The Purity Myth (20 page)

• In addition to pushing Jesus as a cure-all for cramps, in 2005 Hager’s former wife of thirty-two years accused him of regularly anally raping her. Just the kind of guy you want in charge of women’s sexual lives!
  

  †
  I told you this reeked of made-for-TV movie.
  

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  and the same excuse that legislators use to attempt to limit women’s access to birth control.
  

  For example, when a bill prohibiting University of Wisconsin campuses to provide students with any form of contraception passed in 2005, state rep- resentative Dan LeMahieu, who had introduced the legislation, told
  The Cap- ital Times
  that he was “outraged that our public institutions are giving young college women the tools for having promiscuous sexual relations, whether on campus or thousands of miles away on spring break.”*
  15
  I find it telling that Rep. LeMahieu sees access to contraception only as a means to a slutty end, rather than as young women’s taking responsibility for their sexual health.
  

  Ultimately, the FDA/EC debacle became a real crisis. In 2005, Susan Wood, director of the Office of Women’s Health and assistant commissioner for women’s health, resigned in protest. In an email sent to friends and col- leagues, she wrote:
  

  I have spent the last fif teen years working to ensure that science informs good health policy decisions. . . .
  

  I can no longer serve as staf f when scientific and clinical evidence, fully
  

  evaluated and recommended for approval by the professional staf f here, has been overruled. I therefore have submitted my resignation ef fective today.
  

  Not until July 2006—after protests were launched and complaints lodged from female legislators and local activists (nine of whom got arrested in front of FDA headquarters), and the Government Accountability Office is-
  

  

• I love the idea that there
  wouldn’t
  be wanton spring-break sex if campus health centers just stopped providing birth control. “No pills? Well, forget Daytona, gals—I’m headed straight to the library!”
  

sued a report about how politicized and “unusual” the process was—did the FDA approve EC for over-the-counter sale.
16

Unfortunately, the drug was made available only to women aged eigh- teen and older, so the very people who need EC most—young women—were deprived. Once again, this restriction was conceived because of the FDA’s fear that young women would misuse the drug and become “promiscuous.”* Outside of being discriminatory, the age limit also made little sense. In many states, teen girls can obtain abortions without parental permission, but can’t access a drug that can
stop them
from getting pregnant. So in New York, for example, if a teen girl has a broken-condom incident with her partner, she can’t prevent a pregnancy using emergency contraception, but she
can
get an abortion should she become pregnant.

The FDA’s approval process in this case is hardly the first (or the last, I imag- ine) time that the government’s interference in women’s health decisions has re- vealed the degree to which it’s so fully entangled in fears about young females’ sexuality. Deriding young women for having sex is a tradition with a long history, but when socially restrictive double standards about sex make their way into pol- icy, we have an issue that isn’t just women’s problem—it’s the country’s problem.

d a d d y K n o w s b e s t

Another disturbing legislative theme hurting women—again, young women especially—is the widespread notion that women can’t be trusted to make their own decisions.

* The FDA had no problem approving orlistat—a fat-blocking pill whose side effects include “fecal incontinence, gas, and oily discharge”—for all ages, despite the approval panel’s concerns that younger people would misuse the drug. Apparently, a diet pill that makes you shit your pants is preferable to a safe form of contraception.

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One of the most infuriating policy examples as far as this kind of pater- nalism is concerned is “informed consent” laws (also called Woman’s Right to Know* laws), which, to date, thirty-three states implement to varying de- grees. The premise of these laws is essentially that when a woman goes to get an abortion, she doesn’t really know that she’ll be . . . well, getting an abortion. Best that someone let her know—and in the most shaming way possible!
17

Informed consent laws, as they’re supposed to, exist to ensure that peo- ple get accurate and unbiased information before receiving medical care so that they can make the decision that’s best for them. But when it comes to abortion, the principles of informed consent go out the window. Laws that “inform” women about abortion often contain false, misleading, and/or bi- ased information that seeks to shame and scare, rather than inform.

