Ladies, we need to talk. And gentlemen? You may want to sit in.
They are coming for our birth control. And our family’s IVF dreams. And sex in general.
A not insignificant number won’t be happy till they roll the whole kit and caboodle back to 1950 and June Cleaver vacuuming in her heels and pearls.
How do we know this? Because every time they open their mouth, they tell us. Then they frantically try to un-tell us.
This month’s political whiplash poster child is our very own senator, Rick Scott. A warm and fuzzy political ad for Scott dropped on Twitter last week declaring he will always, always, protect IVF.
Always.
Twenty-four hours earlier, he voted against protecting IVF.
He’s not the only one switching stories on how women’s reproduction should be controlled.
“There is no threat to contraception nationally,” Sen. Marco Rubio told the Washington Post. “It’s all made up stuff.’”
That was May 23.
Two weeks later, he voted against a bill creating a federal right to access contraception.
“It’s silly to think contraceptives are at risk,” Roger Severino of the Heritage Foundation chided the Washington Post, shortly after the Heritage X account featured a call for conservatives to “lead the way in … ending recreational sex & senseless use of birth control pills.”
Yes. Getting rid of recreational sex is now an emerging political platform. Be sure and tell that to your fiancée when he explains he’s voting based purely on tax bracket considerations.
Nor is Rubio finished with the abortion-inducing drug mifepristone, despite the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that a motley crew who tried to get it banned had no legal standing to sue. To be more precise, one-legged flamingoes had more standing than plaintiffs who never prescribed mifepristone and never treated anyone because of mifepristone complications.
But why interrupt a vacationing Clarence Thomas when you can just end-run the court and go to the EPA?
Rubio and Palm Harbor congressman Gus Bilirakis late last month co-authored a letter to the agency warning that mifepristone is an eco-hazard, flooding the sewer systems of America and threatening the health of humans as well as — dear readers, I do not make these things up — fish and critters.
Just for good measure, they casually dropped in the jump-scare phrase “drinking water.”
(Petty of me to complain, but: Already, talking to people making decisions about people’s bodies when they don’t understand how those people’s bodies work forces us into discussions of reproductive biology at the headache-inducing cellular level. Do we really have to start arguing over how city sanitation systems work, too?)
It takes nothing from the deeply held convictions of millions opposed to abortion to acknowledge a plan previously hinted at but now shouted: For some number of opponents, abortion is just the leading edge of an agenda that a few years ago would have been designated tin-hat fringe.
Take IUDs and emergency contraception. They don’t end pregnancies. They prevent them. Now, there’s a move to bend science and redefine pregnancy so that both forms of birth control can be categorized as abortion-inducing and subject to possible bans. As for the pill, choosing to take it isn’t an adult woman’s considered decision about a drug on the market for half a century; no, it reflects “birth control pharmaceutical propaganda” persuading clueless, unsuspecting women everywhere to “dose themselves with cancer-causing hormones.”
Birth control is about more than sex. It’s about money and jobs. Pregnancy may be welcomed and wonderful, but childbirth is also the great disruptor. A woman who cannot reliably control her reproduction risks multiple unplanned pregnancies, and unplanned pregnancies can render an employed woman undependable, if not unemployable. An unemployable woman cannot help a loving husband put food on the table for those children. And she cannot leave an abusive one.
This is not the speculative stuff of red gowns and dystopian fiction.
It was the world of the 1960s and early 1970s, before the pill was approved and abortion was legalized. It was the world where women were routinely asked in job interviews whether they were married, or if they had children, or if they planned to have children. That was not polite chatter. It was screening.
Never mind all that. Even Elon Musk has chimed in, telling his millions of followers, not all of them Russian bots, that the pill makes women fat and sad.
So does snacking obsessively while pondering how an unmarried father of 10 hawking rusty trucks and exploding cars gets to lecture women on birth control. But then, bad mysteries make me hungry.
Pat Beall is a columnist and editorial writer for the Sun Sentinel. Write her at pbeall1@gmail.com.
