In Wasilla, Pregnancy Was No Secret

Nor is the fight against birth control only the province of a few zealots. While sites like Worthington's may be new, many antiabortion activists have always been bitterly opposed to contraception. "After Roe v. Wade was decided," says Feldt, "the debate focused on abortion instead of birth control. But they are not separate issues." She points out that what we're seeing today is more of a revival of an old movement than a shift to something new. "It's been there from the beginning. If you go back and look at the rhetoric against birth control from 1916, it's exactly the same as the rhetoric now."

And when you look closely, there is evidence to suggest that even the mainstream anti-choice groups are ready to make the battle against contraception part of their agendas. Many of the National Right to Life Committee state affiliates have opposed legislation that would provide insurance coverage for contraception. Iowa Right to Life even lists a host of birth control methods -- including the pill, the IUD, Norplant and Depo-Provera -- as abortifacients. And NRLC itself parses its language very carefully when it comes to contraception. A call to the organization resulted in an e-mailed statement on the group's position that read in part, "NRLC takes no position on the prevention of the uniting of sperm and egg. Once fertilization, i.e., the uniting of sperm and egg, has occurred, a new life has begun and NRLC is opposed to the destruction of that new human life." Such a position leaves the group plenty of wiggle room to argue, when it is ready to do so, that contraceptives prevent the implantation of a fertilized egg and are thus a form of abortion. (NRLC wouldn't comment further, because, according to a media relations assistant, contraception lies outside of its purview. For the same reason, Feminists for Life refused interview requests. And at Concerned Women for America, a group that has been openly anti-contraception, a spokesperson told Salon twice that none of its experts were available for interviews.)

"The brilliance of the other side is that it's such a wholesale attack, that it's hard to find an entry point," says Cristina Page, vice president of the Institute for Reproductive Health Access at NARAL Pro-Choice New York, and the author of "How the Pro-Choice Movement Saved America: Freedom, Politics, and the War on Sex." While pro-choicers are busy trying to save Roe v. Wade, the anti-choice movement is "laying down their game plan for this next wave." And, she adds, "On every single front, whether it be educational, whether it's a matter of direct access, or whether it's about funding, their campaign is on, and it's effective."

For those who are pro-choice, the idea of fighting to ban both abortion and contraception seems contradictory: Contraception, after all, lessens the number of abortions. But once one understands what the true social and moral agenda of activists like Worthington is, and their attitude toward sexuality, the contradictions vanish. For them, sex should always be about procreation; since contraception prevents conception, it is immoral. At a deeper level, they believe that women's biological destiny is to be mothers.

Feldt says, "When you peel back the layers of the anti-choice motivation, it always comes back to two things: What is the nature and purpose of human sexuality? And second, what is the role of women in the world?" Sex and the role of women are inextricably linked, because "if you can separate sex from procreation, you have given women the ability to participate in society on an equal basis with men."

According to Page, there's no way to distinguish the anti-choice and religious arguments anymore. "The anti-choice movement has become a religious movement, and because of that, their interest isn't in reducing abortion. In fact, reducing abortion has become problematic for them, because they want to strip Americans of using birth control, in effect to change the entire family structure."

Page says she has noticed, too, that some anti-choice groups tend not only to oppose birth control, they also oppose child care. In her book she points to some troubling statistics and anecdotes: Ninety percent of senators who opposed the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act are anti-choice; in the 2004 Children's Defense Fund ranking of the legislators best and worst for children, the 113 worst senators and Congress members are all anti-choice; Web sites like Lifesite and that of the Illinois Right to Life Committee post reports linking child care and aggression; Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council and Concerned Women for America stress the damage that day care can have on a child. (Most of their information comes from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development's Early Child Care Report, which has been debunked again and again and again.) "The trifecta is ban contraception, ban abortion, make child care impossible," says Page.

Frances Kissling agrees that the ultimate message is that "mommy should stay home and take care of the kiddies. This is bound up in this notion of men at the head of a family, of women's identity as linked to their biological capacity, that men and women are complementary and different, that a woman's primary function is motherhood."