Whose Freedom? Birth Control And The Enduring Fight Over Our Bodies.

Kathy Ferguson
University of Hawai'i at Manoa

Current attacks on access to birth control from conservative and religious sources often elicit disbelief from progressive women: we thought those battles were over. We thought we had won. A recent Planned Parenthood ad reminds us that it’s not the 1950s anymore: “It is unbelievable that in 2014 we are still fighting about women’s access to basic health care like birth control.” Progressive women often ask, sarcastically, if this is 1914, not 2014, as if the passage of a hundred years were a guarantor of progress.
However, a stronger grasp of the history of the birth control movement suggests otherwise: the anarchists and socialists who fought those battles in the early twentieth century would not, I think, be surprised that the issue is still with us. I imagine that Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Marie Equi, Ida Rauh, Crystal Eastman, Eugene Debs, Walter Adolphe Roberts, and many, many others working for access to contraception would know better, because they understood birth control as a central tenet of a larger struggle. Rather than looking at opposition to birth control as a lingering remnant of an otherwise settled past, the earlier radicals encourage us to see birth control as inextricably woven into other ongoing struggles for freedom and community. Rather than assuming progress and being repeatedly surprised at its absence, we could learn from earlier struggles to locate our understanding of birth control in a more radical frame.

 The anarchists and socialists who fought for birth control in the late 19th and early 20th centuries did not think they were winning a definitive war, but that they were engaging in a prolonged and messy set of battles in which victories came at significant costs. They understood that if women did not control their own reproduction, someone else would control it, since states, capitalists, churches and families have serious investments in controlling women’s bodies. It wasn’t just attitudes that needed to be changed, but also institutions. They fought for birth control, not as a private decision between a woman and her doctor, but as a potentially revolutionary practice that radically challenged prevailing power arrangements, including that of men over women, capitalists over workers, militaries over soldiers, and churches over parishioners.

The recent Supreme Court decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby offers an unwelcome opportunity to think about birth control through an appreciation of its radical past. Many good questions have been asked regarding the Hobby Lobby ruling – why do for-profit corporations have religious rights? Why is men’s sexuality unproblematic, so that insurance coverage for Viagra and vasectomies is uncontested, while women’s sexuality is subject to scrutiny? Why are straightforward medical distinctions between preventing conception and aborting a fetus ignored or confused? Why do conservatives such as Mike Huckabee and Rush Limbaugh decry recreational sex on the part of women but seem unconcerned that men might have sex for fun? 

While recognizing the legitimacy of these queries, I want to raise a different question: Why are we surprised? Why is our indignation tinged with disbelief: “How could this happen in this day and age?” Critics routinely call the decision “hopelessly backward” and accuse critics of wanting to “turn back the clock,” as though there were a single historical timeline that carries us forward unless someone pushes us back. This is an utterly inadequate view of history. Instead, we need to locate both our victories and our defeats within multi-directional and open-ended historical processes, not steps in a single unfolding drama. We won’t understand the tenacity of efforts to control women’s sexuality until we give up the comforting assumption that history is a story of progress, and look more closely at the stakes and the terms of political struggle.

Reclaiming our radical past

Linda Gordon rightly points out, in her landmark study Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right, that the radical roots of the struggle for birth control are largely unknown today. The situation faced by women in the U.S. in the early twentieth century with regard to controlling their reproduction was dire. The main problem was not a lack of known birth control technology, since, as Gordon documents, ancient, effective forms of birth control were selectively available, but in the U.S. had been largely forced underground. In 1873 the passage of the Comstock Law, which criminalized sending “obscene” material through the mail, gathered birth control, sexuality, and radical ideas in general into its elastic net of prohibitions. During this time, various barrier and suppository methods, called pessaries, were known and available to wealthy women through their doctors, but largely unknown or unavailable to the poor. Diaphragms and condoms had to be smuggled into the U.S. from Europe. Politics, rather than technology, made birth control unavailable to most American women, and to change that situation political struggle was required. 

