Buck Still Needs to Qualify Stance on Birth Control

It is now clear that Ken Buck would, if he could, ban at least some forms of birth control, including the pill in at least some forms. But Buck still has not completely clarified his position on birth control. [See the update below for news about Buck's modified stance.]

On August 28, I wrote a post titled, "Yes, Buck's Policies Would 'Ban Common Forms of Birth Control.'" In that post, I quote a spokesperson for Buck's campaign, who erroneously stated that "oral contraceptive pills for women... do not result in killing a fertilized egg." The very citation provided by that spokesperson shows that the pill can do precisely that. Therefore, under Amendment 62, which Buck has endorsed, the pill would be banned.

But Buck offered a more refined position to 9News:

Buck believes life "begins at conception," so birth control methods that don't impact that (i.e. condoms, some forms of the pill) are fine with him. Others that would keep a fertilized egg from implanting like hormone-based birth control methods, some other forms of the pill, IUDs, RU-486 and what's known as the morning-after pill, are not supported by him. (Source: E-mail from Buck spokesman Owen Loftus to 9NEWS, Aug. 26)

So apparently Buck favors some sort of "pill" that is not "hormone-based" and that would not prevent the implantation of a zygote. At this point Buck needs to list which "forms of the pill... are fine with him."

In the section of the new paper by Diana Hsieh and me devoted to birth control, we evaluate Ortho Tri-Cyclen, Trinessa, Mirena, Plan B, and ella. In each case the birth control can prevent implantation of a zygote, according to statements from the manufacturers or the FDA. We quote others who say any form of the pill can do the same.

So if Buck knows about some sort of birth control pill that acts differently and does not ever prevent the implantation of a zygote, the onus is on him to name it. Otherwise, I'll regard it as the Unicorn Pill, something that sounds good in Buck's imagination but that does not actually exist. Until he can name the pill he has in mind -- and I have the chance to evaluate it -- Buck should state forthrightly and without qualification that he wants to ban the birth control pill.

September 8 Update: In a telephone interview yesterday, Buck spokesman Owen Loftus was unable to name a single brand of pill that never prevents implantation. He initially claimed that the "combination" pill fits, but then I verified that the types of pill that I've already researched are "combination" pills that can prevent implantation. He also offered me two additional citations -- Planned Parenthood and Wikipedia -- each of which states the pill can prevent implantation (though Wikipedia notes the matter is controversial). At any rate, neither of those sources is as reliable as the ones Diana Hsieh and I cite in our paper on the "personhood" movement, in the section, "Bans of Common Birth Control Methods."

September 19 Update: The Denver Post reports that Buck has changed his position, saying he will vote against Amendment 62 and that he does not favor outlawing the birth control pill.

This article originally was published at Free Colorado.

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Yes, Buck's Policies Would 'Ban Common Forms of Birth Control'

As reported by Michael Sandoval for National Review Online, Ken Buck's campaign has responded to Senator Bennet's attack ad. It's not clear to me who wrote the text that Sandoval quotes; it uses first-person pronouns while referring to "Ken Buck" in the third-person. Nevertheless, I will consider the text to constitute Buck's approved policy statement.

Neither Sandoval nor Buck deny that Buck wants to ban abortion even in cases of rape and incest. What is at issue is Buck's views on birth control. Here is the relevant text from Sandoval's article:

'Buck wants to ban common forms of birth control.'

This is a lie. It is difficult to understand where this lie comes from. It may come from Ken's position that life begins at conception. However, the 'common forms of birth control' -- presumably, condoms for men and oral contraceptive pills for women -- do not result in killing a fertilized egg. I am not a doctor, but a Google search brought up this hit about how female oral contraceptives work:

http://womenshealth.about.com/od/thepill/f/howpillworks.htm

Buck is either disingenuous on the issue or else profoundly confused.

As I have reported, Buck endorsed the "personhood" measure, now slated as Amendment 62 for this fall's ballot.

