Who says you can’t turn the clock back?
Decades ago, near the end of the Age of Aquarius, a Republican congressman from Texas argued passionately that the federal government should pay for birth control for poor women.
Del. Norton (D-D.C.) chastises Rep. Issa (R -Ca.) for not allowing Georgetown Univ. student Sandra Fluke to appear, saying a woman should be represented in the witness panel, as the committee’s discussion had health repercussions for women.
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Full text of President Obama’s speech on national security
“We must define the nature and scope of this struggle, or else it will define us,” the president said.
“We need to take sensationalism out of this topic so that it can no longer be used by militants who have no real knowledge of the voluntary nature of the program but, rather, are using it as a political stepping stone,” said George H.W. Bush. “If family planning is anything, it is a public health matter.”
Title X, the law he sponsored that still funds family planning for the poor, passed the House by a vote of 298 to 32. It passed the Senate unanimously. A Republican president, Richard Nixon, enthusiastically signed it.
That was 1970.
This is now: The issue of birth control has suddenly become an obsession of the 2012 presidential campaign. To many observers, it seems that the clock has indeed been turned back.
Using birth control to have sex without making a baby has been settled social behavior, not a taboo but an ordinary prescription that virtually all American women present at the drugstore counter at some point in their lives. For many, it seems the common-sense way to avoid the prospect of abortion, which has been the really divisive issue of sexual politics.
Now gender warfare is erupting anew, at least in the spheres where political agitation thrives.
“Now you have a group of inflamed, enraged and constantly provoked women,” says Clare Coleman, who heads the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association.
Or, as Planned Parenthood’s president, Cecile Richards, said incredulously on Saturday during a rally in Austin:
“Somehow in this country, in 2012, this election might turn on whether women should have access to birth control.”
This might seem a bewildering turn of events, particularly when polls consistently show that (a) voters place jobs and the economy atop the list of their concerns and (b) large majorities of Americans of all faiths support the use of birth control, the most commonly prescribed drug for women between 18 and 44, and have done so for years.
But elections have a way of becoming national conversations — often unwieldy ones.
On the surface, this battle seems to have been joined by liberals and conservatives over President Obama’s insistence that all employers, including religious institutions, who provide health insurance include birth control at no cost.
This expansion of reproductive rights has thrilled liberals and dismayed conservatives, who see it as a violation of the separation of church and state enshrined in the Constitution.
Catholic bishops have been most opposed to the policy directive, because doctrine holds that any birth control except natural family planning is a sin against God. And the bishops have gained allies among those eager to overturn the entire health-care act. Repealing Obamacare, as Republicans call it, is a central pledge of all the men who want to be the Republican presidential nominee.
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