Virginity Or Death!

The Nation: Right Fights To Keep HPV Vaccine Off The Market

(The Nation) 
What is it with these right-wing Christians? Faced with a choice between sex and death, they choose death every time. No sex ed or contraception for teens, no sex for the unwed, no condoms for gays, no abortion for anyone -- even for that poor 13-year-old pregnant girl in a group home in Florida. I would really like to hear the persuasive argument that this middle-schooler with no home and no family would have been better off giving birth against her will, and that the State of Florida, which totally failed to keep her safe, should have been allowed, against its own laws, to compel this child to bear a child. She was too young to have sex, too young to know her own mind about abortion -- but not too young to be forced onto the delivery table for one of the most painful experiences human beings endure, in which the risk of death for her was three times as great as in abortion. Ah, Christian compassion! Christian sadism, more likely. It was the courts that showed humanity when they let the girl terminate her pregnancy.

As they flex their political muscle, right-wing Christians increasingly reveal their condescending view of women as moral children who need to be kept in line sexually by fear. That's why anti-choicers will never answer the call of pro-choicers to join them in reducing abortions by making birth control more widely available: They want it to be less available. Their real interest goes way beyond protecting fetuses -- it's in keeping sex tied to reproduction to keep women in their place. If preventing abortion was what they cared about, they'd be giving birth control and emergency contraception away on street corners instead of supporting pharmacists who refuse to fill prescriptions and hospitals that don't tell rape victims about the existence of EC. David Hager (see Ayelish McGarvey's stunning exposé, and keep in mind that unlike godless me she is a churchgoing evangelical Christian) would never use his position with the FDA to impose his personal views of sexual morality on women in crisis. Instead of blocking nonprescription status for emergency contraception on the specious grounds that it will encourage teen promiscuity, he would take note of the six studies, three including teens, that show no relation between sexual activity and access to EC. He would be calling the loudest for Plan B to be stocked with the toothpaste in every drugstore in the land. How sexist is denial of Plan B? Anti-choicers may pooh-pooh the effectiveness of condoms, but they aren't calling to restrict their sale in order to keep boys chaste.

While the FDA dithers, the case against selling EC over the counter weakens by the day. Besides the now exploded argument that it will let teens run wild, opponents argue that it prevents implantation of a fertilized egg -- which would make it an "abortifacient" if you believe that pregnancy begins when sperm and egg unite. However, new research by the Population Council shows that EC doesn't work by blocking implantation; it only prevents ovulation. True, it's not possible to say it never blocks implantation, James Trussell, director of the Office of Population Research at Princeton, told me, and to anti-choice hard-liners once in a thousand times is enough. But then, many things can block implantation, including breast-feeding. Are the reverends going to come out for formula-feeding now?

"It all comes down to the evils of sex," says Trussell. "That's an ideological position impervious to empirical evidence."


"Subject to Debate" columnist Katha Pollitt has written for The Nation since 1980.