In South Dakota,
†
for example, the informed consent law requires doc-

tors to tell women seeking abortions that the procedure “ends a human life,” and “that the pregnant woman has an existing relationship with that unborn human being and that the relationship enjoys protection under the United States Constitution and under the laws of South Dakota.”
18

Sarah Blustain, who wrote about these laws for
The American Prospect,

notes just how condescending the legislation is:

This line of thinking makes clear that women are too ignorant to realize

that they are carrying some sort of nascent life in them, and too weak to pos- sibly decide for themselves whether to have an abortion. Even worse, draft-

* You have to give the virginity movement credit: It certainly knows how to adopt pro- woman rhetoric for antiwoman laws.

†
Unfortunately for the women of SD, their state is the first place you should look when

you want a good example of antiwoman legislation.

ers of the South Dakota law do not think women are competent to state

whether they have absorbed all of this helpful state information properly: The law would require the doctor to certify, in writing , that he “ believes she [the pregnant woman] understands the information imparted.”
19

A similar component of informed consent laws is ultrasounds—more specifically, requiring women to view an ultrasound before obtaining an abortion. (Again, so that they understand the whole “abortion” thing.)

Twelve states have an ultrasound-related requirement built into their abortion laws.
20
This means that the doctor is required to perform an ultra- sound, and in some cases must ask the patient to view it. Disregard for the moment that an ultrasound requirement can add up to $200 to the already high cost of getting an abortion; what’s even more distressing is that this re- quirement assumes, yet again, that women don’t understand what an abor- tion is. And the reasoning behind the ultrasound requirement is definitely not coming from a place of informed consent. Its purpose is to shame women into thinking that if they
really
knew they were getting an abortion—”killing” a “separate” being—they wouldn’t have one.

When Kansas senator Sam Brownback introduced the Ultrasound Informed Consent Act in 2007, which required women seeking abortions to have an ultrasound, he didn’t say he was concerned that women weren’t getting all the information they needed to make the best decision for themselves and their families. No, instead Senator Brownback said that he was hopeful that the bill would “cause a deeper ref lection on the human- ity of unborn children.”
Deeper reflection
—because clearly, a woman who has taken a pregnancy test, found out she is unexpectedly pregnant, dis- cussed her options with her family, decided to terminate the pregnancy,

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made an appointment at a women’s health clinic, gotten dressed in one of those terrible paper gowns, gotten on the doctor’s table, and put her feet in the gyno-stirrups hasn’t thought about her pregnancy enough.
21
*

And as if feeling compelled to explain to pregnant women that abor- tions are abortions and fetuses are fetuses weren’t bad enough, other legislation mandates outright lie to women. Informed consent laws in Texas and Mississippi require doctors to tell women that abortion and breast cancer are linked. The problem is, they
aren’t.
Yet, despite studies and statements from highly regarded medical groups, like the National Cancer Institute, that refute any such connection, the virginity move- ment continues to promote this falsity in abstinence-only education, in its lobbying work, and now in five states’ abortion legislation.
22
What bet- ter way to scare women than to tell them that a perfectly safe procedure could actually give them cancer?

Another kind of paternalism that’s surfaced in the abortion debate is the idea that women who have abortions are victims—of the men who impregnated them, of abortion providers who are just in it for the money. From this standpoint, anyone is responsible—except the woman getting the abortion. This line of reasoning serves several purposes: First, it enables the woman-as-moral-child model that’s so pervasive in virginity-movement thinking (and evident in informed consent laws). How can poor, unknow- ing women be blamed for medical procedures that they just can’t mentally grasp? The other, more politically savvy purpose is that it allows anti-choice leaders and legislators to dodge questions about criminalizing women who have abortions.

* As anyone who has experienced an unplanned pregnancy can tell you, there’s little else you
do
think about. The “deeper ref lection” line is simply insulting.

After all, if abortion becomes illegal, then women who have abortions would go to prison. But anti-choice activists can’t
say
that they want women to go to jail—most Americans would never support that. It’s a political reality that they don’t want to own up to.

In 2005, for example, a team of pro-choice activists filmed anti-abortion advocates trying to answer the question “If
Roe
were overturned, should women who have illegal abortions be punished?” If so, what should their punishment be?