From a contemporary point of view, it is startling to realize that many anarchists and socialists placed women’s access to birth control at the heart of social revolution. We are accustomed to seeing the medicalized perspective – the claim that reproductive choices are questions of women’s health and should be left to women and their doctors – as the feminist position, the position we must defend. Yet, there is another set of feminist voices, radical voices, voices that aimed to free women as well as liberate workers, end war, and transform society. Jamaican writer Walter Adolphe Roberts championed birth control both to enhance women’s freedom and to advance the cause of social revolution. Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman located women’s control over their reproduction as a central aspect of workers’ struggles and anti-war activism. They objected to Margaret Sanger’s strategy, which legitimized the birth control movement by aligning it with (mostly male) doctors, because Sanger’s approach removed birth control from the larger political context while giving power over women (including midwives) to doctors rather than to women themselves. Understanding these arguments can help feminists today to learn from our own movement’s past and perhaps to shape current reproductive struggles as steps toward more radical political change.

Anarchists and socialists who embraced birth control framed it as a revolutionary demand to include sexual and reproductive freedom as necessary aspects of social justice and individual autonomy. Controlling one’s own reproduction was part of transforming society. These progressive women and men integrated the liberation of women’s sexuality into their vocal anti-capitalist, anti-war mass movements. Just as capitalism sought to control the laboring bodies of workers, and militaries sought to control the fighting bodies of soldiers, so did patriarchal families, churches, professions, and governments seek to control the reproductive bodies of women. Restrictions on birth control, they concluded, served the interests of states by producing an endless supply of cannon fodder for imperial wars, the interests of capital by generating a reserve army of labor to keep wages down, and the interests of organized religion by maintaining women’s subservience and vulnerability within families and communities. A free society would be a society in which workers control their own labor, soldiers control their own fighting, and women control their own wombs. The radicals watched with dismay as their vision of a transformed society was displaced by the rise of a coalition between feminists, doctors and the state to privatize contraception as an issue “between a woman and her doctor.” Understanding the potentially radical implications of women’s reproductive freedom, they also saw that some kinds of birth control reform could reinforce patriarchy rather than challenge it.
Attention to these struggles can reframe contemporary debates over birth control. The Hobby Lobby decision and other losses for women are not temporary backsliding or inexplicable throwbacks to an earlier era, but instead indicate ongoing and predictable unrest over proper standards of sexuality and of women’s place. It would not surprise earlier anarchist and socialist feminists that the current Gilded Age, driven by neoliberal values and global corporate priorities, includes a resurgent war on women’s reproductive autonomy. These radicals would, however, likely recoil from the pallid notion that birth control is a “women’s issue” rather than a central aspect of a larger system of exploitation and control. A fuller grasp of our radical past can help us think of history as a dynamic network of shifting relations, operating at different paces in response to various challenges. The birth control movement then becomes a site of struggle, not an unfolding of a telos of development. We can look for the forgotten victories and lost possibilities of human freedom recorded there and bring those minoritarian views back into contemporary discussions. 

How can birth control be more radical?

How might a greater appreciation of birth control’s radical past change feminism’s present and future? Perhaps it could give us an alternative to being on the defensive: rather than asking for health care, we might demand freedom. Rather than seeing doctors as our main partners, we might see unions, antiwar groups, civil rights organizations, environmental groups, alternative spiritual movements and other radical communities as coalition partners. We can make common cause with others who are similarly disadvantaged by, for example, judicial rulings granting corporations personhood, defining money as speech, and attributing religious identity to for-profit businesses. We might become more bold, not more cautious, in our thinking and acting.

