Best Sex Writing 2013: The State of Today's Sexual Culture (21 page)

The Catholic hierarchy insisted that the mandate to include contraceptives would violate religious liberty—even though under the policy their institutions are not required to directly pay for it.

The bishops then upped their demands and began pressing for federal legislation that would give any employer (even in non- religious settings) the right to exclude birth control coverage in health-care plans if it offended his or her religious beliefs—a move, critics said, that could potentially deny or greatly restrict access to millions of Americans.

In the wake of the national controversy, lawmakers in sev- eral states began pushing legislation that would have the effect of restricting access to birth control. One of the more extreme measures surfaced in Arizona, where a bill that would have al- lowed any employer with religious objections to deny contracep- tive coverage passed the state House of Representatives.

The measure, which stalled in the state Senate only after a public outcry, would allow a woman access to the Pill for medical reasons but only after she proved to her employer that she wasn’t using it for birth control, a provision opponents called patronizing and a violation of medical privacy.

The aggressive nature of the joint legislative and sectarian as- sault on contraceptives dismayed many birth control advocates.

“I am completely shocked that contraception is being made to seem as if it’s a controversial issue,” said the Rev. Debra W. Haffner, president of the Religious Institute, a Connecticut-based

group that examines the intersection of theology and human sex- uality. “The fact is, ninety percent of heterosexual, sexually active adults use contraception. More than nine in ten American adults support the availability of contraception.”

Haffner noted that support for this issue used to be bipartisan. As a member of the House of Representatives during the 1970s, future president George H.W. Bush championed family planning initiatives, and President Ronald W. Reagan signed them into law during the 1980s.

Why the change now?

“I think what is going on now has virtually nothing to do with contraception,” Haffner, a Unitarian Universalist minister, told
Church & State.
“It has to do with both the Catholic bishops and the extreme evangelical right looking for new wedge issues to continue to try to impose their beliefs about sexuality on the general public. I believe that the Catholic bishops are trying to do through legislation what they’ve been unable to do from their pulpits, which is influence the way their congregants enjoy their sexuality.”

She added that many conservative religions maintain that sex exists only for procreation, a view they seek to have reflected in secular law.

“The Pill enabled people through technology to enjoy sexual pleasure without the possibility of reproduction, separating sexual behavior from procreation,” Haffner said. “In today’s world, it’s not just a pill but patches and rings and implants and lots of modern methods of sterilization that are effective. There’s an af- firmation of sexuality that now exists that to a very small group of people is very frightening.”

Although, as Haffner points out, birth control comes in many forms, most of the discussion centers around oral medication that

has become so ubiquitous it is called simply “the Pill.”

The Pill remains the most popular form of contraceptive in America. In 2010, the Centers for Disease Control and Preven- tion reported that 82 percent of all women who had sex with men reported that they had been on the Pill at some point in their lives. Nationwide, about eleven million women of childbearing age were estimated to be on the Pill at that time.

The Pill, condoms, intrauterine devices, permanent steriliza- tion and other forms of birth control have become so common and popular that it’s easy for people today to forget how hard they once were to get. Easy access to contraceptives is the exception in America. For most of our history, a potent combination of church and state blocked not only access to birth control but access to information about birth control. Amazingly, some forces today want to go back to those days.

For most of human history, birth control was unreliable, er- ratic and often dangerous to women. Some women used wool, cotton, linen and other materials to block the cervix. Various potions were also said to function as spermicide, although much of this was folklore. (One early preparation consisted of crocodile dung and honey.)

Early condoms, often made of linen or animal bladders, were used during the Roman Empire and into the Middle Ages. For the hundreds of years that followed, not many other options were available.

The discovery of the vulcanization of rubber by Charles Goodyear, a process that was patented in 1844, led to the intro- duction of rubber condoms in America. Early rubber condoms were thick, brittle and often unreliable, but by 1920 latex con- doms had been invented, and their use quickly caught on.

But there were also forces determined to prevent the wide-

spread use of contraceptives of any kind in America. Self-ap- pointed anti-vice crusaders joined forces with religious leaders to crack down on material deemed “obscene”—and that included even information of a clinical nature about birth control.

Most famously, Anthony Comstock, a devout Congregation- alist in New York, secured passage of a federal law that allowed the Post Office to ban “lewd” and “lascivious” material. This included not only books and magazines dealing with sexual topics but contraceptives and information about them.

Material circulated secretly through an underground, and doctors often signaled their willingness to discuss the topic of birth control (and sexually transmitted diseases) in advertisements using code words such as “private complaints” or “delicate mat- ters.”

Attempts to bring the discussion of birth control into the open were quickly squashed. This continued well into the twentieth century. New England states with strong Catholic traditions were hotbeds of anti–birth control activism.

New England today is often viewed as a bastion of political liberalism, but for many years the region languished under heavy- handed forms of clerical censorship. Catholic clergy and their al- lies were also successful in curbing access to contraception.

Americans United, which was founded in 1947, quickly rec- ognized that the battle over birth control had strong church-state implications. Many Americans, the organization noted, wanted to use contraceptives but were stymied because they lived in states where clerical interference made that impossible.

The pages of
Church & State
in the late 1940s, ’50s and ’60s are studded with stories about often-successful attempts to block access to birth control, mainly by Catholic leaders and their allies working in concert with government officials.

In 1949, four doctors were fired from Farren Memorial Hos- pital in Greenfield, Massachusetts, because they refused to stop discussing birth control with patients who had requested the in- formation. Hospital officials offered to reinstate the doctors if they would publicly admit they were wrong, vow to stop dis- cussing the issue and promise not to contradict Catholic views again. The four refused.

