Today is the 40th anniversary of the Vatican's controversial encyclical, Humanae Vitae, which defined the Church's opposition to contraceptive use. It is well known to be a terrifically unpopular decision among the laity (when polled 6 years after the encyclical 83% of Catholics disagreed with Humanae Vitae.) What's lesser known is how unpopular it was even among the clergy. Cardinal Leo Joseph Suenens, a moderator of the ecumenical council at the time, summarized the perspective shared by many of the ordained and cautioned the Church against prohibiting contraception, stating, "I beg you my brothers let us avoid another Galileo affair, one is enough for the Church."

The history leading up to the decision is pretty fascinating. Catholics for a Free Choice recently released its report, Truth and Consequence, which examines the process the Pope took when considering the issue and the impact the encyclical has had since it's release in 1968.

The report details how the encyclical harmed the church immeasurably, establishing a doctrine that the faithful have since diligently ignored thereby creating two opposing value systems within the Church: the one congregants were lectured to about on Sunday morning and the one they practiced. Quoting Father Charles Curran, who battled the Vatican for years about its stance on birth control before being forced from his teaching position at Catholic University, the report explains,

"According to Curran, 'Humanae Vitae hit like a storm that
dashed the hopes of millions of Catholics. All the hope
and enthusiasm, all the sense that things had changed
and that the birth control teaching could change, were
crushed by the document,' he recalls today. Beyond the
sense of betrayal felt by many who had invested their
energy and hopes in transforming the church, Humanae
Vitae also altered the relationship between Catholics and
the hierarchy, says Curran. 'In a sense, there was one pos-
itive outcome from the encyclical in that Catholics real-
ized that they could disagree with the pope on
nonfallible issues and still remain a good Catholic. How-
ever, the negative outcome was that it created a lot of
tension regarding the credibility of the church,' he says.
Statistics on papal authority bear Curran out. In 1963, 70
percent of Catholics believed that the pope derived his
teaching authority from Christ through St. Peter; by 1974,
only 42 percent believed the same thing. By 1999,
nearly 80 percent of Catholics believed that a person
could be a good Catholic without obeying the church hi-
erarchy’s teaching on birth control."

When John Paul II became Pope, he launched a campaign targeting clergy who spoke out against the encyclical, defrocking the most vocal and rewarding only those who did not question the correctness of the anti-family planning doctrine. Today, dissenters are still not permitted within the the highest orders of the Church. It is here that the Church has done itself the greatest disservice--promoting sycophants instead of moral leaders. It's no wonder the Church would spend the next few decades in the throws a sex abuse scandal of catastrophic proportions. The Church was being led by the pusillanimous, chosen precisely for their compliance and willingness not to speak out in the face of obvious moral corruption.

The Bush administration's Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has been called "ground zero for the ideological wars in this country," and a new HHS proposal leaked this week proves why. In a spectacular act of complicity with extremists on the right, HHS is proposing to allow any federal grant recipient to obstruct a woman's access to contraception.

The American public is nearly unanimous in supporting contraception: 90 percent favor wide availability for birth control, and 90 percent of sexually active women of reproductive age are using it. It is simple common sense: the average woman spends nearly three decades of her life attempting to be sexually active without getting pregnant, and access to contraception is the only proven way to avoid an unintended pregnancy.

For most women, birth control is a basic health care need. But with this new proposal, the Bush administration plans to hand over the gears of health care to the few extremists who want to impose their deeply unpopular right-wing doctrine on the many. The "Pill Kills" fringe has generally been ignored for its warped pseudo-science, but not at Bush's HHS. Its new proposal would make agencies receiving HHS funding promise not to discriminate in hiring against anyone who objects to abortion – and then redefines abortion so as to include most commonly used forms of birth control including oral contraceptives and IUDs.

This is the latest –and now incontrovertible-- proof that the anti-abortion movement, and the administration that appears beholden to it, opposes basic pregnancy prevention and is firmly committed to control over Americans' sex lives. If the HHS proposal is approved, anti-contraceptive operatives will seize health financing, one of the most important levers of control. The regulations would be vast in scope and serve as an open invitation for local extremists to directly meddle with your most important life decisions.

