Why Aren't Pro-lifers and Pro-choicers Pro-contraception?
McWilliams, Rita
Why Aren't Pro-lifers and Pro-choicers Pro-contraception? by Rita McWilliams On one side of the walkway to a Georgia Avenue clinic less than a mile from the U.S. Supreme Court, men and...
...Other groups not commonly associated with abortion— Children's Defense Fund, the Urban League, the Center for Population Options, the National Organization on Adolescent Pregnancy and Parenting— have also fought quietly to expand contraception education...
...As the public senses, what the 1.6 million abortions performed annually indicate is an inexcusable failure: of responsibility, of education, of birth control...
...On the other side, women join hands in a human shield, blocking the pamphleteers...
...An IUD...
...In New York City, condoms are now available in the city's 120 public high schools, not to keep young women out of abortion clinics but to help prevent the spread of AIDS...
...teens are more sexually active than ever, only 13 states require local school systems to provide sex ed—let alone pass out condoms...
...Perhaps a better theory—one most right-to-lifers have ignored—is that contraception in the U.S...
...No one called us about that...
...You know how the argument goes," says an Alexandria, Virginia, school official who recently weathered the clinic controversy...
...The theory is simple: The availability of contraceptives leads to promiscuity leads to abortion...
...By failing to endorse contraception over abortion, both sides deny themselves precisely what they've been fighting for for decades: the ability to appeal to middle America...
...But don't expect it here any time soon...
...To use contraception, she says, "is to say the body and soul are two separate beings...
...Stevens, a reproductive biologist at Ohio State University, has received several million dollars over the past 15 years from the World Health Organization to support his research on another contraceptive injection...
...NRLC's Douglas Johnson claims his group would rather not oppose legislation that increases the amount and variety of U.S...
...Members of the "clinic defense force" say they are protecting her fundamental right not to carry an unwanted child...
...And Stevens, who has received his share of anti-abortion hate mail, has no love for right-to-life...
...Where was pro-choice during all this commotion...
...How much is that, in pharmaceutical R&D terms...
...But it's not just the market that senses pro-choice's impotence on this matter...
...Others still think you can't get pregnant the first time...
...Yet the same poll found, surprisingly, that most Americans also take the stance that abortion is "murder...
...of contraception articles that pro-life campaigns stop pharmaceutical companies from buying new contraceptives...
...Threading her way between these two factions this chilly Saturday morning is a lone woman— make that girl—wearing sweat pants, a hair ribbon, and braces...
...According to a 1989 Gallup poll, 61 percent of Americans don't want Roe v. Wade overturned...
...NOW's Rosemary Dempsey explains the prochoice movement's rationale for not concentrating more of its efforts on contraceptive battles like those...
...contraceptives but is often "forced to" because of the abortion provisions included...
...It also fights for the rights of handicapped infants and opposes euthanasia...
...But with birth control, you don't see the protesters...
...We believe it is the same life at either end of the alimentary canal," says NRLC's legislative director, Doug Johnson...
...Dozens of appalled activists packed the public hearings...
...It's a clich...
...Seventy-five percent of the women who choose abortion do so, according to their own assessments, out of financial and personal convenience— to avoid interference with school, work, or other activities...
...But both sides have already failed this woman...
...Willy allows that an ice cube inserted into the vagina will "freeze" the sperm...
...According to the National Opinion Research Center, a nonprofit group affiliated with the University of Chicago, a large majority of Americans support abortion only when the woman's health is seriously endangered, when the pregnancy is a result of rape or incest, or when the baby is likely to be born with a serious birth defect...
...And many can also remember times when that Trojan never came out of the wallet—which is one reason methods like the pill and Norplant are more reliable...
...What we've learned in the last 25 years is that it is baseline critical to make contraceptives available, but you have to combine it with education and encourage people to use contraceptives well...
...Yet making both sides embrace contraceptives as a legitimate, integral part of American life isn't ultimately about politics...
...Yet when it comes to sex, few people plan that far ahead—especially when, at least in a young person's mind, there are so many reasons to put a clinic visit off...