My source was the "Christian Family Alliance of Colorado," which reports on its web page that Buck supports the "personhood" initiative. If for some reason this is mistaken, the Buck should correct the record immediately. I personally would be thrilled to hear that Buck in fact denounces rather than endorses Amendment 62; unfortunately, I don't think that's actually the case.

Nobody thinks Amendment 62 would ban condoms; that's just a diversion. However, according to the sponsors of Amendment 62, the measure certainly would ban any form of birth control that could damage a zygote, and the birth control pill certainly qualifies, as I have noted. Indeed, the pill that my wife took until recently says on its prescription information that it can act by "making it difficult for a fertilized egg to attach to the lining of the womb (implantation)."

Indeed, if we look at the very citation provided by Buck's campaign, it states that, with the pill, "The lining of the uterus is also affected in a way that prevents fertilized eggs from implanting into the wall of the uterus."

Assuming that Buck in fact endorses Amendment 62, then he in fact wants to ban the birth control pill, IUD, and "morning after" drugs. Either that, or Buck lacks the integrity to own up to the consequences of his endorsements. Which is it, Ken?

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The War on Birth Control

I recently found this 2006 Ayn Rand Institute op-ed by Keith Lockitch on the deeply anti-sex and anti-pleasure ideology underlying the religious right's increasing opposition to birth control. While we might have won some recent battles, the war for our political freedoms against the theocrats is ongoing. So a reminder of what is at stake and why is quite appropriate.

The Conservatives' War on Birth Control
By Keith Lockitch (September 19, 2006)

Religious conservatives are increasingly opposing birth control. The Bush administration has shifted funding from sex education endorsing condoms to programs preaching "abstinence only." And Bush F.D.A. appointees spent three years blocking nonprescription use of the "morning after" pill, despite overwhelming evidence of its safety. Shockingly, there has been an increasing number of Christian pharmacists refusing to fill contraceptive prescriptions--in some cases even for ordinary birth control pills for married women. What is behind this disturbing hostility to reproductive freedom?

Religious conservatives insist that their growing opposition to contraception is not the product of some sort of puritan, anti-sex agenda. What they are concerned about, they claim, is irresponsible sexual indulgence. They decry what they see as a culture of mindless promiscuity spawned by the advent of effective and easily available birth control.

But blaming birth control for the irresponsible actions of those who misuse it is like blaming Sudafed for crystal meth addiction. Like any other technology, contraception is a tool that can be used rationally or abused--and used properly it enables people to be more responsible about sex. It is bizarre to crusade against irresponsible sexuality by crusading for the renunciation of responsibility: the conscious, deliberate rejection of rational family planning in favor of reproductive roulette. Clearly, there is something deeper underlying the growing antagonism to birth control.

It is significant that in opposing contraception, conservatives declare that sex must be inextricably tied to reproduction--that it is morally wrong to pursue sexual pleasure while deliberately preventing pregnancy. "To demand sexual pleasure without openness to children is to violate a sacred trust," writes Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. But this implies a certain hostility to sexual pleasure, as such: not its irrational, promiscuous pursuit, but the very act of enjoying sex as something separate from reproduction. What explains such hostility?

Consider that sexual desire is a response to personal values. For a rational person, it is not a desire for mindless, indiscriminate indulgence, but a feeling that results from the embodiment in one's lover of one's highest, most important values. For a couple in a serious, committed, romantic relationship, sex is a celebration of their love--an expression, in the form of intense physical pleasure, of the joy that each partner derives from the other.

But such joy is a selfish pleasure--a rationally selfish pleasure. It is a pleasure that people pursue for the sake of their own enjoyment and happiness, whether they choose to have children or not. And this, fundamentally, is what religious conservatives have against it.

