Sex

They Are Coming for Your Birth Control: End Planned Parenthood and Start the Conversions!

Why should birth control be impossible to access? Because God.

The Cleaver Family, from popular late 1950s-early 1960s TV show "Leave It To Beaver." (The Tangential)

Note: Think that anti-choice politicians and activists aren’t trying to outlaw contraception? Think again. Follow along in an ongoing series that proves beyond a doubt that they really are coming for your birth control.

Remember the fifties? Ah yes, the golden age of the Cleaver family, where Father knew best and a naughty girl got shipped off for a year when she accidentally got pregnant? Well, we can go back there, or so say anti-choice advocates. The linchpin? All we have to do is defund Planned Parenthood first.

Yes, Chuck Donovan of the Charlotte Lozier Institute (the new group setting itself up as the anti-Guttmacher Institute), explains in his own special way that in today’s society, teens can get access to the morning after pill, whereas in the past “the typical ‘night before’ for America’s 14-year-olds was homework, tea, and toast, and a prayer before bedtime.”

Still, we can return to the glory days of yore, and a time where Planned Parenthood wasn’t destroying “any alternative vision of mother-and-child health.” Religious and deception crisis pregnancy centers are the key.

Pregnancy resource centers are just now entering their heyday. The number of medically oriented centers is increasing yearly, and the nation’s pregnancy networks are devoting new attention to underserved communities where abortion rates are highest. African Americans, who bear the deepest wounds of abortion in the United States, continue to take up leadership roles and to challenge established organizations like the NAACP that have accepted anti-life alliances.  

As a new study by my own organization, the Lozier Institute in Washington, D.C. confirms, pro-life pregnancy centers in the United States raise substantially more private funding than Planned Parenthood clinics do. Cut off the federal-state gravy train to the nation’s largest abortion provider, and Planned Parenthood’s appeal will suddenly be revealed as remarkably limited. The health care of the future will deal with the well-being of the whole woman and the potential of the whole girl, including her relationships with family, church, and community.

Cut off funding to prevent pregnancy, increase funding for centers that “help” women and girls give birth to the babies that they didn’t want to have—and get her back to the church, too! What a fantastic plan! After all, if she didn’t want to have a baby on her own, she shouldn’t have had dirty, immoral sex that put her soul in danger in the first place. Oh, and if that sex was with her husband but for some reason they didn’t want more children well, obviously God thought otherwise and thinks an unwanted child is the perfect means to bring the couple back into the fold.

Sadly, it’s a tactic that could work—at least, when it comes to the moving of funds. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker entered his term as governor by stripping state funding from Planned Parenthood as a “budgetary measure” despite the fact that experts asserted it would cost the state more in the long run in unintended pregnancies. Now, the city of Madison has an excellent new plan to deal with the inevitable pregnancies: provide hundreds of thousands of dollars in low interest loans to CareNet to build more housing for those pregnant women, an apartment complex to supplement a maternity home that they already run.

Care Net claims that living in their housing will not mean the women will be forced to undergo any religious litmus tests for either initial or continued residence.

Please be assured that although we self-identify as a Christian ministry, we have not and will never impose a religious requirement on any client seeking our services,” wrote Liz Osborn, the group’s executive director. “Likewise, no tenant at Eagle Harbor Apartments will be required to have any religious preference, including those tenants in the supported units.”

Osborn also wrote that Care Net has “both an internal policy and an obligation stemming from our affiliation with three national organizations that ‘clients are served without regard to age, race, income, nationality, religious affiliation, disability or other arbitrary circumstances.'”

As we’ve seen in the past, Care Net’s claims and reality don’t always meet.

Religious anti-choicers are focused on “stopping the gravy train” so they have more money freed up for their own agendas. It’s an agenda that they have made repeatedly clear involves pregnant teens and women who have no options but to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term with their assistance, all to give them a chance to bring these women to God.

But first, in order to make that happen, they are coming for your birth control.