...It's pro-life, not prochoice, that wreaks fear in the hearts of TV executives...
...there are waits for private doctors, too...
...Of course, most of us would rather have no birth control than dangerous Dalkon Shields...
...NOW sent thousands of postcards to the manufacturer, RousselUCLAF, urging it to fight the FDA's import ban...
...Lacking self-esteem, lacking options, sometimes just lacking love, they feel they have nothing else in life...
...They say they simply have no opinion...
...Planned Parenthood...
...PPFA did object to IPPF-WH's signing of the policy, he says, but no threats about withdrawing money or fundraising assistance were involved...
...Instead, obsessed with abortion, they have forgotten a critical corollary of the cause: ensuring that most American women never face the decision to abort at all...
...Properly inserting a diaphragm is difficult for 35-year-olds with engineering degrees, let alone embarrassed 1 1 th graders...
...Of course, that leaves the 9 out of 10 women who were using contraceptives to account for the rest...
...You can see them marching in front of the clinics and screaming...
...Despite the fact that the U.S...
...A Los Angeles Times poll the same year confirmed that most Americans think the choice to abort should be left to the woman...
...Research assistance was provided by Pat Davis and Michael Schaffer...
...For instance, to counter 1989's pro-choice march in Washington, the American Coalition for Life created a "Cemetery of the Innocents" on Capitol Hill, erecting 4,400 white crosses—one for every abortion that takes place each day...
...Last year alone, five were introduced in the Virginia statehouse...
...So when it was announced in February that Norplant, a convenient form of contraception expected to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies by hundreds of thousands, was approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), one might have thought the news would be met with jubilation from those struggling to prevent abortion: Anything that reduces unwanted pregnancy, after all, reduces the motive for murder...
...Martin Luther called contraception homicide...
...Polls like these illustrate the public's moral dilemma about abortion, an ambivalence that increases when the primary motive for the procedure is simple inconvenience...
...Contraception is intertwined with abortion...
...has the highest rate of teen pregnancy in the First World, they disapprove of even teaching young people about contraception...
...John Wesley promised that those who used contraceptives would lose their souls...
...Condoms reduce "sensitivity," he complains...
...In introducing funding legislation for the centers again this year, Snowe said, "We have proposed a middle ground where individuals, whether pro-life or pro-choice, can meet in support of reaching a positive, important goal...
...And half of them say that they were using no contraceptives at all...
...One anti-condom leader even declared May 13 "Chastity Day" and convened 1,000 students for a rally...
...Representatives of NOW and NARAL become livid at the suggestion that they've given short shrift to contraception...
...ALL considers these methods "abortifacients" because they prevent a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterus...
...by Rita McWilliams On one side of the walkway to a Georgia Avenue clinic less than a mile from the U.S...
...that they would speak up to assuage the anxiety that still clouds our thinking about contraception...
...That's a question Frances Kissling, executive director of the abortion rights group Catholics for a Free Choice (CFC), has had occasion to ask her fellow travelers...
...Yet the explanation NRLC and FRC give for refusing to promote contraception—and that ALL gives for opposing many forms of contraception—is the fear of "the contraceptive culture...
...The seven million or so members of the nation's far-flung pro-life movement claim to be driven to action by one principle: to preserve the new life inside a mother's womb...
...ALL's primary goal is the passage of a constitutional amendment to ban all abortions except those to save the life of the mother (with the stipulation that equal effort be made to save the life of the fetus...
...Confounded by the system, many find it easier to get birth control sent to them from Latin America, where it's cheaper and, astonishingly, there are more choices...
...s also a little disingenuousNRLC has hardly been a leading advocate of contraceptives— yet the link prochoicers forge between abortion and contraception has dealt at least one painful blow to international family planning...
...Yet the number-1.6 million each year—is only part of the story...
...Willy, a 25-year-old parking lot attendant, lives with his girlfriend and their child in a small Alexandria apartment...
...But if the woman wants an abortion because she is unmarried or does not want more children or is too poor to support them—the circumstances under which most abortions take place—slightly less than half of Americans think a legal abortion should be available...
