Last month, the Associated Press distributed an article titled: Birth control: Lots of choices, but confusion is widespread. Good news: Even if you feel hazy or muddled right now, you likely have access to technologies your parents could only have dreamed of. Bad news: The confusion is no accident. When a serious presidential candidate can approve outlawing contraception, you know there are powerful forces aligned against you having control over your fertility. Getting the facts takes some digging, because powerful people are intent on burying them. If you know who is obscuring information and why, you’re more likely to figure out your real options.
For decades, sexual health information has been controlled by three networks of “Old Boys:” the Church, medical gatekeepers, and the pharmaceutical industry. All of them like their authoritative standing; none of them are particularly invested in your having the knowledge to manage your body and your fertility. All three use their political weight to stay in control of information and technology. Their highest objectives are, respectively: protecting ideology, minimizing risk, and maximizing profits. None of these three has, as its top tier goal, empowering women (or men) to make fully informed decisions about our bodies and our families. Rather, each of them has grounds to mistrust us, and to want the decisions in their own hands.
The Church. Most people know that the Catholic bishops oppose both abortion and contraception. But given that Catholics comprise just a quarter of the U.S. population, many might be surprised to know that the bishops routinely meet with U.S. presidents (including Obama) and have been using their D.C. access to block American contraceptive access since the advent of modern birth control. Another FYI: Bishop opposition to abortion is so extreme that they excommunicated a Phoenix nun because she authorized a first trimester abortion to save a 27-year-old mother of four! In parts of Africa, which the Pope has called a “reservoir of life” for the Church, pronatalist bishops boldly exhort Catholic women to produce more little believers, creating a Third World competitor to the Protestant “Quiverfull” movement. When it comes to women’s lives, Protestant fundamentalists, who believe that women were made for baby-making and that fertilized eggs are persons, are quite content to have the Conference of Bishops or conservative Catholics politicians like Santorum negotiating for them.
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