In a move that surprises no one ever, House Republicans added a last minute measure to the spending bill before the government shutdown aimed at exerting yet more control over female health and autonomy.
The “conscience clause,” in a delightful twist of legal rhetoric aimed at casting those who support contraception, choice, and bodily autonomy as immoral degenerates, would do three things: allow employers and insurers to opt out of providing preventative contraceptive care like birth control on any religious or “moral” objection, undermine the Affordable Care Act’s birth control benefit, which already gives over 27 million women access to affordable or free preventative health services that they may not have been able to afford and will soon reach more, and serve as another volley in the GOP’s continuing attempt to prevent access to women’s healthcare across the country.
With the Texas abortion ban poised to take effect despite the filibustering attempts of Wendy Davis earlier in the year and a lawsuit by Planned Parenthood, this last point is crucial – less a blustering attempt to have their way in a spending bill against their needs, and more part of a systemic attack on women’s rights to reproductive care and choice over their own bodies. While the legislation will likely never get passed – the Republicans pulled a similar move in 2011 to cut off subsidies to Planned Parenthood and other family planning organizations, and have been successfully focused on tightening abortion regulation for years. One would hope that the War on Women is a relic of the past, but it looks like we still live in a political climate where women’s health is used as what the CEO of the Center of Reproductive Rights called “[a] political pawn” – even when the administration has granted exemptions to contraceptive coverage to religious nonprofit institutions.
The amount of hypocrisy, double-standards, and blind entitlement that the GOP shows in pushing these attacks on women’s rights is continually astounding. Forget the fact that Viagra and other erectile dysfunction drugs, vacuum erection devices, penile implants, vasectomies and circumcision are covered by health insurance without the slightest outcry from the right. Forget that until Obamacare (and maybe not even then, considering the tightening of abortion laws across the country), disparities in unintended pregnancies grew across class divides. Forget even that the World Health Organization has documented the positive effects of providing access to family planning in countries globally: preventing pregnancy-related health risks in women, reducing infant mortality, helping prevent STIs and HIV/AIDS, empowering people and enhancing education, and reducing adolescent pregnancies (there were 329,797 babies born to teenage mothers in the US in 2011, with declining rates thought to be solely because of increased use of birth control).
The GOP’s actions show a petulant, childish assumption – rife with misogyny – that their personal objections to someone else’s lifestyle means that they can interfere with it. Legislation like “conscience clauses” being pushed aggressively across America means millions of women’s access to healthcare would depend on whether their employer approves of their sexual behavior or “believes” in contraception. This sets up power imbalances and interference of personal life from spheres that have been legally kept out of these areas for decades – victims of rape have been denied emergency birth control because of conscience clause legislation, while an employer’s objection to women’s reproductive preventative care denies them important medical assistance, like regulating menstruation, getting access to screenings for breast and cervical cancer, avoiding unwanted pregnancies, and so on.
These issues are what have dominated the political stage when discussing birth control. In the end, though, this comes down to a question of moral values – one thing that, if any of our nation’s history can tell us, Americans will always vehemently disagree on.
Luckily, the Constitution lays out a philosophical framework for dealing with this, stating that each individual has the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Oh, apparently except when female pursuit of life, liberty and happiness doesn’t conform to the GOP’s utopian vision of free Viagra coupled with intimate restriction of what women get to do with their vaginas. This kind of ideological extremism is antithetical to what the US government was envisioned to be: a series of checks and balances to ensure that each individual retained rights to their privacy, liberty, and autonomy. Opposition to the GOP needs to call out these blatant attacks on the quality of life of millions of women. And while the GOP itself may never change, they could stand to take a good, long look at what they stand for: opposing the very tenants of the American ideal.