...Yet NRLC is not a single-issue lobby...
...Anti-abortion forces would rather refuse the underprivileged millions of dollars for birth control counseling than allow such advice to include abortion...
...While judging the merit of the high court decision involves more than an opinion on abortion— restricting doctors' ability to advise their patients raises important ethical and constitutional issues—the current controversy reveals something both sides would rather not admit...
...Some local family planning clinics are far too busy to mitigate these individual difficulties and fears...
...Birth control is under fire," she warns darkly, reeling off NOW's recent activities—lobbying the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for improved contraception, lobbying Congress for more federal research funds, etc...
...Of course, every movement has its extremists...
...Pull out," he says...
...they sure won't learn it on the radio or TV, either...
...The absence of the pro-choice movement in contraceptive conflicts has allowed pro-life considerable freedom in setting the terms of the debate—terms that can be misleading...
...Except, of course, when unmarried teenagers are involved...
...D.C...
...rates are now three times as high as those in Canada, which boasts aggressive contraception campaigns...
...It's much tougher, however, to find a TV ad for birth control...
...Contraception, however, "is an entirely different question...
...Rita McWilliams is a Washington writer...
...When D.C.'s hispanic women go to the city public hospital for contraceptive advice, they get it in English, whether they can understand it or not...
...You have to have surgery for that, shrugs Willy...
...It denounces the diaphragm, the condom—"any kind of artificial jam, jelly, anything you want to call it," says Brown—except what she calls "natural child spacing," or what was once known as the rhythm method...
...And make no mistake: To the Catholic hierarchy, anti-abortion is also anti-contraception...
...For its part, the Fund for a Feminist Majority delivered 800 pounds of signatures to Roussel...
...The National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) has no D.C...
...It's about the women who arrive each Saturday morning on clinic doorsteps, wracked with a terrible choice...
...First it's contraceptives in the clinic, then it's sex in the gym, and then it's abortions in the cafeteria...
...The recent Supreme Court decision forbidding family planning organizations using federal money to advise clients on abortion illustrates a truth that has existed quietly ever since Roe v. Wade: the selling out of contraceptives in the battle over women's wombs and fetuses' futures...
...It's nine the same night, and two high schoolers from "Beverly Hills, 90210" bed down in a hotel during the prom...
...We don't have a position on breast cancer or a variety of other medical issues either...
...It is a much more complicated picture than making sure there are condoms in every drug store," says Lisa Kaeser, senior associate for policy analysis at the Guttmacher Institute...
...Besides, the number 1.6 million turns a lot of heads...
...The support of the nation's leading science and health organizations has been carefully cultivated...
...Dixon, as it happens, isn't advocating that...
...It's much tougher, however, to find a TV ad for birth control...
...What with all the differing views about contraception on the right, any policy could reduce the strength of NRLC's 3,000 member-organizations across the nation...
...Brown is the founder and president of the American Life League (ALL), one of the least conciliatory of the anti-abortion groups...
...The networks won't take them—afraid they might "offend the moral and religious sensibilities of viewers," as an NBC executive puts it...
...That's the same rationale more moderate right-tolifers offer for their passivity on contraception—we would, but we're tied up with the bigger battle...
...One of the obvious reasons for advocating contraception is to reduce the incidence of abortion, but, as Frances Kissling of CFC points out, doing that would imply that abortion is "not a morally good thing," thus eroding the argument that abortion should and must be available...
...During the same two decades, the United States developed the artificial heart, co-discovered the AIDS virus, perfected the sex change operation, and made babies on slides...
...The federal government knows, too...
...Granted, recent studies show that clinics in schools are not panaceas for teen pregnancy...
...government over the policy—a suit that it lost before the Supreme Court last month...
...Would pro-choice jeopardize that money—in the face of so much human need—on the abortion principle...
...But remarkably, the leading method of birth control in the United States is once again sterilization...
...In this age of scientific technology, an era in which birth control should be cheap, effective, and widely used, she shouldn't be here in the first place...