Virtue, according to Christianity, consists of sacrificing one's desires and goals in the name of fulfilling one's duties to God. Sex, on this premise, is at best a necessary evil--a sinful act, justifiable only by the duty to procreate. To deliberately prevent pregnancy by using birth control is to assert one's right to enjoy sex purely for its own sake--not as a means to procreation, but purely as an end in itself. And this is what conservatives find unacceptable. What they object to is that a couple using birth control is placing their own, personal happiness above obedience to religion. They object to contraception not despite the fact that it removes the fear of unwanted pregnancy, but precisely because it removes that fear.

To proclaim categorically, as Mohler does, that "every marriage must be open to the gift of children" is to demand that a couple sacrifice their own dreams and long-range goals to an alleged duty to "be fruitful and multiply." Even a couple who wants to have children must, on this premise, do so out of submission to divine will--not because they value children as a source of personal joy. The rejection of birth control is the demand that couples surrender the power--crucial to their own happiness in life--of choosing when, or whether, to have children, and instead allow themselves to be reduced, by means of their healthy sexual desires, to the role of stock farm animals, breeding uncontrollably.

Though they claim their intention is not to condemn sexuality as such, but merely its indiscriminate pursuit, religious conservatives are in fact opposed to sexual happiness. They are opposed to the fact that sex is an exalted pleasure that people pursue as an end in itself. Their war on contraception is not a war against the alleged excesses of the "birth control revolution"--it is a declaration of war against the pursuit of happiness.

Keith Lockitch, PhD in physics, is a fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, Calif. The Institute promotes Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand--author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.

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Vatican Cites Environmentalist Objections to the Pill

Another news item of interest from the iFeminists news feed:

Vatican newspaper slams 'the pill'
January 4, 2009

The contraceptive pill is polluting the environment and is in part responsible for male infertility, a report in the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano said on Saturday.

The pill "has for some years had devastating effects on the environment by releasing tonnes of hormones into nature" through female urine, said Pedro Jose Maria Simon Castellvi, president of the International Federation of Catholic Medical Associations, in the report. "We have sufficient evidence to state that a non-negligible cause of male infertility in the West is the environmental pollution caused by the pill," he said, without elaborating further. "We are faced with a clear anti-environmental effect which demands more explanation on the part of the manufacturers," added Castellvi.

The article was promptly dismissed by several organisations. "Once metabolised, the hormones contained in oral contraceptives no longer have any of the characteristic effects of feminine hormones," said Gianbenedetto Melis, vice-president of a contraceptive research association, quoted by the ANSA news agency. The hormones contained in the pill such as oestrogen "are present everywhere... in plastic, in disinfectants, in meat that we eat," added Flavia Franconi, of the Society of Italian Pharmacology. ...

The alliance between capitalism and religion in the 20th century in America was artifact of the rise of atheistic communism. It's not a sustainable union: a religious worldview cannot ground the rights of the individual to pursue his own happy life by his own rational judgment as required by capitalism. (On that point, see Ayn Rand's essay "Faith and Force" in Philosophy: Who Needs It.) More particularly, the Christian scriptures preach disdain for this world, blind obedience to the whims of God, abject sacrifice for the sake of the poor and weak, acceptance of sin, the positive value of suffering, and the moral corruption of wealth. A person who takes those values seriously cannot preach or practice capitalism. (See this LTE and this one.)

Consequently, I'm not surprised to see supposedly "conservative" religious institutions abandon their marginal respect for individual rights in favor of statist causes like the welfare states and environmentalism. Of course, the Catholic Church has never been a defender of individual rights, particularly not reproductive rights. But its embrace of environmentalist arguments to further that end is something new -- and ominous.

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Conflating Birth Control and Abortion, Again

Here's a birth control case to keep on the radar:

The Illinois Supreme Court last month gave pro-life pharmacists a victory when it determined that they can proceed with their lawsuit seeking to overturn a mandate Gov. Rod Blagojevich put in place. The governor's order makes them fill all prescriptions, including those for the morning after pill. The pharmacists objected to being forced to fill orders for the drug on both moral and religious grounds and because the Plan B drug can sometimes cause an abortion. The state's high court said the religious objections of pro-life health professionals must be considered by the Illinois courts and sent the case back to the trial court.

