Will American Conservatives Move To Take Away Women's Right To Birth Control?

The most relevent point in this week’s TIME magazine cover article Love, Sex, Freedom and Paradox comes in last place. It should be the lead.

After a comprehensive review of American social life before the pill and after, writer Nancy Gibbs focuses on the Conservative backlash against women being allowed to use birth control in America.

Reminding us that Vatican II was expected to endorse the pill, because it didn’t actually interfere physically with the ability of a sperm and egg to get together, Gibbs accounts not only the Vatican’s rejection of all birth control for women (even to protect themselves against AIDS-infected husbands) but now the growing position among Conservatives that birth control should be banned in America. 

We applaud the use of the “patriarchy” word again this week. (Trust me, we’re tracking this issue).

Women’s-rights leaders see multiple agendas at work in the counterrevolution: an attempt not just to roll back access to contraception but also to return women to more traditional roles. “The cynic in me says, Hmm, they are winning the abortion fight, so they need to raise money some other way, which means go somewhere else. They go to contraception,” says NOW president O’Neill of social conservatives. “If the project is to re-establish patriarchal structures, where women are subordinate to male family members, they have to end women’s access to contraception.”

Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, an organization that believes a woman is officially subordinate to her husband, told TIME doesn’t disagree with this assertion. Goodness knows, the Vatican’s onboard.

We’re glad that finally all the anti-women’s rights strategies are coming out of the shadows. Play-nice American feminists are having a lightbulb moment. Nine months ago I worried about sounding like a hysterical woman. Now it seems we were at the front of the parade.

First stop abortion; next stop birth control. Meanwhile, Conservative buy more porn than anyone, so they will have their sex digitally, except when they want to make a baby. (See yesterday’s Pornography Industry Revs Up for Apple iPad.)

This is becoming one tidy, unified vision for the American patriarchy. Anne