Reproductive Rights 101

When men want to make decisions about their own reproductive system, they have a remarkable amount of freedom to do so. Viagra? Legal and covered by insurance. Vasectomy? A simple outpatient procedure.

But it’s different for women. Every time a new procedure is developed to allow a woman to control her periods, every time a new vaccine is invented to protect women from a sexually transmitted disease, it sparks a national debate. And birth control, unlike Viagra, is not covered by most health plans. Some pharmacies refuse to dispense birth control altogether; I am aware of no pharmacy that refuses to dispense Viagra.

It stands to reason that there are bioethical issues that come into play when a woman is pregnant and a separate fetal body begins to develop inside of her own—and if this were the only reproductive rights issue under debate, it might be feasible to say that the debate over reproductive rights has nothing to do with controlling women’s personal choices. But abortion isn’t the only reproductive rights issue. Not even close.

Sex and Civil Liberties
Many sex-related laws were written to protect what their authors saw, or see, as a woman’s sexual “purity.” This is a relic of a culture where virginity was a primary consideration when choosing a bride, and a woman without a hymen would lose value among potential husbands in much the same way an action figure loses value for collectors when it’s taken out of its original packaging.

Why I’m Pro-Choice
Sometimes “pro-choice” is interpreted as a euphemism for “pro-abortion rights,” but the two terms are not exactly identical. To be pro-choice means that you support a full range of choices for women—abstinence, contraception, emergency contraception, pharmaceutical abortion, surgical abortion, and carrying the pregnancy to term. When 73% of women who have abortions do so largely or primarily because they can’t afford to carry the pregnancy to term, leaving these women only with this non-choice isn’t pro-choice, and leaving these women only with the option of unsafe, illegal abortion isn’t pro-life.

Abortion Rights 101
That said, abortion rights are an essential part of reproductive rights. If abortions are outlawed, only outlaws will perform abortions—and, generally speaking, outlaws aren’t very good at it.

The Rhythm Method as Abortifacient: A Response to John B. Shea
The most obvious way to prevent unplanned pregnancies, and subsequently abortions, is to promote widespread use of emergency contraception and other forms of birth control. The trouble for some social conservatives is that birth control can operate in two ways: By preventing the fertilization of a egg, or by making the uterus hostile to egg implantation. One British conservative pundit, John B. Shea, has made the argument that the latter is morally equivalent to abortion. The trouble is that natural birth control, aka the rhythm method, also relies on uterine rejection of fertilized eggs. If that really is tantamount to abortion, shouldn’t religious authorities stop advocating use of the rhythm method by married couples and start advocating condom use instead?