In all the do-si-do’s this past week or so in the dance we might call Contraception, the Catholic Church and the Obama Administration, there are many sideline opinions (American Idol, American politics, take your pick). I found myself in a tussle with someone on a Facebook thread, and here’s hair he split: he felt I was wrong to say discrimination against women—half the population—existed over contraception because the childbearing years do not occur for all females across their entire lifespan, so it’s less than half.
Music and math aside, and mostly because I have a little teensy corner on the Internet to say this one thing clearly, I’m going to: even if technically, as in how many years do you menstruate a woman does not require birth control to determine whether she has a child or not, whether contraception is easily available to her affects her over the course of her entire lifetime. How can that be?
What happens when a pregnancy occurs that you might have prevented but can’t and have a baby is that your life changes, but not only your life changes. The baby arriving perhaps a decade before you’re actually ready to raise a child’s life is (obviously) affected. The partner has a child, again, maybe before actual readiness. Those partners, at a more mature stage in their lives, might not choose one another to share life and family. Even if they are apart, this sears a connection between them. Their families—including possibly their mothers, beyond childbearing age even—are affected, quite possibly to continue working to raise children. Some here might insert the notion that an unintended pregnancy can be resolved by opting for adoption. This is true. I’m an adoptive mother and can attest that a (birth)mother’s life—and that of her extended family—is changed by adoption. Adoption is not a substitution for contraception.
This is off my chest now.
And Nic Kristoff reminds us, this debate is not really all about women, contraception and poverty are critically entwined.
**
Women, who are legally entitled not to be discriminated against in the workplaces about their reproductive choices, those women should not have to go through an extra step to have contraception covered. That’s not a mere inconvenience; it’s at the least an indignity.
Now that’s off my chest, too.
**
Writing this on the morning of the ninth day I’m solo parenting four lovely, absorbing, annoying, needy, cranky, funny, charming young people what I really want to say to anyone who thinks there are morals about contraception more complicated than make them accessible is cruel. It’s too big a task for “oops” to be acceptable public policy.