(I found this story via the ever-useful iFeminists.net news service.)

By any rational definition, pregnancy begins with the implantation of the fertilized egg in the uterine wall, not fertilization. That's because the significant biological changes to the woman associated with pregnancy begin with implantation, not fertilization. Moreover, starting pregnancy at fertilization would have bizarre implications. For example, a woman undergoing IVF would be pregnant while her fertilized egg remained in the lab, before it was ever implanted in her womb. So pregnancy does begin at implantation, and any method of preventing that implantation is rightly regarded as birth control, not abortion.

Nonetheless, in a free society, pharmacists should have the right to refuse to fill prescriptions that violate their moral principles -- whether those principles are right or wrong. They should not be required by law to become the slave of anyone with a script. Correspondingly, pharmacies should not be held in thrall to the whims of their pharmacists: they should have the absolute right to fire a pharmacist who refuses to fill a prescription.

Tom Bowden of the Ayn Rand Institute offers a similar view in commenting on the Bush administration's attempt to shield anti-abortion and anti-contraceptive doctors from being fired for refusing to deliver such services this past summer. He writes:

This is the kind of political infighting that's inevitable when doctors, hospitals, and patients are denied freedom of contract. Such moral questions have no place in the political arena. Instead, the law should recognize each individual's right to deal, or refuse to deal, with others on a voluntary basis.

For example, a doctor has the right to refuse an employment offer from a Catholic hospital that forbids contraceptives and abortions. But if he takes the job, he has no right to force the hospital to abandon its religious taboos and allow him to perform abortions. Likewise, a hospital has the right to hire only those doctors willing to prescribe contraception and provide abortions. If one of those doctors refuses to perform such services on moral grounds, he must take the contractual consequences.

Patients have the same rights as doctors and hospitals to set their own terms of trade. A pregnant woman contemplating abortion has the right to seek treatment at a hospital whose doctors are unencumbered by religious superstitions about ensoulment at conception. But if that hospital denies her admission, she has no right to demand that the Catholic hospital down the street abort her fetus.

The correct path out of the 'conscience controversy' over abortions and contraceptives is not to adopt new regulations creating 'provider conscience rights.' The solution is for government to recognize and protect the individual rights of all participants in the health-care system. Doctors, hospitals, and patients should be allowed to deal with each other by voluntary agreement, with government's only role to enforce contracts and prevent fraud.

You can find more on that particular federal-level controversy in this PWG post.

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Every Sperm is Sacred, Every Egg Divine

Evangelical Christian in several states have tried to get a "personhood" amendment on the ballot. Colorado is the first state where this effort have been successful. Colorado's Amendment 48 would grant "inalienable rights, equality of justice, and due process of law" to a fertilized egg.

"The Coalition for a Secular Government" has produced an excellent position paper written by Ari Armstrong and Diana Hseih that describes in detail why this amendment is wrong, immoral, impractical and disastrous.

But to highlight how absurd this amendment really is, it is necessary to take the next step in line with religious belief: We must go further back in the reproductive process and grant full rights to sperm and eggs. After all, they are the necessary and sufficient prerequisites for creating a human life.

The Catholic Church has unequivocally established the doctrine for this idea. In Pope Paul IV's 1968 Encyclical Letter on the Regulation of Birth, he spells out that married couples may not use any form of artificial means to control their fertility, and are permitted only to avoid pregnancy by chaste refrain from sexual intercourse.

He explains that it is "natural law" from the will of God that regulates reproduction: "The fact is, as experience shows, that new life is not the result of each and every act of sexual intercourse. God has wisely ordered laws of nature and the incidence of fertility in such a way that successive births are already naturally spaced through the inherent operation of these laws."

