Challenging Religious Bigotry In The Birth Control Debate

By Katherine M Acosta
Countercurrents.org

In 1975, country legend Loretta Lynn released a song with these lyrics:

All these years I’ve stayed at home
While you had all your fun
And every year that’s gone by
Another baby’s come
There’s gonna be some changes made
Right here on nursery hill
You’ve set this chicken your last time
‘Cause now I’ve got the pill.

She was denounced in pulpits throughout the country and the song was banned from many radio stations. It wasn’t the first time a song of hers had been banned. A few years earlier, her hit song, Rated X , about the double standard applied to divorced women, sparked similar outrage from the usual suspects, and was also banned. Lynn didn’t set out to make big political statements. She simply wrote from her life experience and the raw truths she expressed resonated with her many fans. In a 2010 interview with Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air, Lynn remarked that she recorded a lot of songs that tell it like it is. “I guess,” she mused, “we’re not to talk about the way it is.”

Lynn had her first child when she was just 14 years old, and four children by the time she was19. By the time she recorded “The Pill” she’d had six children, (including a set of twins), and three miscarriages. She never took birth control pills, but would have, she told Terry Gross, had they been available to her. “It’s hard for a woman,” she said, “to have so many kids.”

I think of her now as I struggle to respond to the birth control issue. I am an intensely private person, not one of those writers who regularly examine and analyze their personal lives for public consumption. But the attack on birth control and women who use it, (nearly all women, during their child-bearing years), is deeply personal. The insults Rush Limbaugh, Patricia Heaton , and others have heaped on Sandra Fluke, hit me like blows to the stomach. The attacks politicians make on insurance coverage of birth control for perceived political gain – (Who are the real prostitutes here?) – similarly hit me where I live. Is there any better illustration of the maxim the personal is political ?
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