Birth control ban case of violence against women

Two pieces in last week's Opinions section addressed recent issues pertaining to women's access to reproductive services. Juan Thompson's column ("HHS order violates nation's right to freedom of religion") argued that religious institutions should be permitted to forgo provision of contraceptive services, and Bill Crane's column ("Komen Foundation decision reveals war against women") argued that the Komen Foundation's brief lapse in support for Planned Parenthood is part of a larger movement of gender- and class-based oppression. It took me a moment to realize that they were writing about different issues. They were in fact writing about the same thing: violence against women.

Most behaviors falling under the heading of "violence against women," such as rape and abuse, are not entirely sex-specific. These acts of violence can be and are perpetrated by and against all types of people (bearing in mind constraints of age and ability) with statistical patterns indicating disproportionate risk of exposure and perpetration depending on other demographic features.

But abortion and emergency contraception are strictly, 100 percent sexed. This makes the withholding of reproductive medical services the most explicit form of violence against women that exists today in the United States. And it is incredibly violent. As Crane pointed out in his column, withholding these services from women is to force them to potentially (in the case of emergency contraception) or certainly (in the case of abortion) endure pregnancy and produce biological offspring. It is forced pregnancy.

Like other forms of violence against women, forced pregnancy has no rational, secular argument to support it. But, like other forms of violence against women, forced pregnancy is excused by secular arguments that favor nonintervention. Thompson laid out this argument nicely in his column last week; the argument hinges on religious sovereignty. Thompson, ironically, chooses the rather oxymoronic term "religious freedom," perhaps forgetting that the freedom in question is the freedom to restrict freedom—the freedom of healthcare organizations to restrict the freedom of women.

Sovereignty defines freedom at the institutional level. Liberals often fail to see how poorly this translates into freedom at the individual's level. Independence from outsiders is secured in order to engage in oppressive behavior within a state, institution or household. These concepts enable an institution or agent to use freedom as an argument in defense of its oppressive behavior. This argument enables pharmacists and insurance companies to construe their misogynistic dominance as an exercise in religious freedom.

And notice how effectively this rhetoric banishes the pregnant female from our consciousness; we're too preoccupied with autonomy and liberty to even think about pregnant women—or pregnant girls. Or people who didn't identify with their bodily sex in the first place and are now being punished for this nonconformity by enduring what society deems to be the proper function of that body—the production of new humans. I can't even imagine how traumatizing that would be; no lifelong biological male can. And many of them don't even try. Instead, they distance themselves psychologically from these issues by framing them in terms of liberty and other cheap, hokey, imageless words.

This rhetoric also has the impressive ability to turn the entire reality of oppression on its head. Thompson exemplifies this strategy beautifully: "Directing a religious institution to violate their beliefs is an assault on those rights." Did you see that? It's saying that opponents of violence against women are guilty of assault. Amazing.

Thompson also advanced a historical argument for allowing religious institutions to practice forced pregnancy. He points out that Catholic hospitals are an extension of a larger cultural system that Catholic immigrants set up to form a safe space for their marginalized religion. Again, notice how framing the issue this way enables someone to hijack buzzwords associated with feminism, like safe space and marginalized, and use them in defense of violence against women. Misogynies that have a distinctly Catholic flavor (like forcing women to endure pregnancy) are justified on the grounds that Catholicism is a threatened identity. Since when did that earn them the right to oppress subpopulations within that identity? Not to mention females are not really a subpopulation but comprise nearly half of the entire population.

Empirical observations shed light on the way in which misogynistic Catholic ideology unfolds in real life. Consider findings from a national study of Catholic hospitals from Catholics for Free Choice in which female researchers, pretending to be patients, called the hospitals' emergency departments and asked for emergency contraception. Only 10 percent of the hospitals offered it without restrictions. Others said that only rape victims were eligible to obtain emergency contraception, and some of these required that the victim report the rape to the police first.

In 82 percent of cases, callers were told that even rape victims could not obtain emergency contraception. And only 14 percent of these hospitals offered referrals. Some staff hung up on the caller before she could ask for a referral. One caller was told, "This is an emergency room, and that is not an emergency." In other words, pregnancy is the proper function of the female body and does not warrant medical intervention. These and other instances of rudeness serve to punish female insubordination.

This is the exact opposite of religious freedom. By deliberately withholding information about alternatives, hospital staff were directly imposing their ideology upon the callers and sabotaging women's attempts to prevent a potentially devastating event. The blatant coerciveness of this behavior, and the almost unrivaled specificity with which it targets women, is unequivocally misogynistic and undeniably violent.

And even when hospitals provide referrals, this is insufficient to justify the withholding of treatment. As Crane pointed out, many women have insufficient resources to seek out those alternatives. Financial restrictions are an obvious concern, as is the possibility that females seeking emergency contraception are victims of ongoing abuse and may have extremely limited access to transportation.

This neutralizes any lingering fantasies about women having abundant options when it comes to their reproductive health. It also unveils "religious freedom" as a euphemism for violence. A feminist perspective cuts right through these hallucinations and clarifies the role of forced pregnancy as an instrument of subordination.

—Carson Robinson '12 is a psychology major.