The Church commands that the "...exercise of responsible parenthood requires that husband and wife, keeping a right order priorities, recognize their own duties toward God, themselves, their families and human society... From this it follows that they are not free to act as they choose in the service of transmitting life, as if it were wholly up to them to decide what is the right course to follow."

So, not only is it a sin for couples to control their fertility by conscious choice, they must be open to the church teaching that "...each and every marital act must of necessity retain its intrinsic relationship to the procreation of human life." That is: every sperm and every egg is sacred, and humans must not violate the natural law of God in any way that could prevent a pregnancy.

On the basis of this doctrine, the Church speaks to governments to enforce this: "And now We wish to speak to rulers of nations... The family is the primary unit in the state; do not tolerate any legislation which would introduce into the family those practices which are opposed to the natural law of God."

In keeping with this doctrine, the Church speaks to medical scientists: "It is supremely desirable...that medical science should by the study of natural rhythms succeed in determining a sufficiently secure basis for the chaste limitation of offspring."

And the Church speaks to doctors and nurses: "Likewise we hold in the highest esteem those doctors and members of the nursing profession... when married couples ask for their advice, they may be in a position to give them right counsel and to point them in the proper direction."

Colorado for Equal Rights would be wrong according to the Catholic Church ruling by promoting rights for a fertilized egg. The Evangelicals should push for granting rights to eggs and sperm in compliance with "natural law."

And if the Catholic Church ruled much of the world (like they used to), the government, the scientists and the medical professionals would be obligated to enforce Church law.

Is this the world you want? Do you value the freedom of our secular society to make private choices about your fertility and sexual relations with your spouse?

This is one of the reasons why we have the Separation of Church and State as explicitly stated in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Religion enmeshed with politics leads to tyranny. The church--whether it be the Catholic Church or politically-active Evangelical Christians--is nothing more than certain people gaining power over others to control our most personal life decisions according to their religious beliefs.

They have no right to do that. And as free citizens of a secular, reason-based society, we must make sure that they don't.

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Federal Ambiguity on Abortion Vs. Contraception

William Saletan of Slate has recently posted a couple of informative updates on the Bush administration's attempt (or lack thereof) to define abortion.

The context is the proposed new law that would grant special protections for religious health care workers who chose not to provide abortion care or information to patients out of reasons of "conscience". In effect, the new law would forbid employers from firing such workers and enforce this by threatening the employer with loss of federal funding.

Leaving apart the fact that such issues should be settled by private contract (as nicely argued by Thomas Bowden of the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights in their recent press release, "Let Doctors Protect Conscience by Contract"), this proposed law has spawned a controversy over what exactly constitutes an "abortion" in the eyes of the federal government.

As Saletan documents in his first piece from 8/28/2008, "Contraceptive Fudge", the initial definition was:

...[A]ny of the various procedures -- including the prescription, dispensing and administration of any drug or the performance of any procedure or any other action -- that results in the termination of the life of a human being in utero between conception and natural birth, whether before or after implantation

However, this was dropped after protest from physicians and reproductive rights advocates who correctly noted that this would include some forms of birth control that are not generally regarded as "abortion" -- including IUDs and sometimes birth control pills.

Saletan also points out that a number of religious advocacy groups have already argued that "hormonal contraception is abortion", including Pharmacists for Life International, Christian Legal Society, and Concerned Women for America, and that the current definition still leaves the door open for this interpretation.

When others have asked Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt to clarify this point, he has been cagey. In Saleton's second piece from 8/29/2008, "Contraceptive Fudge: Addendum", he notes the following statement by Leavitt:

But when pressed about whether the regulation would protect health-care workers who consider birth control pills, Plan B and other forms of contraception to be equivalent to abortion, Leavitt said: "This regulation does not seek to resolve any ambiguity in that area. It focuses on abortion and focuses on physicians' conscience in relation to that."