Three years later, a flap erupted in Massachusetts over whether doctors should have the legal right to discuss birth control with patients. State law at the time prohibited doctors from providing information on the topic even if patients asked about it.

Planned Parenthood launched a drive to repeal the law and secured more than eighty thousand signatures on petitions, but Catholic Church leaders raised so many objections that the legis- lature was cowed and refused to act.

Nearly one thousand miles to the west, birth control advocates in Chicago announced plans in 1960 to add information about contraceptives at a clinic that served a largely low-income popula- tion. Pressure from the Catholic hierarchy soon scuttled the plan, a result officials at Planned Parenthood deemed “reprehensible.”

The controversy even reached overseas. In 1949, U.S. military forces in occupied Japan rescinded an invitation that had been extended to birth control advocate Margaret Sanger. Sanger had been invited to the country, which was still under American con- trol following World War II, by Japanese civic organizations, but Catholic groups raised so many objections that Sanger was denied the necessary military clearance.

As late as 1970, William R. Baird, a birth control advocate in New York, was being harassed by police for giving public lectures on contraceptives and abortion. In 1967, Baird was arrested in Boston after he distributed contraceptive foam to students during

a lecture at Boston University. Baird was charged with violating a state “chastity” law prohibiting the distribution of birth control to unmarried persons, a felony punishable by ten years in prison. His conviction was voided by the Supreme Court in 1972 in Eisenstadt v. Baird, a ruling that extended the right to use birth

control to unmarried couples.

Baird, now eighty years old, still lectures about reproductive justice. He told
Church & State
that he was at first reluctant to challenge the Massachusetts law.

“My initial reaction when I saw the penalty,” he recalls, “was, ‘I have four kids. I can’t afford to be in prison for ten years.’”

Baird changed his mind after students pleaded with him to come.

“I thought of a young woman I once saw in a hospital who died from an illegal abortion,” Baird said. “I was so absolutely outraged that a fellow human being was dying in front of me because she could not legally have birth control.”

By this time, the issue was becoming a little less volatile in religious circles because many Protestant churches had accepted birth control and told their congregants that its use was not a sin. But the Catholic hierarchy remained entrenched.

In 1963, Pope John XXIII formed a commission to study the issue. The pope died before the commission could complete its work, and its members later recommended to Pope Paul VI that the church’s ban on artificial contraceptives be lifted. Church hardliners immediately fired back with their own report. In 1968, Pope Paul sided with the hardliners and issued
Humanae Vitae,
an encyclical that affirmed the church’s ban on all forms of artificial contraception.

As a practical matter, the ban has proved impossible for the church to enforce, and numerous studies have shown that sex-

ually active Catholics rely on birth control at the same rate as non-Catholics. Many Catholic women, like their non-Catholic counterparts, also use the pill for medical reasons, such as to shrink ovarian cysts, to manage endometriosis or lessen menstrual cramps.

Why, after so many years of struggle, is birth control suddenly an issue again?

One reason is that some members of the Catholic hierarchy and the Religious Right have never accepted the premise of the 1965 Griswold ruling. The right to privacy outlined there ap- peared again in 1973’s Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion in the United States. Antiabortion church leaders blasted Roe—and some didn’t hesitate to trace its origins back to Griswold.

TV preacher Pat Robertson has several times made the con- nection explicit. Addressing his political group, the Christian Co- alition, in 1997, Robertson blasted Griswold as “made up out of whole cloth.”

Said Robertson of the ruling, “I want to see it abolished.”

According to ultraconservative religious leaders, the right to privacy that undergirds Griswold has spawned a raft of problems. In 2003, for example, the Supreme Court struck down a Texas law criminalizing consensual same-sex relationships. In its Law- rence v. Texas decision, the high court cited both Griswold and Eisenstadt.

But there is a deeper reason: many religious fundamentalists have never made peace with the social and cultural changes that the Pill—a safe, effective and affordable form of birth control— brought about.

The Pill has been called the most important invention of the twentieth century, and while some believe that designation is overblown—nuclear weapons, the computer and the World Wide

Web are also contenders—there’s no denying its powerful cul- tural impact.

The Economist
put it well in a special issue published on the brink of the twenty-first century: “[B]efore the 1950s the unpre- dictability of the arrival of children meant that the rights of many women were more theoretical than actual,” observed the publi- cation. “The Pill really did give a woman the right to choose. And though the consequences of that choice are still working themselves out, as both men and women adjust to the new re- ality, one difference between the passing millennium and those to come is clear: women have taken a giant step towards their rightful position of equal partnership with men. Technology re- ally is liberation.”

Fundamentalist Protestants and the male-only Catholic hier- archy, who have never been known for their support of women’s rights, have sought ways to reverse that giant step. Laws banning contraceptives outright are unlikely to win legislative approval in the modern era. But sectarian opponents of birth control don’t have to go that far to curb access. If their “religious freedom” argument carries the day, millions of American men and women may wake up to find out their health care plans no longer pay for birth control pills, IUDs, sterilization operations and other methods—and that, essentially, their ability to use birth control hinges on their employers’ religious beliefs.

Advocates for contraception say Americans should not be san- guine about this issue.

“The American public—both men and women, straight and LGBT, both young and post-reproductive age—need to be very frightened about the attacks on reproductive health,” Haffner said. “The current attack on whether contraception will be in- cluded in health care reform is actually only a small piece of what’s

happening across the country to effectively turn back people’s sexual rights.

“Once the government is able to deny the right to privacy,” she continued, “they can legislate against anyone’s sex life. All of our ability to make our own informed decisions about our sex lives becomes in jeopardy.”