For example, feminists often stress the difference between preventing and terminating pregnancy in order to use opposition to abortion to promote acceptance of birth control. Abortion and contraception are two separate issues, we say. Hobby Lobby’s court arguments are invalid because they confuse technologies that prevent fertilization with technologies that remove fertilized eggs, we point out. We invite people who oppose abortion to agree with us about birth control because, if all women had access to birth control, there would be fewer abortions. Perhaps we need to stop concentrating on these arguments. Even though these claims are accurate, they don’t appear to be working. I suspect they give up too much. While clearly abortion and contraception are different, it is their common value to women who want to control their fertility that makes both birth control and abortion into targets of conservative wrath.
Also, feminists often stress the priority of the relationship “between a woman and her doctor” to discredit other possible relations, say, between a woman and her employer, a woman and her husband, a woman and her Supreme Court justices. Perhaps we need to stop doing that, too. Medicalization of contraception has come to be the progressive position, the position we have to defend. But that only happened because more radical, more feminist perspectives were sidelined. Maybe it’s time to stress women’s freedom – and access to affordable and high quality health care would surely be an aspect of that freedom – rather than women’s health as our primary goal. When Sandra Fluke bravely testified before Congress about the importance of oral contraception for treating health issues other than pregnancy, she was vilified as a slut and a prostitute anyway. So perhaps it’s time to demand access to the birth control techniques that we want rather than parsing our desires to downplay sexual freedom. Calling on the courts to consider the “plight” of women who use contraception for non-sexual purposes implicitly suggests that those uses are somehow more legitimate, that women who have a “plight” are more worthy of consideration than women who have a cause. If oral contraceptives were sold over-the-counter at affordable prices or distributed for free at clinics (like condoms), then women’s reasons for wanting them would be irrelevant and the opportunites to judge women’s sexuality might diminish.

Further, feminists sometimes speak of opposition to birth control as psychological, a question of men’s fears of women’s sexual autonomy. Joan Walsh of Salon.com writes of a deep fear of women’s freedom on the Right; Andrea Flynn of Alternet denounces the Right’s obsession with punishing women for having sex. I don’t disagree with either of these claims, but I want to push them further – opposition to women’s reproductive freedom is not primarily a bad attitude or emotional hang-up. The interests of material structures and institutions that distribute resources, organize labor, conduct war, and administer spirituality are fully in play. Birth control keeps coming back as an issue not just because men don’t get it, but because capitalism, the state, empire, war and patriarchal religions are still in power, and those institutions have an enormous stake in controlling women’s sexuality. 

Finally, feminists need to give up the comforting idea that history is on our side, that progress toward fuller rights and greater equality is written into the order of things, once we dispense with those irrational, wrong-thinking obstructionists. History, I think, isn’t on anyone’s side; more importantly, there are many histories, many trajectories, many different futures past. When feminists assure us, as Joan Walsh recently did, that “the right’s crippling panic over women’s autonomy will eventually doom it to irrelevance,” or, as Marcote commented, “the anti-sex argument is a losing argument,” we should question the implicit progress narrative folded into such guarantees. We are neither doomed nor blessed – rather, we have multiple opportunities to struggle for a better world and we should think carefully about their possibilities.

*My thanks to Nicole Sunday Grove, Jairus Grove, and Lori Marso for their help on this essay.

Making Sense of Rick Santorum

Kathy Ferguson
  University of Hawaii


I want to understand Rick Santorum. Republican candidates routinely compete for the most extreme position from which to oppose women’s reproductive freedom, but Santorum is distinct.  He is not simply calling for a ruthless public policy limiting women’s access to abortion: he is performing the savage grief of the bereaved parent, enacting the wild, aggressive distress that brings many conservative Christian women to the ranks of the anti-choice movement.  His passionate participation in a realm of sorrow usually reserved for women, and usually unrecognized in civic life, brings public, male recognition to their suffering.  To respond, feminists need to intervene in this alliance, not by minimizing the pain associated with child loss but by recognizing it differently.

Santorum marshals a fiery combination of rage and grief to call for reproductive unfreedom for women. This is a potent emotional brew that often works, politically, by lionizing the perceived suffering of some (in this case, unborn children) while demonizing the pain of others (here, women whose desire to control their fertility is recast as selfish, thoughtless, and murderous). 

Santorum demands control over women's bodies, his story goes, in order to protect babies, and that calculation often works, politically, as well. Enough women want to protect babies at any cost that they will cooperate in their own loss of freedom, and enough men want to control women's sexuality, and perhaps protect the unborn as well, that they enthusiastically go along. Leaders of conservative evangelical groups, nearly all of them men, have rallied around Santorum because they think Romney is not sufficiently hard-line on denying women medical care if it relates to their control of their reproduction.  For evangelical women voters, Romney loses out to Santorum not so much because of policy differences but because of the raging emotional economies through which relatively small differences on reproductive policies are being cast.

