It would be hard to imagine a more unlikely historical moment than this one for birth control to become a matter of outraged political controversy. For starters, there is the statistic that ninety-nine per cent of all American women who have had sex have used contraception at some point in their lives. For Catholic women, the percentage is almost the same—ninety-eight per cent, according to an analysis released last spring by the Guttmacher Institute. Then, there’s the fact that we live in a society that has become remarkably dependent on the unfettered ambition of women. As the Washington Post reporter Liza Mundy writes in a new book, “The Richer Sex,” forty per cent of working wives now earn more than their husbands, and, by 2030, that number will probably rise to fifty per cent. Women already make up more than half of college and university students. By 2019, if current trends continue, they will make up fifty-nine per cent of total undergraduate enrollment, and sixty-one per cent of those enrolled in graduate programs. This is an economic and educational order predicated on the freedom of women, married and unmarried, to protect their own health and to decide when they’re going to have children.
As long as the debate stirred up by the Blunt Amendment—which would have allowed employers to refuse coverage for health services they felt compromised their religious beliefs—stayed focussed on freedom of religion, it was possible to forget that putting birth control back in political play meant ignoring reality. You could, after all, make a coherent argument about Catholic employers and the calls of conscience, without insisting on the moral turpitude of people who use birth control or talk about it in public. You could also argue that the Catholic hierarchy was basically asking the federal government to do what its own teachings apparently could not: to remind Catholic women of the evils of contraceptives in such a way that they would actually stop using them. But at least we were still in the realm of a legitimate policy debate.
Then Rush Limbaugh opened his mouth and showed us more than we wanted to know about the dank interior of his mind. Though repellent, it wasn’t exactly surprising. A few months ago, after Sharon Bialek charged that Herman Cain had sexually harassed her, Limbaugh pronounced her name “Buy-a-lick,” and called her thirteen-year-old son a Nazi “brownshirt,” for having encouraged her to come forth. That’s not really so different from calling Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown Law School student who testified before Congress about insurance coverage of contraception, “a slut” and “a prostitute.”
What was more revealing was the mild response from leading Republicans. “He’s taken care of that issue” was all Michele Bachmann said, after Limbaugh made his truculent apology. Mitt Romney landed on: “I’ll just say this, which is, it’s not the language I would have used.” And Rick Santorum? He was already on record condemning birth control altogether. As he told an interviewer for the evangelical Christian Web site Caffeinated Thoughts, in October, “Many in the Christian faith have said, ‘Well, that’s O.K. Contraception’s O.K.’ It’s not O.K. because it’s a license to do things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”
It’s tempting to say that the timing of these events—and the eighty new restrictions on abortion rights that were enacted by state legislatures in 2011, up from twenty-three in 2010—is not unlikely at all, and that it is precisely because women are on the ascendant in the public sphere that conservatives seem so eager to undermine them in the private one. But that seems more systematic than is probable. The real attraction of the birth-control issue was that it could be used to bash Obamacare. It’s not proving to be a very effective weapon, however. When birth control is uncoupled from the religious-freedom argument—and when conservatives start talking in ugly ad-hominem language, like Limbaugh’s, or clueless anachronistic language, like Santorum’s—women, in particular, do not respond well. Just after Limbaugh lashed out at Fluke, a Georgetown professor attended a reunion at a Catholic school in Queens. An elderly nun asked her, “Do you know that girl?” She added, “That awful man should be fired for what he said. How’s she holding up?”
Women, of course, make up the majority of the electorate, and, in the general election, it won’t necessarily help if Republicans try to insulate themselves by, say, picking a female Vice-Presidential candidate—maybe another governor, like Susana Martinez, of New Mexico. As the conservative political analyst Michelle Bernard noted, on NPR, “2008 saw the advent of the red-state feminist,” the type of woman who supported Sarah Palin, and most polls show that “even those right-of-center women . . . are absolutely appalled” by the attacks on reproductive rights.
Social conservatives could pay more attention to another, more challenging social issue: the decline in marriage. More than half of all births to American women under the age of thirty now take place outside of marriage, and children who grow up without married parents are less likely to go to college and to find employment, and are more likely to live in poverty, to become pregnant as teen-agers, and to go to prison than children with married parents. It might be tough for Newt Gingrich to make marital commitment a centerpiece of his platform, but Santorum could. In the same interview in which he condemned contraception, he talked about how he would use the moral authority of the Presidency to support marriage. But, on the campaign trail and on his official Web site, his social-issue rhetoric is almost all about abortion, contraception, reinstating Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and passing a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage.
Indeed, social conservatives seem to see a bigger threat to marriage from committed gay couples who want in on it than from straight ones who opt out of it. Maybe Santorum doesn’t say much about the decline because the people who are currently marrying more, divorcing less, and having fewer children out of wedlock—the people who are more apt to have what the researcher W. Bradford Wilcox calls “the marriage mind-set”—are not his people. They are Americans with college degrees (the snobs). Many of them live in households where the wife is the economic powerhouse, and professionally accomplished. Talking about them might mean giving blue-state liberals a little credit. And, besides, there are many reasons for the decline in marriage, including some that are usually the province of Democrats (the loss of blue-collar jobs) and some that are irreversible social trends (women have higher expectations of marriage). It would be hard, even for the current Republican field, to pin them all on the President. ♦
