war on contraception goes mainstream

The War on Contraception Goes Mainstream

The Catholic Church’s fight with the White House makes an extreme stance seem reasonable.
BY Sady Doyle
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In her book How The Pro-Choice Movement Saved America, Page argues that right-wing attacks on abortion are cover for a far more radical agenda. The real target of organized anti-choicers, she says, is not abortion. Abortion is just the divisive, emotional topic used to mobilize grassroots support. The real target of the organized anti-choice movement–as opposed to individuals who are anti-abortion–has always been birth control. Page told me she’s been recommending since 2008 that reporters ask all GOP candidates about their position on contraception.
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It’s worth noting how very far from the mainstream the roots of the anti-contraception movement are. In our conversation, Page mentioned Quiverfull, a radical religious movement aligned with the Christian Patriarchy Movement. (Yes, they actually call themselves the Patriarchy Movement.) Quiverfull believes that children are a blessing, and that to refuse such a blessing–under any circumstances, in any way, or for any reason–is a sin. Oh, and also that true believers will impregnate their wives as many times as humanly possible, in order to raise an “army” and eventually rule the United States. In the grand scheme of wacky cult strategies for world domination, this one’s fairly practical: They plan to overcome us through sheer numbers.

But examining the Patriarchy Movement is useful to understanding what it would look like if we lost the “War on Contraception.” In practice, women within Quiverfull and similar evangelical anti-contraception movements can have well over a dozen children. Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar, the most high-profile representatives of the movement (who star in The Learning Channel show 19 Kids and Counting), recently tried for their twentieth. Women are kept from working not only by religious rhetoric, but by the sheer physical burden of cycling rapidly through pregnancy and childbirth while bearing sole responsibility for massive amounts of domestic work. Daughters are enlisted early to assist, and like their mothers, they work full-time; home schooling is central to the movement.

Of course, denying women education and income and putting them in a near-perpetual state of physical vulnerability makes them totally dependent on men. Which is the point: As Libby Anne, a woman raised in the Christian Patriarchy Movement, put it, “a woman is always under male authority, first her father, then her husband, and perhaps, someday, her son.” And if she wants out, she can’t get out, because she’s been systematically denied the economic and social power necessary to escape. Anne got free because her parents took the fairly heretical step of allowing her to attend college.

Page argues that this vision, dystopian and unlikely as it sounds, is essential to understanding anti-choice conservatism. She lists the seemingly paradoxical stances of the anti-choice movement: They’re against abortion, but also against contraception that reduces the likelihood of abortion, but also against child care for working parents.

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