...With cable and a clicker, it's possible to watch people having sex day and night...
...Carl Djerassi, a Stanford University chemist who helped develop the pill, observed last year in Science that the U.S...
...According to the memo, PPFA board members condemned the other body (which, despite its name, is a separate organization) for entering into the agreement, and then decided to cut off funding to IPPF-WH altogether...
...But it's not just groups like ALL he's annoyed with...
...Rosemary Dempsey, action vice president for NOW, rejects the notion that her group isn't always on the front lines of contraception...
...Despite all the pro-choice lip service, many clinics are cash- and volunteer-poor...
...Pro-choice groups "get really psyched about the sexiest issues—abortion, RU486," says Lisa Kaeser...
...His girlfriend tried that once, but when the six-month supply ran out, money was short...
...In America, presumably a land of contraceptive plenty, the number of abortions has doubled since Roe v. Wade...
...We can protest against people trying to ban abortion because it's easy," acknowledges Vicky Grand, a young pro-choice activist...
...Yet compare these efforts to the vocal, headlinegrabbing campaigns pro-choice has mobilized on behalf of abortion—or RU486, a pill that produces an abortion in the privacy of one's home...
...Or sometimes—as was the case recently in New York's black churches—the charge is simply genocide: white people trying to stop black teenagers from procreating...
...The NIH last year spent only $8.5 million on the development of new birth control...
...Where was the powerful National Organization for Women (NOW) during the critical skirmish at Ballou...
...To be sure, Planned Parenthood has been advocating contraception for years—launching drives to cut teen pregnancy rates in half by the end of the decade and mandate sex education in every state...
...Such women account for about half of the United States' 1.6 million annual abortions...
...Condom minimum Over the Anacostia River in Southeast D.C., Ballou High School serves one of the city's poorest and most isolated neighborhoods...
...Today, his girlfriend's carrying baby number two...
...Amid so much fear and ignorance, it's taken a deadly disease—not the mere threat of pregnancy, not pro-life or pro-choice activists—to bring the only real advance in the availability of contraception to young people during the eighties...
...You just can't see the enemy...
...For in the interim, ministers and right-to-life activists besieged the school board, wrote The Washington Post, preached from the pulpits, turned out at hearings, and pushed the school system into a complete reverse...
...Similarly, the pro-choice movement could persuade us that legalized abortion is necessary if it worked harder to make it not an act of convenience but a step of last resort...
...But while pro-choice was fighting other battles, a stringent regulatory environment, suits such as the 320,000 claims filed against A. H. Robins for the Dalkon Shield, and the mighty anti-contraception forces virtually ensured that research would have to wait...
...Sex exists for one purpose only, she argues: to initiate life...
...As the press flocked to the scene, pro-lifers invoked the number-4,400 a day— like a mantra...
...It's because they know abortion is readily available," Johnson says...
...Anti-abortion protests have gone further than scuffles on abortion clinic sidewalks...
...That gives pro-lifers an excuse to oppose the measures...
...While surveys indicate that U.S...
...God created us body and soul together," says Helen Alvare, director of campaign planning and information...
...On both sides, there's a headstrong refusal to compromise abortion principles to improve American contraception...
...Focused on fetuses, suction tubes, and coat hangers, we have ignored the needs of millions of women and men...
...It's a very slippery slope—which is why some prochoicers have kept their distance...
...But you don't have to take her word for it...
...Pro-life groups have outyelled pro-choice groups in the boardrooms of the nation's media giants, too...
...Yet when the subject is contraception, knowledge isn't necessarily power...
...chapter, but there's a Virginia affiliate a few miles away, run by Executive Director Jennifer Carley...
...Before contraception takes root in a culture, people have to be familiar with and open to the benefits of postponing pregnancy...
...he simply doesn't consider them an option...
...But sometimes the problem's not apathy...
...The networks won't take them—afraid they might "offend the moral and religious sensitivities of viewers," as Richard Gitter, vice president for advertising standards at NBC, puts it...
...We put the majority of our energy into abortion," explains Jennifer Heitler-Klevans of NOW's Philadelphia affiliate...
