Contraception as Prevention in the Fight for Reproductive Autonomy
Thursday, January 26th, 2012Mallory Carlberg, University of Oklahoma College of Law
*This post is part of a series written in support of Trust Women Week Silver Ribbon Campaign and the online virtual march from January 20-27. LSRJ is proud to partner with numerous orgs across the country – join the march by sending a message to your lawmakers today! And check back here throughout the week for more posts.
With the anniversary of Roe and the start of a new year, January is a time of reflection for the reproductive justice movement. Reproductive rights organizations publish summaries of the previous year’s anti-abortion legislation and predict what’s to come as state legislatures reconvene. OU LSRJ students have been discussing new bills Oklahoma legislators will introduce this session. In addition to the widely publicized bill outlawing the use of fetuses in the food industry. Legislators will also introduce a personhood bill and a bill requiring the use of an electric fetal heart monitor during abortion procedures. It’s easy to focus solely on the abortion debate since abortion opponents are often loudest about this issue. But there is another issue that deserves our attention: the idea of contraception as prevention.
I want to be clear that what I mean by contraception as prevention is not that we should be preventing abortions. Once we start saying there are good and bad reasons to have abortions, we are no longer trusting women. Our focus instead should be on preventing unplanned pregnancy. Of course this would also prevent abortions, but we should be supporting contraception because it helps people control when or if they have a child and not solely because it prevents abortions.
This year extremist anti-birth control views reached the mainstream. Four GOP presidential candidates participated in a debate sponsored by Personhood USA and signed a “personhood pledge”. Rick Santorum, a GOP frontrunner, has gone so far as to call birth control dangerous because it enables people to have non-procreative sex. And here in Oklahoma a well-known Representative went on record saying that some forms of birth control kill a person. The previous examples show that although Griswold v. Connecticut established a right to privacy and a right to contraception way back in 1965, these rights are still not secure. Affordable, accessible birth control is still not a reality for all.
This year there were both victories and setbacks in the fight to expand birth control access. Under the Affordable Care Act most women employed in the US will have their birth control fully covered by their insurance and religiously affiliated employers will not be exempt from this. However, this year HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius vetoed the FDA’s recommendation that Plan B be available to teens under 17 without a prescription. Pharmacists also continue to deny adult men and women access to emergency contraception based on misunderstandings about the law or moral objections to the method.
As we celebrate Roe this week, we should remember that making affordable and accessible birth control is just as important as making abortion affordable and accessible. People need both birth control and access to safe abortions to achieve reproductive autonomy.