Reproductive freedom

by Allison Guttu*

On April 5, U.S. federal judge in Tummino et al. v. Hamburg ordered that the Morning-After Pill be made available "without a prescription and without point-of-sale or age restrictions within thirty days."

Until the court’s ruling, emergency contraception was only available without a prescription for women 17 and up, forcing all women to be “carded” to buy it. Now, the Morning-After Pill or “Plan B” can be stocked on any shelf in any store, next to condoms, aspirin, or shampoo. No prescription or identification will be needed to buy it.

The Morning-After Pill prevents pregnancy up to 5 days after sex; but is most effective within the first 24 hours. It is not RU-486, which induces an abortion. If you are pregnant, it will not work. But, having this form of birth control at our fingertips will give women enormous freedom--if we don’t want to have a child, we won’t have to.

When women can’t control how many children we have, it impacts us as a group, not just individually. Not being able to control the course of our lives has deep implications for women. It means we have less leverage, whether in the workplace, with partners, in our families, or in our public lives. No birth control method is foolproof. Sometimes our partners resist using condoms, condoms break, and sometimes we forget to take the pill. Less frequently we are "swept away" by the moment, but should that mean that we have to bear a child? The Morning-After Pill is one more way for us to prevent unwanted pregnancies.

For over a decade, grassroots feminists with National Women’s Liberation (NWL) -- including lead plaintiff Annie Tummino -- have been waging the most important fight in decades to expand access to birth control in the United States: making the Morning-After Pill available over-the-counter without any restrictions.

by Jeremy Leaming

Even before the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral argument in two cases dealing with government discrimination of gay couples who want to get married, a growing chorus of legal scholars and others urged the high court to move slowly. Because, according to these folks, if the justices declare that lesbians and gay men have a constitutionally protected right to wed, a backlash against the marriage equality movement could be unleashed.

And proof for such a backlash centers on the high court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade opinion, which found that the right of privacy includes the right of women to make their own decisions on abortion. According to proponents of moving slowly on marriage equality, Roe sparked a backlash against growing support of abortion and now we have state after state trying to trample the fundamental right. Therefore the backlash proponents argue that the justices should learn from Roe and avoid handing down a ruling that would end government discrimination against gay couples seeking to wed. This backlash story has been fueled in part by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who while defending the Roe decision, said the Court moved to fast.

But as an editorial in The New York Times notes, the backlash proponents are basing their argument on a “false reading of politics before and after Roe v. Wade ….” The editorial cites the work of ACS Board Members Linda Greenhouse and Reva Siegel, both teach at Yale Law School, documenting the fact that the fevered opposition to reproductive rights was forming long before the high court handed down Roe.

In a 2010 interview with ACSblog, highlighting their Before Roe v. Wade book, Greenhouse and Siegel said the documentation they collected for the book showed “that, contrary to the commonly expressed view that it was the Supreme Court and its decision that unleashed a ‘backlash’ against abortion reform, a vigorous counter-movement was forming well before Roe. In the late 1960s, as public support for liberalization surged, the Catholic Church helped organized an anti-abortion movement to oppose liberalization in every state legislature and court considering abortion laws. Strategists for President Nixon’s 1972 re-election then decided to denounce ‘permissive’ abortion laws to attract Catholics from their longtime affiliation with the Democratic Party and court the support of a ‘silent majority.’”