...As for birth control pills—they cost $20 a month, not including the cost of the requisite gynecological checkup every six months...
...public clinic, a woman routinely waits four to six weeks...
...While a 10th-grade crack addict can be easily referred by a school nurse to a drug treatment clinic in the District, his sexually active classmate seeking contraception can expect little help...
...If the availability of contraceptives in school clinics matters dramatically today, research will determine the climate of American contraception—and the number of American abortions—long into the next century...
...But there's political irony here, too...
...And why would she, when there's little political pressure to do so...
...Unfortunately, attacks on abortion rights have been so virulent that the focus of our energy has necessarily been to fight them...
...But in this case, one of them is the powerful National Conference of Catholic Bishops, which last year launched a multimillion-dollar anti-abortion campaign with the aid of Hill & Knowlton, one of the most sophisticated PR firms in the country...
...To prove this wanton, careless "culture" exists, NRLC's Johnson points to an Alan Guttmacher Institute study showing that half of all women seeking abortions were using no contraception at all...
...Many see [birth control] as encouraging promiscuity and are against it," he says...
...Until Norplant—which was opposed not just by some right-to-lifers but by the pro-choice National Women's Health Network (they said not enough testing had been done)—no fundamentally new contraceptive methods had been approved for use in the United States since the sixties...
...While European countries press ahead with aggressive contraceptive research and education, contraception in the United States has devolved, since the advent of the pill, from a critical end in itself into a mere accessory in the abortion debate...
...The anti-abortion "counselors" say they want to prevent her from committing an act that will plague her the rest of her life...
...It's clear already that teenagers aren't learning that in American classrooms...
...But more than a million pregnant American women don't want to be...
...Supreme Court, men and women surge forward with full-color photos of aborted fetuses...
...These groups profess to be interested in expanding contraceptives," says Johnson about the pro-choicers, "but they are willing to jeopardize the whole program" just so they can continue to include abortion...
...that they would put aside their differences to make contraception available to teenagers, to teach its proper use...
...It's groups like NOW that he claims have failed to come to his rescue...
...The pro-choice movement "is not making as much of [the contraceptive issue] as it should," she says...
...But when it comes to the plodding school clinic or sex education debates, don't count on them to join the fight...
...We are always using our political clout for both," says Renee Cravens, spokeswoman for the 500,000-member NARAL...
...Blinded to science CFC's Frances Kissling calls the contraceptionversusabortion debate "the conflict in the pro-choice movement today...
...By helping scientists, governments, schools, and companies make contraception safer, more effective, and easier to use, the anti-abortion movement could claim those undecided on the abortion issue, convincing them that it truly cares about and understands women—sexually active, morally complex women— and doesn't just fetishize the lives within their wombs...
...The United States government currently devotes $330 million a year in foreign aid to family planning...
...And while a 10thgrade crack addict can easily be referred by a Ballou nurse to a drug treatment clinic in the city, his sexually active classmate seeking contraception can expect to get little help...
...Unlike ALL and the Catholic Church, the nation's two largest pro-life groups, the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) and the Family Research Council (FRC), don't oppose contraception outright...
...And that's not right-to-life's fault alone...
...It convenes policymakers and scientists to discuss improving contraceptive methods, and its affiliates distribute free or low-cost contraceptives across the land...
...In 1984, after pressure from NRLC and other anti-abortion groups, the Reagan administration decreed that none of that money would be provided to groups that offer abortion counseling or referral...
...The Archbishop of Philadelphia objected...
...Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) and its prochoice supporters may choose to forgo $34 million—and, perhaps, the contraceptives that money would buy for low-income women—instead of adjusting their counseling protocol...
...Mayor Sharon Pratt Dixon is leaning toward a similar policy, which is a good start—but handing out condoms is hardly a replacement for school clinics with professional counseling and instruction...
...If IUDs are literally painful to many women, other methods are simply a pain...
...In fact, only one of the nine companies researching new contraceptives in the seventies is still exploring new technology today...
