The New York Times Magazine weighs in on the War On Whoopie

Interesting article in the New York Times magazine yesterday...

think they read "All Worked Up?"

Russell Shorto writes:

For the past 33 years — since, as they see it, the wanton era of the 1960's culminated in the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 — American social conservatives have been on an unyielding campaign against abortion. But recently, as the conservative tide has continued to swell, this campaign has taken on a broader scope. Its true beginning point may not be Roe but Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 case that had the effect of legalizing contraception. "We see a direct connection between the practice of contraception and the practice of abortion," says Judie Brown, president of the American Life League, an organization that has battled abortion for 27 years but that, like others, now has a larger mission. "The mind-set that invites a couple to use contraception is an antichild mind-set," she told me. "So when a baby is conceived accidentally, the couple already have this negative attitude toward the child. Therefore seeking an abortion is a natural outcome. We oppose all forms of contraception."

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The American Life League is an organization with its roots in the lay Catholic community, naturally enough. However, the Holy Terrors have picked up the ball and run with it in a big way.
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Dr. Joseph B. Stanford, who was appointed by President Bush in 2002 to the F.D.A.'s Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee despite (or perhaps because of) his opposition to contraception, wrote: "Sexual union in marriage ought to be a complete giving of each spouse to the other, and when fertility (or potential fertility) is deliberately excluded from that giving I am convinced that something valuable is lost. A husband will sometimes begin to see his wife as an object of sexual pleasure who should always be available for gratification."

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Pardon my own little asides, here. What happens if the wife sees her husband as an object of sexual pleasure? Doesn't that ever happen? (Happened to me last night, as a matter of fact.)

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R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, is considered one of the leading intellectual figures of evangelical Christianity in the U.S. In a December 2005 column in The Christian Post titled "Can Christians Use Birth Control?" he wrote: "The effective separation of sex from procreation may be one of the most important defining marks of our age — and one of the most ominous. This awareness is spreading among American evangelicals, and it threatens to set loose a firestorm.. . .A growing number of evangelicals are rethinking the issue of birth control — and facing the hard questions posed by reproductive technologies."

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Focus on the Family posts a kind of contraceptive warning label on its Web site: "Modern contraceptive inventions have given many an exaggerated sense of safety and prompted more people than ever before to move sexual expression outside the marriage boundary." Contraception, by this logic, encourages sexual promiscuity, sexual deviance (like homosexuality) and a preoccupation with sex that is unhealthful even within marriage.
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The article spends a long time discussing the war within the government regarding making emergency contraception available over the counter. There's also a discussion of when life begins. The anti-choice armies have always advocated that "life begins at conception," or when a sperm cell fertilizes the egg. However, that's not entirely accurate. Technically, the case can be made that life begins when the woman's body begins nourishing the egg, or at "implantation" which occurs later.
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According to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, however, pregnancy begins not at fertilization but at implantation. The medical thinking behind this definition has to do with the fact that implantation is the moment when a woman's body begins to nurture the fertilized egg. The roughly one-half of all fertilized eggs that never attach to a uterine wall are thus not generally considered to be tiny humans — ensouled beings — that died but rather fertilized eggs that did not turn into pregnancies. Federal regulations enacted during the Bush administration agree with this, stating, "Pregnancy encompasses the period of time from implantation until delivery."
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The article concludes:

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And, around the world, countries in which abortion is legal and contraception is widely available tend to rank among the lowest in rate of abortion, while those that outlaw abortion — notably in Central and South America and Africa — have rates that are among the highest. According to Stanley K. Henshaw of the Guttmacher Institute, recent drops in abortion rates in Eastern Europe are due to improved access to contraceptives. The U.S. falls somewhere in the middle in rate of abortion: at 21 per 1,000 women of reproductive age, it is roughly on par with Nigeria (25), much better than Peru (56) but far worse than the Netherlands (9).

The Netherlands, where the teen pregnancy rate also ranks among the lowest in the world, has long been of interest to sex educators in the U.S. for the frankness of its approach. The national sex education course, called Long Live Love, begins at age 13. One of its hallmarks has been dubbed "Double Dutch" — encouraging the use of both condoms and birth control pills. "It's proven successful," says Margo Mulder of STI AIDS Netherlands, the Dutch health education center. "It shows that when you discuss contraception and protection with students, they actually are careful. And I know that some people in the U.S. say that when you promote contraception, you're also promoting sex, but we've found that when you educate people, they don't have sex earlier. They think about it. So you're not promoting sex, you're helping them to be rational about doing it."

The problem with this, as far as American social conservatives are concerned, is that it treats symptoms rather than what they see as the underlying disease: an outlook that is focused on the individual at the expense of family and society. Their ultimate goal is not a number — the percentage of abortions or unintended pregnancies — but an ideal, a way for people to think and behave. As Mohler says of the Dutch approach in particular: "The idea is to completely sever the sex act from reproduction, and then train teens to do it. It treats sex as a morally meaningless act. I find it profoundly anti-humanistic."

While Americans as a whole don't hold such a dark view of comprehensive sex education, many do feel there's something wrong with a strictly clinical approach. This ambivalence, according to Sarah Brown of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, gets to the root of the problem and may explain the numbers. "One of the things I'm most often asked is why the abortion and unintended pregnancy rates are so much lower in Europe," she says. "People talk about the easy access to contraception there, but I think it's really a matter of the underlying social norms. In Europe, these things are in the open, and the only issue is to be careful. Here in the U.S., people are still arguing about whether it's O.K. to have sex."

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Not to sound like I'm bragging, but I've been saying this for some time. While the Holy Terrors are rarely bold enough to say so outright, they've got as much of a problem with birth control as they do with abortion. And it's not just a matter of taking the position that all life is sacred and that all life begins at conception. They're seeking to barge into people's bedrooms and prohibit them from having sex for fun.

Indeed, it's a veritable War On Whoopie.

Especially telling is how frank, honest talk about sex actually reduces the abortion rate, while pseudo-fascist religious psycho-babble increases the abortion rate. Coupled with the Holy Terrors' abstinence-only sex ed agenda (which also increases sexual activity and pregnancy rates), they seem bound and determined to advocate courses of action which actually INCREASE teen pregnancies and abortions, the very activities they claim they want to stop.

Madness.