My plea to my fellow evangelical Christians is simple: Stop lying. Stop telling and spreading and pretending to believe lies just because they allow us to pretend we’re “pro-life” while others are, therefore, anti-life.
Bearing false witness against our neighbors is something we were told not to do. It shouldn’t be the heart and soul and center of our identity as “Christians.”
In contrast to that bearing of false witness, here are two women bearing witness and speaking truth. Ears to hear and all that.
Ellen Painter Dollar, “How Having an (Insurance-Covered) IUD is Saving My Life”
The second, and to me more viscerally troubling, trend among some Christians rejoicing in Hobby Lobby’s victory was the characterization of the court’s decision as a dismissal of whiny women who want someone else to pay so they can have lots and lots of sex without worry, because they can have as many abortions-via-contraception as they need.
I can’t believe this point needs to be made, but contraceptives are actually not used solely, or even primarily, by women who want to have lots and lots of sex without getting pregnant. Contraception isn’t a mere “Get Out of Jail Free” card for the promiscuous. It’s a tool that can promote health—physical, psychological, individual, communal, and global. Propagating the idea that medications to halt infections, ameliorate mental illness, and prolong men’s erections are reasonable tools to promote health (and therefore covered by insurance, regardless of your employer’s opinions about the germ theory, the causes of depression, or erections), but contraceptives are a personal choice so that women can give their out-of-control libidos a regular workout without worry is, indeed, an act of aggression toward and dismissal of women.
Contraceptives don’t merely prevent pregnancy for women having lots, or even a little, sex. They support women’s physical, psychological, and emotional health. I’m not just talking about women taking birth control pills for conditions such as polycystic ovary syndrome or painful periods, or women whose circumstances dictate that a pregnancy could kill her or push her family more deeply into dire poverty.
I’m talking about me.
Hännah Ettinger, “The American Dream, Hobby Lobby, Pro-Life Ethics, and Me”
So I looked at that $700 copper IUD covered by the ACA through my insurance, and I said “yes, please” and got it for myself as an autonomy present after my divorce. That little inch of copper says that my future is my own, my body is my own, and I decide when I’m ready for whatever comes next.
And I paid nothing for it. I swear, this has been the biggest boost in my self-confidence and general peace of mind. It was free, and it gives me my power as an adult woman.
Others aren’t so lucky. I know that my IUD isn’t going to cause abortions, because I researched it and educated myself. But the number of conservative Christian women I grew up with whose science education is so lacking that they don’t know that (for example) being on hormonal birth control actually reduces the possibility of a fertilized egg getting sloughed off in menstruation when compared with the natural risk of this occurring without being on birth control of any sort.
And I also know women who weren’t as lucky as I was, whose minimum wage employers kept their hours just below the full time mark in order to not have to pay for their heath care costs, and who couldn’t afford birth control before the ACA and ended up pregnant or unable to treat their endometriosis symptoms or their PMDD and became depressed, bedridden, suicidal, or just plain overworked and exhausted. And, this isn’t just one or two of my friends. This is a large portion of the women I know.
Contraception isn’t just an extra funtimes experimental drug that women sometimes do for kicks when they feel wicked.
Sometimes it’s the difference between freedom and reduced options, between autonomy and wage-slave exhaustion.
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