...As we go to press, it appears that at least one prochoice group, NARAL, has awakened to that political reality, planning its first-ever TV campaign advocating contraception...
...Of course, the highest abortion rates in the world are not in "contraceptive cultures" like Sweden, but in the Soviet Union, where contraceptives are scarce, and Romania, where for years they've been illegal...
...I said if there was better birth control, there would be less need for abortion," Stevens avers...
...For them, the availability of effective contraception doesn't make much difference...
...She never went back to the clinic...
...They have to see contraception, talk about it, understand how putting off motherhood is often crucial to staying in school and getting good jobs...
...Yet instead of praising this abortion preventative, many anti-abortion groups oppose it...
...For an appointment to get contraception from a D.C...
...There have been torchings at dusk and bombings at dawn...
...Yet ALL doesn't find just abortion, the pill, and IUDs morally offensive...
...We don't have much contact with that part of the community," she says...
...A survey of Detroit teenagers a few years ago found that some women relied on high heels when they had sex, believing the pelvic-tilt effect of pumps would make the sperm slip out...
...Both camps on the sidewalk claim they care deeply for this young woman...
...Once you have that mindset and the contraceptives fail, then you can eliminate that problem [the pregnancy] as well...
...Anything that interferes," she summarizes simply, "is a bad thing...
...and Iran are the only places in the world that regressed in contraceptive research during that decade...
...It even threatened to sue the international group if it attempted to raise funds in the U.S...
...We find that a little disingenuous...
...The city's influential black clergy came out passionately against it...
...Most of us can remember our first, mortified visit to the drugstore to buy Trojans...
...Several years ago, concerned school administrators and PTA members tried to start a school clinic that would provide contraception to students...
...Whenever funds for contraception are up for a vote in Congress, prochoice groups insist that money to counsel abortion be provided as well...
...We want women to have a choice of options, so they won't necessarily have to choose abortion...
...ALL's Judie Brown explains, "The contraceptive mentality suggests that man and woman have absolute and total control over their reproductive lives...
...Imagine how many condoms that would've bought in Haiti...
...An August 1985 memo written by an AID official describes how the PPFA decided to punish the International Planned Parenthood Foundation-Western Hemisphere (IPPF-WH) for signing the no-counseling policy, even though abortion is illegal in all the Latin American and Caribbean nations the international group covers...
...Why is this...
...Although ardently opposed to abortion, the FRC "doesn't really get into contraception very much," says Charmaine Yoest, public policy analyst for the influential evangelical group...
...asks a spokesman for D.C...
...Reducing the number of abortions through more effective contraception could reduce the potency of campaigns like these...
...Yet pro-choicers' absence, like that of the right-to-life groups, stems from more than a lack of resources...
...In a scathing report last year, the National Academy of Sciences, observing that current methods are ill-suited to the needs of a huge number of Americans, called for major research into new forms of contraception...
...With contraceptives, "a man and a woman are not coming together completely...
...It is not a right-to-life issue...
...So what do they do...
...They haven't bit much on that because that's not their point...
...We don't have a position on it," echoes Nancy Myers, communications director of the mammoth NRLC...
...That's why NARAL is active on everything from family medical leave to day-care legislation, she says...
...An hour later on "LA Law," Arnie Becker is sleeping with another client, a soontobe divorcee...
...Patricia Schroeder and Olympia Snowe proposed the creation of three new contraception research centers, the project was awarded a paltry $3 million after right-to-life opposed it, charging that the research would involve RU486...
...Though you won't hear it from the principals, one reason for NRLC's silence is politics...
...Perhaps—even if abortion is illegal in the countries in question...
...What is certain is that PPFA diverted some $500,000 it had intended for international programs to sue the U.S...
...Although a staunch supporter of contraceptive measures, the pro-choice movement finds it difficult to actively promote contraceptives as a more attractive option than abortion—for that would effectively underscore the other side's argument...
...But the 259,000 "member families" of ALL have another, less publicized goal: to pull the pill and the IUD, two of the most popular contraceptives in America, from the market...
