals like me think women should know the pill can kill their 5- to 9-day-old children.
(Back to today's sponsor, irony. How ironic is it that Stanek sardonically calls herself a Neanderthal?!?!)
As long as we are talking about the rarer uses of birth control, I might as well point out that I take the Pill literally to save my life. As a sufferer of polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), a condition that affects up to 1 in 10 women of childbearing age, I don't get my period. At all. Ever. While many might celebrate this lack of monthly nuisance, it actually causes a higher risk for endometrial cancer. To combat that danger, I take the Pill so that I can shed the lining of