Under the new rule, any health care provider who receives federal funding and would like to prevent women from having access to prescription birth control would have federal protection for doing it. State laws requiring hospitals to give pregnancy prevention to rape victims would be automatically invalidated. Pharmacies nationwide could be granted instant permission to refuse to fill prescriptions for birth control. Health centers may be forced to hire religious extremists who would refuse to provide contraception to their patients, even if contraception service is the main focus of the facility.

The new regulation would overrule laws in 27 states requiring health insurers to cover contraceptives. Keep in mind that reluctance of Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs) to cover contraception was what led to these state mandates in the first place. Health insurance plans would likely be able to eliminate contraceptive coverage, re-imposing on women 68 percent more in out-of-pocket health care expenses than men pay.

President Bush has been committed to restricting Americans' access to pregnancy prevention since his first days in office. In 2001, he attempted to eliminate contraceptive coverage for federal employees and soldiers. At the request of the anti-contraception movement, he has obstructed the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's process of approving proposals for wider access to contraception; appointed self-described anti-contraception leaders to oversee the nation's federal contraception program for the poor; eliminated funding for international family planning programs; appointed anti-condom activists to the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS; promoted programs that withhold information about birth control from sexually active teens; and sunk unprecedented sums of public funding into these no-sex-until-marriage programs, even after witnessing, as governor of Texas, that the result there was the highest teen birth rate of any state in the union.

The proposed regulation is just one of many campaigns against contraception, all led entirely by the anti-abortion establishment. Few Americans know that not one anti-abortion organization in the United States supports contraception. Even fewer understand that every effort to ensure Americans' access to pregnancy prevention is met with fierce, well-financed, and increasingly successful opposition by anti-abortion groups.

The Bush administration has been able to implement these deeply unpopular attacks against birth control and family planning because the American public doesn't really believe that an anti-contraception movement even exists. Under the cover of public denial, behind the banner of "Who could be against contraception?" ideological extremists have accomplished much of their agenda. Approval of the HHS proposal would be the most encompassing and far-reaching attack on the right to contraception they could hope for. What the anti-birth control extremists need now is for the public to continue to believe it can't happen.

Thanks to GeekGirly for the photo.

In a spectacular act of complicity with the religious right, the Department of Health and Human Services Monday released a proposal that allows any federal grant recipient to obstruct a woman's access to contraception. In order to do this, the Department is attempting to redefine many forms of contraception, the birth control 40% of Americans use, as abortion. Doing so protects extremists under the Weldon and Church amendments. Those laws prohibit federal grant recipients from requiring employees to help provide or refer for abortion services. In the "Definitions" section of the HHS proposal it states,

"Abortion: An abortion is the termination of a pregnancy. There are two commonly held views on the question of when a pregnancy begins. Some consider a pregnancy to begin at conception (that is, the fertilization of the egg by the sperm), while others consider it to begin with implantation (when the embryo implants in the lining of the uterus). A 2001 Zogby International American Values poll revealed that 49% of Americans believe that human life begins at conception. Presumably many who hold this belief think that any action that destroys human life after conception is the termination of a pregnancy, and so would be included in their definition of the term "abortion." Those who believe pregnancy begins at implantation believe the term "abortion" only includes the destruction of a human being after it has implanted in the lining of the uterus."

The proposal continues,

"Both definitions of pregnancy inform medical practice. Some medical authorities, like the American Medical Association and the British Medical Association, have defined the term "established pregnancy" as occurring after implantation. Other medical authorities present different definitions. Stedman's Medical Dictionary, for example, defines pregnancy as "[t]he state of a female after conception and until the termination of the gestation." Dorland's Medical Dictionary defines pregnancy, in relevant part, as "the condition of having a developing embryo or fetus in the body, after union of an oocyte and spermatozoon."

Up until now, the federal government followed the definition of pregnancy accepted by the American Medical Association and our nation's pregnancy experts, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which is: pregnancy begins at implantation. With this proposal, however, HHS is dismissing medical experts and opting instead to accept a definition of pregnancy based on polling data. It now claims that pregnancy begins at some biologically unknowable moment (there's no test to determine if a woman's egg has been fertilized). Under these new standards there would be no way for a woman to prove she's not pregnant. Thus, any woman could be denied contraception under HHS' new science.

