The Flawed Religion of Anti-Choice and Anti-Contraception Politics

Every sperm is sacred, goes the old Monty Python song, but it might well be the new motto of the Republican Party in 2011.  Since their victory in 2010 midterms, Republican politicians (with a few Democratic collaborators) have launched a dizzying array of ever-more retrogressive attacks on reproductive rights – 351 bills at State and Federal level already this year reports Time.  While religiously inflected anti-abortion “pro-life” politics have long been a feature of American politics, what has marked the more recent movements is an intensified push towards defining personhood right from the moment of conception, and an explicit attack on the right to contraception as well as abortion.  Ironically given the Christian roots of this movement, the theological implications of these twin moves can themselves be considered irreligious.

In Ohio, there is a new bill attempting to re-define life as the moment in which the fetus has a heartbeat–as early as 18 days.  As Mother Jones reports, “attacking first-trimester pregnancies is important for anti-abortion activists because 88% of all abortions occur before 12 weeks gestation.”  Hammering the point home, a pro-life stunt saw a fetus “testify” as a legislative witness before the House Health Committee (though amusingly, the heartbeat was difficult to find–the fetus, it seems, took the fifth).  Still, the message is coming through loud and clear–from conception, a fetus is a person.
The vast majority of conceptions naturally do not make it to term, yet even miscarriage has been put under the microscope this year, with Georgia senator Bobby Franklin putting forth a bill demanding that women (and other uterus-having transgender people) be put under investigation if they miscarry.  This being an internet age, a tumblr entitled “Unsolved Hysteries” has appeared in response with women proffering the proof of their periods and asking if they have committed a crime.  The move to “protect” the fetus–also apparent in “justifiable homicide” bills in Nebraska and Iowa to allow killing in the name of the fetus–brings with it a co-commital silence on the health and well-being of the actual person carrying the fetus.

Yet anti-choice ideologies stray into dangerous, perhaps even idolatrous, waters.  The medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas argued that God was “being itself,” that he “lacks potentiality.”  In contrast, the fetus is itself pure potentiality, and we forget all too the riskiness of carrying a child, the work of pregnancy, and instead fix the fetus with a certainty and lack of potentiality that mirrors the divine.  As Ta-Nehisi Coates put it in a moving post at The Atlantic:

For reasons beyond me, childbirth–in the popular American mind–is swaddled in gossamer, gift-wrap, and icing. Beneath the pastel Hallmark cards and baby showers, behind the flowers, lies a truth encoded, still, in our wording, but given only minimal respect–the charge of shepherding life is labor. It’s work. And you need only look to the immediate past, or you need only look around the world, or you need only come close to losing the love of your small, young life to understand a correlating truth–pregnancy is potentially lethal work.

This recent movement has extended well past attacks on abortion into contraception.  Republicans have sought to completely defund Title X, a program that fund 4600 centers for non-abortion services like contraception for 5 million people. As NARAL President Nancy Keenan put it, “they now want to deny funding for birth control, even though that’s the best way to prevent unintended pregnancy. Americans will not stand for this blatant hypocrisy.”

Hypocrisy or no, the movement against contraception is certainly predictable when seen through a religious frame.  Most notably, the Catholic Church has historically been opposed to contraception, arguing that every sex act (confined only to married heterosexuals) should be potentially reproductive.  As a 1997 missive from the Pontifical Council For the Family put it, “The Church has always taught the intrinsic evil of contraception, that is, of every marital act intentionally rendered unfruitful.” The further recommendation of “conjugal chastity” for those married heterosexuals is sure to be a popular one if applied to the general population (and about as effective as abstinence-only sex education).
Yet fetus personhood bills erase the work of pregnancy, the nutrients delivered, the strain on a person’s body and life–instead opting for a miraculous moment of conception that owes more to Aquinas’s essentialist God than any embodied experience of pregnancy.  As philosopher of religion John D. Caputo has put it in his important work The Weakness of God, a Christianity without risk is one that does not understand its own traditions. Caputo relates a wonderful story in the Talmud in which God creates the world twenty six times and fails, and on the twenty-seventh successful attempt says “let us hope this time it works.” For God as much as us, creation is a beautiful risk. Though the theology of certainty is propagated by the Christian Right, the deification of the fetus (but not the child) is itself profoundly idolatrous.

By contrast, the Anglican/Episcopalian church has recognized contraception as theologically acceptable since the Lambeth conference in the 1930s, where it agreed that “other methods (of contraception) may be used, provided that this is done in the light of Christian principles.”  Where the Catholic position argues that contraception is intrinsically anti-Christian, the Anglican position takes a broader view of what Christian practice may be.  The Catholic Church takes the position that sex without marriage is instrumentalising, that without the sacrament of marriage human relationships are stripped of their true dignity.  Yet to make sex solely about reproduction as anti-choice bills undoubtedly do is to similarly instrumentalise sexual relationships, indeed to rob the sexual relation of its potentially transcendental qualities.

To put it bluntly, animals fuck to prolong the species, but only human have the capacity to turn that action into love, and it is precisely by controlling our reproductive ability that we preserve the possibility for sex to be something more than pure animality, a way to glorify our love and God’s creation.

For a couple to have a wanted, loved child is undoubtedly a beautiful thing.  But to make that necessary for all potentially reproductive couples at all times is equally undoubtedly monstrous, a moral and religious error.