The Politics of Contraception: Why Gender Balance Matters in Congress

There are times when the effects of the gender imbalance in Congress really hit home. This week, when House Republicans convened an all male panel to discuss contraception, was one of those times.

It seems almost incredible that we are still arguing over the merits of birth control in 2011 when almost 99% of sexually active women of all ages use at least one method of birth control (Mosher WD and Jones J, "Use of contraception in the United States: 1982-2008, Vital Health and Statistics 2010).

Of those women, nearly a third use oral contraceptives (“the pill”), especially those under 30 years of age, while those over the age of 30 are more likely to choose sterilization than any other form of birth control (Alan Guttmacher Institute, Facts on Contraceptive Use in the United States, 2010).

Yet the male-dominated House and Senate are considering bills that would allow any employer to opt out of covering birth control, and they're discussing this issue as if women had nothing to say about it.

This lack of coverage would, of course, create a disproportionate burden on young women and poor women, two constituencies Republicans apparently care little about. Of the 66 million women of reproductive age, about half (36 million) are in need of contraceptive services, and about a quarter need publicly-funded services because they are poor or under the age of 20. In fact, four in ten poor women of reproductive age have no health insurance at all (Alan Guttmacher Institute, Facts on Publicly Funded Contraceptive Services in the United States, August 2011).

Given these figures, you would think that Congress would be discussing the need to increase financial support for contraception, not talking about taking it away from those women who are fortunate enough to have insurance policies that cover it.

But when you convene a panel of five people, who by definition cannot get pregnant, can we really expect an honest, objective discussion of a resource that allows women to choose whether to get pregnant or not?

Can you imagine what the response of men would be like if Congress put together a panel of five women in order to discuss whether or not insurance should cover medications to address erectile dysfunction?

The cynic in me wonders if this latest fight over contraception is simply a Republican gambit to shift attention away from their embarrassing gaffe in holding up a payroll tax extension for millions of working Americans.

Or it might be a deliberate provocation of the Republican party's base of social conservative base to get them riled up enough to vote, when Mitt Romney seems more and more likely to make them want to stay home on election day.

But I can't help but feel that this fight points to some deeper and more unsettling in our culture. There seems to be an almost atavistic fear of women having control over their own fertility as if it might threaten the very structure of society.

During the Enlightenment, French philosophers from Louis de Jaucourt to Rousseau to Condorcet argued for political liberty for men, but they openly worried about extending the same kinds of liberties to women because it might upset the hierarchical structure of the family.

Indeed, Rousseau's ideal woman was one whose education was limited to her role as wife and mother, and he attacked aristocratic women as selfish and decadent for wanting to control their fertility. “Not content to have ceased breast-feeding their infants, they have ceased to want to have them at all,” he wrote in his novel Émile.

In a similar vein, Pierre Bayle wrote: “It is certain that if women had only consulted reason, they would have renounced the quality of mother, discouraged by the inconvenience of pregnancy, the pains of delivery, and the care that must be taken of the little creatures they produce.”

This fear that if women could control their fertility, they would avoid having children may run deep in a culture where “family values” still connotes a husband who works and a wife who stays home with the kids.

Today the number of households fitting this description is rapidly diminishing, and the number of women who still have no children by the time they reach their mid-40s has doubled since the 1980s (Jane Lawler Dye, "Fertility of American Women, 2006," Current Population Reports).

Is it a coincidence then that Republicans picked five men to talk about one of the important health and life issues a woman can face, i.e. deciding when and if to have a child?

Whatever their motivations, this ongoing debate raises serious issues for women, and it underscores the danger of having so little female representation in bodies like the House and Senate, when a majority of men are writing laws that affect the most important decision a woman can make.

So I urge women not only to write their representatives and let their voices be heard in support of contraceptive health coverage but also to urge their husbands, boyfriends, fathers, sons, and male colleagues to do the same.

And let's start putting at least a few more women in the House and Senate where they belong.