It is on the terrain of emotional labor, of competing efforts to marshal pity for some victims and contempt for others, that the abortion debates are being fought.  Senator Barbara Boxer, defending the legality of late term abortion, described the women lobbying to retain the provision with these words:  ‘They’re crying, they’re crying because we’re trying to take away an option.” Then-Senator Santorum proudly, defiantly, repainted these women as the aggressors against helpless , victimized babies:  “I got up afterwards and I said, I repeated the story about these women crying, and I said, ‘We would be deafened by the cries of the children who are not here to cry because of these procedures.’” 
Mackenzie Weinger,  “Rick Santorum Stresses Evangelical Pitch.”

It is the hypothetical cries of the unborn that move Santorum’s women. Numerous scholars interviewing evangelical women have found that, while right wing Christian men may be motivated by rage at the violation of proper family values, their female equivalents, in contrast, are likely to be motivated more from grief at a loss related to birth or children. The life stories of anti-choice activist women, far more than their pro-choice opponents, are littered with reproductive losses: devastating miscarriages, infertility, death or serious illness of a child, or some other trauma related to childbearing unite as many as one third of anti-choice women. They share intense narratives of inconsolable suffering and desperately sought solace: “I lost a baby.” “I grieved for years.” “In a way it becomes as though [all] abortions were my children.” 

Of all these wells of sadness, the devaluing of “imperfect” children is often the most devastating for their mothers: Santorum’s lost son and disabled daughter, I speculate, come to stand for the lost and endangered children and potential children these women grieve.  Santorum may be a man, but in the emotional economy of reproductive rights he is with the women, his masculine privilege enhancing the public import of their usually private grief. And the Republican women, at least those voting in Iowa, Missouri, Colorado, and Minnesotta are with him. Nancy Pence of Concerned Women of America, concurs:
“After playing the field for weeks, women in Iowa finally settled down with their man. In fact, CNN entrance polls showed that the majority of women were supporting Santorum at twenty-seven percent (despite the sweater vest)….Santorum's appeal to women and evangelicals centers on a desire for authenticity. Rick's been consistent in behavior and record. His stance on the sanctity of life and traditional marriage gained the voters' attention. His personal story of a strong marriage and eight children, including baby Gabriel, who died, and beautiful Bella, who is severely handicapped and the apple of her father's eye, is beyond reproach.” 
“Beyond reproach” is Pence’s ham-handed summary of how the personal has become political for many evangelical women: Santorum’s grief at the loss of a child, and his fierce dedication to the damaged child remaining, let these women see their own deep grief reflected and honored. 
  Santorum recalled how devastated he was when his son died, and the news of his daughter’s condition seemed too much to handle:
“I was the rock, I was the guy holding everything together as the chaos was around. And I did so. I loved her. But I had lost a child. And as I think you can see, it still hurts. I had put everything into that little boy Gabriel and it crushed me. And I felt maybe, maybe if I love my daughter but just hold back a little just so I don’t get hurt so bad. And then she got sick,” he said.

Then Santorum told the hushed crowd that his daughter got better — and taught him about his relationship with God.
“The gift that Bella gave me was the gift of looking at this disabled child, who in the world’s view will never be able to do anything for me, other than love me,” Santorum said. “She is just a font of love, as far as I’m concerned, and she made me understand that’s how the father looks at me – disabled – unable to do anything for him except love him. And he loves me unconditionally.” 

Thus, Santorum’s strongest assault on reproductive rights comes through the backdoor: his personal grief over the death of his premature infant son, and the tragedy of his daughter’s genetic disability, allies him with bereaved evangelical women and their spokespersons far more effectively than do abstract arguments about policies and their implementation.

