Rhetoric Race and Religion
In my relentless pursuit of scaring off as many readers as possible this year, I’m blogging today about contraception.
I try not to put too much pressure on myself to speak up as the token “Christian feminist” on issues like these, but after reading multiple blog posts and articles this week from Christian men about women and contraception, I decided to add my two cents as a pro-life woman of faith who supports affordable access to birth control for women. Just to offer another perspective.
(This is obviously an issue in which people of strong faith disagree, so let’s treat one another with respect as we engage, shall we?)
The topic has been in the news lately for a lot of reasons—from the anniversary of Roe vs. Wade last week, to Hobby Lobby’s challenge of the HHS mandate last year. Mike Huckabee made the news days ago for tackling the topic in a speech to the Republican Nation Committee, where he suggested that women who expect health insurance to cover birth control pills as it would any other prescription believe the Democrat-manufactured lie that they are “helpless without Uncle Sugar coming in and providing for them a prescription each month for birth control because they cannot control their libido or their reproductive system without the help of government.”
His comments may strike some as too outrageous to engage, but I think they reflect widely-held (thought not typically as crudely-stated) sentiments regarding birth control, sentiments I’ve seen expressed more and more often by fellow Christians in recent years. And I think they reflect a problem of privilege that plagues conversations around contraception, infusing them with misinformation and unhelpful assumptions.
Read the rest here
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In