...This says to me that many women are not using contraceptives as well as they could be, or that the methods themselves are not what we call user-friendly," says Guttmacher's Lisa Kaeser...
...Judie Brown's take is more or less the same...
...He's never heard of Norplant, and nobody he knows uses a diaphragm...
...While the move is clearly a parry in the national abortion counseling debate, it is also a shrewd political gesture...
...But if these groups could mobilize more than 300,000 protesters on Washington's Mall to support abortion rights, why not do the same to expand contraceptive education, availability, and research...
...With cable and a clicker, it's possible to watch people having sex day or night...
...There's all this stuff to worry about—you're not going to do it right, they're going to send a letter to your house with the clinic's name on it, your mother's going to find it," says a young woman who had all the facts but has had two abortions...
...Nowhere, concedes Paula McKenzie, president of D.C...
...The teen pregnancy rate there is the highest in the entire metropolitan area, yet in the eighties not a single public clinic in the area dispensed birth control...
...Especially, it seems, if you're not looking...
...Among the young, the definitions of "contraceptive" can be amazingly creative...
...Others see contraceptive advertising as attempts at sex ed by the network, and they are against that...
...To abort a fetus, whether it's 1 or 45 weeks old, they say, is to murder...
...It's Thursday afternoon at one, and Roman and Isabella on "Days of Our Lives" are making love on the beach...
...That's why right-to-life groups consider the sheer quantity of American abortions a major weapon in their campaign...
...Today, the clinic is open—but there's not a condom or a pillpack in the place...
...For years, 90 countries have been using a steroid injection to prevent pregnancy for six months per shot...
...We primarily deal with abortion," she explains...
...isn't as accessible as we'd like to think...
...In the Philadelphia city schools last month, a plan to provide students with condoms foundered...
...It is, she says, "a crisis situation...
...Yet one reason middle ground—and any legislative headway—are so elusive is that pro-choice groups say access to contraception and abortion are "indivisible" rights of women...
...And scientist Vernon Stevens thinks it's clear which side is winning...
...In 1988, the Guttmacher Institute studied a group of sexually active women who said they didn't want to get pregnant and discovered that 1 in 10 were using no contraception at all...
...We would like to be able to fight more for contraception and family life issues," but beating off restrictive abortion bills is all the chapter can handle...
...Last year, when Reps...
...Though Planned Parenthood led a campaign to land contraceptive ads on TV a few years ago, it apparently didn't bombard the networks with as much mail or as many calls as the right-to-lifers...
...Their point is, 'Irrespective of whether I'm a responsible woman or not, I have the right to abortion.— With no political power or corporate sponsor behind him, Stevens is one of the many contraception casualties of the eighties...
...Pickle-juice douches are a popular spermicide— vinegar and salt, it is believed, kill sperm...
...This year, he'll start testing it in Sweden...
...The pickle-juice prophylactic Much has been made in recent years of studies that show some unwed teenagers want to get pregnant...
...And, indeed, it is beyond doubt that pro-choice groups like these support contraceptives and better reproductive education...
...As a result, the United States today has one of the highest abortion rates in the industrialized world...
...But few young people take the time and trouble to use these regular, more permanent methods of contraception...
...Logic suggests that pro-life and pro-choice activists would hail new technology like Norplant that makes it easier and safer to prevent pregnancy...
...We think it is a personal decision for people, particularly when you are concerned with adults...
...David Andrews, vice president of the PPFA, disputes the memo...
...What's Ballou clinic...
...According to the Philadelphia Inquirer reporter covering the beat, there was not a single press conference or rally supporting the program...
...Daunted by the Ballou case, administrators in neighboring Hyattsville, Maryland, decided not even to raise the issue of contraception when opening a school health clinic there a year later...
...There's moral irony in pro-life's rejection of contraception and in pro-choice's inability to devote more of its resources to promoting it...
...Ortho Pharmaceutical, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson and the sole remaining corporate researcher in the country, says it costs some $230 million to develop a new birth control technology...
...under the "Planned Parenthood" name, the AID memo said...
Vol. 23 • July 1991 • No. 7
