Anti-abortion hardliners see criminalization of birth-control as common ground

IAP Photo Obama and the Pope Haraz N. Ghanbari

Commentary: I admire President Obama for jumping head first into the abortion cultural war with a sensible common sense approach to reducing the need for abortion; reducing unintended pregnancies. It will be very hard to place the tug of war over abortion into neutral because there’s simply no middle ground for anti-abortion extremists. It’s their way or no way.

For today’s anti-abortion groups common sense is a wholly unacceptable method to utilize in finding common ground and there’s no room in the abortion debate for them for mainstream science and medical truth. Those facts in particular are going to make President Obama’s trip toward the middle no trip down the yellow brick road.

Among the American public; the left and right, pro-choice and non-hard-line anti-abortion supporters, and through all religious strains in America, one of the most widely accepted common sense approaches to pregnancy prevention and abortion reduction is female hormonal birth-control.

In the 1930’s hormones used in rabbits were found to prevent ovulation. Margaret Sanger, the mother of Planned Parenthood was 80 in 1950 when she raised $150,000 to move forward research which helped formulate the first human birth-control pill. Searle, a pharmaceutical company employed PHD Chemist Frank Colton who, independently developed Enovid, the first oral contraceptive in 1960.

However, it took two court cases to give legal access to American women to what is now commonly referred to as “the pill.” It wasn’t until 1965, two years after President Kennedy’s assassination, that Griswold vs. Connecticut was decided striking down a Connecticut law that made use of the birth-control pill for married couples illegal. Then it wasn’t until 1972 in Eisenstadt v. Baird that unmarried couples were given the legal right to use the birth-control pill.

The modern birth-control pill, with lower estrogen levels than its earlier predecessors, prevents ovulation, or conception, or implantation of a fertilized egg. It’s the later that becomes one of the major sticking points at the common ground table.

Because it can prevent implantation of a fertilized egg, anti-abortion hardliners want to see the birth-control pill, including the morning after a.k.a. Plan B, labeled an instrument that can cause an abortion; an abortifacient and therefore subject, just like medical and surgical abortion to criminalization.

From letters to the editor, their web sites and of late, Personhood ballot initiatives, anti-abortion hardliners are now very eager to talk loud and clearly about criminalizing hormonal birth-control.

This new found drum-beating is certainly a response to their loss of power in Congress and the White House and moreover it’s a strategy. They are well aware that when they sit down at the common ground table that President Obama and most especially the American people believe that pregnancy prevention is the key to lowering the number of abortions in this country. And they know that pregnancy prevention means more tax dollars will be spent on birth-control research and on birth-control availability. So now they must pull out all the stops to convince the American public that hormonal birth-control “kills unborn babies.”

Gualberto Garcia Jones is a lawyer and former legislative analyst for the American Life League a hardliner anti-abortion group. He’s involved in the effort to place on the 2010 Colorado ballot a “Personhood” amendment to the constitution. The Personhood amendment would define a person as existing from the moment of conception making a zygote, embryo and fetus absolutely equal in a right to life and due process of law as the woman. That would in essence ban hormonal birth-control and IUDs.

Jones told Wendy Norris of RHRealityCheck.org on July 7th, 2009 that he welcomed a debate about a contraception ban as an effect of the personhood cause. He also told her, “Something that’s erroneously referred to as contraception causes the early human to die because they cannot develop in the uterus. And, then yeah, this would prohibit it. We’re more than happy to talk about that.”

And talk about it in Colorado we will, as we did last year when the first incarnation of this amendment suffered a 3-1 loss. There’s no doubt that that defeat involved, among other things, one particular undisputable effect of the amendment; banning all hormonal birth-control pills, Depo Provera, Norplant, IUDs and the morning after pill.

On October 5, 2005 the American Life League (http://www.all.org/article.php?id=10126) said the following: {The birth-control pill} “can irritate the lining of the uterus so that if the first two actions fail, [prevention of ovulation and fertilization] and the woman does become pregnant, the tiny baby boy or girl will die before he or she can actually attach to the lining of the uterus. In other words, if the third action occurs, the woman’s body rejects the tiny baby and he or she will die. This is called a chemical abortion. [an absolute falsehood] Abortion is an act of direct killing that takes the life of a tiny human being-a life that begins at fertilization…. It {the birth-control pill} could…kill your baby-without you knowing it.”

However, mainstream medical science disagrees with anti-abortion extremists on when a pregnancy begins. Dr. Lennart Nilsson author of “A Child Is Born” notes that after fertilization as the ovum is rolling along the fallopian tube, “no chemical substances or other mechanisms are yet signaling to the woman about developments deep inside her body….when the blastocyst has finally come to rest and established contact with the endometrium, [implantation] an intensive chemical exchange of information between it and the mother’s body begins.” So no woman or doctor can know a woman is pregnant until implantation. That’s when a pregnancy begins. So any birth control method, including the pill that interferes before implantation doesn’t cause an abortion. To say otherwise is to defy mainstream medical understanding an understanding the American public believes in.

This maybe a strategy anti-abortion hardliners have kept under the radar way too long to ever be effective now. The birth-control pill is a proven method to prevent an unintended pregnancy and is an American icon of women’s reproductive health and pregnancy prevention and more importantly, it is where the majority of the American public beliefs the common ground in the abortion war begins. The American public never has and never will view hormonal birth control as an abortifacient. The anti-abortion hardliners now risk total alienation by the American public. Criminalization of the most effective and widely used birth-control will not be tolerated by the American public; by American women. I am puzzled as to what part of that they don’t get.

The anti-abortion extremism and desperation exhibited and highlighted in neon in this new strategy may do more to marginalize the anti-abortion movement among American women than all the battles the pro-choice movement has fought over the last three decades.