Secretary Leavitt is trying to have it both ways. While claiming this would not "change a patient's right to a legal procedure", his deliberate characterization of this issue as one of "ambiguity" is leaving the door open for the conflation of popular forms of birth control with abortion, and thus preparing the way for future restrictions of birth control in the name of restricting abortion.

Saletan also explicitly supports the private contract approach to the "conscience" issue, and I applaud his principled stance:

As a pharmacist, you have every right to refuse to fill contraceptive prescriptions. But your customers have every right to boycott your store, and your employer has every right to fire you. If you don't like your employer's policy, open your own pharmacy.

He also notes that federal government is soliciting citizens' opinions on this issue. You can e-mail them at: consciencecomment@hhs.gov.

Here's a slightly edited version of the comment I sent them:

The US government needs to be completely clear and unambiguous as to whether it regards standard forms of contraception such as birth control pills and IUDs as forms of "abortion", if they result in the expulsion of an egg that has already been fertilized but not yet undergone implantation.

Rather than fudging this issue and calling it an "ambiguity", it must let practicing physicians such as myself know whether restrictions on abortion will also entail restrictions on these other forms of contraception.

If the Bush administration wants to call those "abortions", then please be up front about it and say so. If the administration does not consider those to be "abortions", then say so and clear the air. To straddle the fence does a grave disservice to millions of men and women, and also leads to the concern that there is a hidden agenda amongst some in the government to also include restrictions on these forms of birth control when they propose future restrictions on abortions.

Paul Hsieh, MD

You too can let the Feds know what you think!

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Breast-Feeding Kills Babies?

Recently, a draft proposal by the Health and Human Services to change the standard definition of pregnancy was leaked to the press. If implemented, the proposal would alter the definition of pregnancy so that it would start with fertilization of the egg, not with the implantation of the embryo in the womb, as in the medical understanding of pregnancy. The change is a special concession to the religious zealots who believe that a fertilized egg is a human person: it would allow them to deny perfectly legal medical services to sometimes-desperate women, despite tax funding, under the false banner of religious freedom.

I sent the following letter to the editor to the Wall Street Journal in response to that news about two weeks ago. Since I don't think it will be published, I'll reproduce it here:

The Bush Administration's attempt to define conception as the start of pregnancy rather than implantation -- thereby classifying the birth control pill as abortion -- is an ominous sign for reproductive freedom in America ("Treating the Pill as Abortion, Draft Regulation Stirs Debate," Jul 31). If adopted, that standard would ensure that any future ban on abortion would apply equally to the birth control pill. Millions of women would be cut off from their preferred method of preventing unwanted pregnancy.

Even worse, the principle underlying this rule would justify banning all contraception. The religious right's new-found opposition to birth control methods that prevent implantation shows that they regard all women as obliged to make their bodies hospitable to pregnancy. God's will, not human reason and choice, must govern the creation of new life. By that vicious principle, all birth control, from condoms to sterilization, must be banned as defiance of God's will.

If that doesn't show contempt for human life, then nothing does.

I've seen quite a few good responses to the proposed rule change, but my favorite by far is the fantastic satire William Saletan dishes out in Slate. The subtitle encapsulates the essay perfectly: "The pro-life case against birth control, nursing, and exercise." I highly recommend it.

Also, Bloomberg columnist Ann Woolner also makes the following astute observations:

Why call contraception abortion? It's not as if anti-abortionists can stop either one of them.

But while waiting for the Supreme Court to strike down Roe v. Wade, they've been persuading state legislatures and Congress to restrict abortions in every imaginable way, making it as difficult as possible for women to get them.

Now they want to make it just as hard to get contraception.

Contraception as most women practice it is part of the "culture of death," declared Susan Orr, whom President George W. Bush put in charge of the Office of Population Affairs.

The Religious Right does not merely wish to prevent women from terminating unwanted pregnancies. They want to prevent women from using the most effective means, apart from sterilization, of preventing unwanted pregnancies.

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