Effectively opposing Rick Santorum requires sustained attention to the concerns of his evangelical base. Opposing Santorum’s extreme anti-choice position through mockery is counterproductive. For instance, Lee Drutman from The Sunlight Foundation ridicules Santorum for being obsessed with anything “gynecological” for his successful criminalization of late-term abortions, and adamant advocacy for the rights of the unborn over any health or life consideration of the mother.  Andrea Stone, writing for the Huffington Post, repeats the line that Santorum is “obsessed with all things gynecological.” Derision of “things gynecological” subtly jeers at women’s bodies as much as at anti-choice activism.  It is not a victory for feminism if Santorum is defeated because he cares about reproduction, since feminists care very much about reproduction as well.

Opposing Santorum by focusing on his personal ethical dilemmas is similarly unhelpful. For instance, some critics have accused the Santorums of hypocrisy, in that the pitocin-induced labor that produced their doomed 20 week old infant was not unlike the medical procedures against which Santorum rages.  Other critics are repulsed by the Santorums’ decision to take the infant’s corpse home for the older children to kiss and fondle.  Still others find him inconsistent on anti-choice legislation in his Senate career, when, like all Senators, he sometimes had to vote on omnibus spending bills packaging a number of issues into a single vote. But these responses miss the main political point: Rick Santorum’s public grief, his savage heartbreak over the loss of a child, his exalted loyalty to the remaining disabled child, is exactly the source of his legitimacy over other men who merely oppose abortion. He willingly, exquisitely performs publicly the grief and outrage that the anti-choice women feel. 

Defenders of the Santorums are more perceptive in seeing what is at stake: potential hypocrisy or disquieting death rituals are not the point; the point, rather, is a fierce public legitimation of reproductive grief.  That is what pulls evangelical women toward Santorum, and it may be right wing men’s realization of the likely electoral support of evangelical women that has brought the country’s male fundamentalist leadership into Santorum’s camp. 

In this moment of his campaign, Santorum is the rightful heir of Sarah Palin, whose folksy appeal to right wing women is largely based on the compassion calculus embodied by the quiet Downs Syndrome baby in her arms and the strapping son in military uniform by her side. If, in the long run, it is not Rick Santorum, then there will be another standard bearer for this violent compassion. If not this election, then the next. According to Mackenzie Weinger’s account of then-Senator Santorum’s confrontation with Senator Boxer, when Santorum invoked the tears of the unborn, “The crowd responded with the biggest cheers of the night.” Conservative evangelical women’s well of birth-grief will not soon wear itself out or retreat from public life.

If I am correct that ridicule and charges of hypocrisy are inadequate grounds for critique, then how should feminists proceed? I have two suggestions. First, we should recognize and honor the profound sadness, as well as the potential understanding, occasioned in birth loss.  
  Pro-choice women also struggle with reproductive loss, and it does us no service to overlook or minimize the grief we share with our anti-choice opponents. When I miscarried in the first trimester of my second pregnancy, I was bereft.  Well-meaning people who encouraged me to cheer up, since I could always have more children, totally missed the point. That baby would never be. I desperately mourned the loss of that baby.  Pseudo-precise definitions of when, exactly, the potential life became an actual life were irrelevant. Further, the loss of a life growing inside my own was confusing: who, exactly, ceased to be? Was it my fault?  It does not compromise our pro-choice politics to mourn a baby who could have been but is not.  In fact, it could enhance our politics by taking seriously the disquieting presence of death in life, and help us to take in death as a part of life, not its opposite.

   Second, the best way to act on concern for the not-yet-born is to work for equality between men and women. The great and utter tragedy of the abortion debates is that if, as a culture, we truly wanted to protect babies, then we would empower women over all aspects of their lives. Global development projects find, over and over, that the best way to raise children's standard of living is to channel resources to their mothers. If women are educated and have access to opportunity, including the opportunity to control their own fertility, then children are far more likely to flourish. But Rick Santorum’s candidacy shows us that actual existing children and their mothers are far less important, politically, than the heady brew of parental grief and public solace Santorum enacts.

Worth noting that in 2010 19 percent of children in Santorum's Home State of Pennsylvania live in Poverty 

*My thanks to Sharain Naylor and Carolyn DiPalma for helping me think about Rick Santorum and role of child loss in politics.