By Leslie Tignor
Columnist Jessica Valenti recently wrote an article for The Guardian entitled “Women like sex. Stop making ‘health’ excuses for why we use birth control.” Basically she argued exactly what the title implies—that women enjoy sex and use birth control because they don’t want to have children.
What more is there to say? It’s true. And more women should just admit it! Women like sex. What’s wrong with saying it? Sex is meant to be pleasurable and provide physical, emotional, and psychological satisfaction. What’s wrong with liking sex? And, yes, by golly, lots of women also use birth control while they’re enjoying sex. Sure, some women use it for other purposes (like controlling heavy menstrual cycles, treating endometriosis, reducing acne breakouts, and the like), but the vast majority of women use birth control for just that—controlling (i.e., preventing) births. Ms. Valenti is right: We should stop making excuses for why women use birth control.
The vast majority of women who use birth control do so, not only because they like sex, but because they’ve been taught that it’s okay. Women have been led to believe that it’s okay to use birth control because it’s safe, it’s healthy, and it’s empowering to have control over one’s fertility (or lack thereof). It’s been pounded into our heads that birth control is necessary to space births, prevent overpopulation, and make us equal to men. For more than 50 years, the feminist movement has worked overtime to indoctrinate every living female with the ideology that birth control is liberating. And any medical or scientific evidence which points to opposite findings is obviously flawed!
The problem is that it has all been one big gargantuan lie. Contraception is not safe. It’s not healthy, and it’s not liberating or empowering. Contrary to the liberal claim that conservatives are deathly afraid of sex—particularly sex that leads to pregnancy—conservatives happen to know the truth.
The truth is that the synthetic hormones in today’s contraceptives are carcinogens. They cause cancer. They also pose a number of serious health risks and have been associated with thousands of deaths. Medical malpractice lawsuits involving contraception abound. In addition to adversely affecting women’s health, many of today’s hormonal contraceptives are also abortifacients (again, contrary to liberal claims and ACOG’s redefinitions), meaning they can kill a newly conceived child before the mother even knows she is pregnant. And, hormonal contraception is harming our environment through the contamination of our water supply!
Social science has shown that the birth control movement has had horribly harmful effects on the family and on society. Promiscuity, adultery, divorce, pornography, out-of-wedlock births, STDs—not to mention abortion—have all skyrocketed since the “sexual revolution.”
Those who oppose artificial forms of contraception, whether we are religious or not, know that there are better (safer, healthier, and less costly) alternatives. There is natural family planning for avoiding or spacing pregnancies and Na-pro technology for fertility/gynecological treatments. We know that there are an innumerable number of advantages—both individually and for society—to sex in a healthy one man-one woman married relationship.
Those who argue in favor of contraception do not want to acknowledge the truth. And, now, those who fought so desperately to keep everyone out of their bedrooms so they could indulge in whatever kind of sex life they wanted want to force the rest of us to be intimately involved by providing, one way or another, for their contraception regardless of what we believe about it.
What Ms. Valenti ought to admit is not that women like sex, but that she and those like her want their unlimited, accessible-everywhere-and-at-all-times contraception—preferably free—and for the rest of us to simply shut up about it.
Leslie Tignor is Development Coordinator and Resources Department Manager for American Life League.