The other rarely discussed issue here is whether hormonal even does what the religious right claims. There is no scientific evidence that hormonal methods of birth control can prevent a fertilized egg from implanting in the womb. This argument is the basis upon which the religious right hopes to include the 40% of the birth control methods Americans use, such as the pill, the patch, the shot, the ring, the IUD, and emergency contraception, under the classification "abortion." Even the "pro-life" movement's most respected physicians cautioned the movement about making these claims. In 1999, the physicians--who, like the movement at large, define pregnancy as beginning at fertilization-- released an open letter to community stating: "Recently, some special interest groups have claimed, without providing any scientific rationale, that some methods of contraception may have an abortifacient effect...The 'hormonal contraception is abortifacient' theory is not established fact. It is speculation, and the discussion presented here suggests it is error...if a family, weighing all the factors affecting their own circumstances, decides to use this modality, we are confident that they are not using an abortifacient."

As the HHS proposal proves, the absence of fact or evidence does not slow anti-abortion movement attempts to classify hormonal contraception as abortion. With HHS' proposal they have struck gold. Anyone working for a federal clinic, or a health center that receives federal funding--even in the form of Medicaid--and would like to prevent a woman from accessing most prescription birth control methods has federal protection to do so. As the HHS proposal details,

"Because the statutes that would be enforced through this regulation seek, in part, to protect individuals and institutions from suffering discrimination on the basis of conscience, the conscience of the individual or institution should be paramount in determining what constitutes abortion, within the bounds of reason. As discussed above, both definitions of pregnancy are reasonable and used within the scientific and medical community. The Department proposes, then, to allow individuals and institutions to adhere to their own views and adopt a definition of abortion that encompasses both views of abortion." (emphasis mine)

So HHS proposes that anyone can enforce his or her own definition of abortion "within the bounds of reason." And, it would seem the bounds are pretty far flung. Most dangerously, perhaps, this new rule establishes a legal precedent that may eventually be used as a basis for banning the most popular forms of birth control along with what is, in fact, abortion.

Environmentalists used to speak loudly and clearly about the linkages between the degradation of the planet and unchecked population growth. The alarms they signaled led some countries, like China, to resort to extreme solutions; namely stripping women of reproductive rights, imposing state mandated population limits and coercive abortion policies. Since then, environmentalists have been hesitant to pound the table as forcefully as they once did about the population growth threat, which is mounting, for fear that more countries would resort to human rights abuses as solutions. And with the absence of any public awareness effort showing the relationship between the increasing population and climate change, the religious right has entered to cast doubt that population growth is even a problem to begin with and instead argues the very opposite, that there aren't enough people on the planet, in order to justify its ideological campaigns to strip people of the right to plan their families.

So, it comes as great relief to have Robert Engelman, vice president of programs at the Worldwatch Institute and author of More: Population, Nature and What Women Want, enter onto the national stage with a new take on it all. According to Engelman, the solution to the climate change problem, wonderfully, poetically, is human rights. The way to protect our planet is to give women reproductive freedom. As Time Magazine explained in its May article about Engelman entitled, What Condoms Have to Do With Climate Change, "The key to limiting population growth, he says, is to give control over procreation to women. In society after society, even in countries where large families have always been the norm, when women take control over family size, birth rates shrink. 'They don't have to be coerced,' says Engelman. 'This will happen as long as women are in charge.'"

This certainly was the case when UNFPA convinced the Chinese Government to lift its coercive one-child policy in some of its provinces to test out voluntary family planning instead. As I write in my book,

"In 1998, the Chinese government agreed to a test. It would end its one-child policy in 32 counties (out of 2,500). The UNFPA approach was voluntary birth control. After five years, the results looked promising, The new approach helped reign in the population explosion; the number of women giving birth remained the same, and at the same rate. Also, the abortion rate fell in the 32 counties from 24 percent of all pregnancies to 10 percent, a rate lower than that of the United States. The Chinese government, impressed with the results, paid to expand the program to 800 more counties."

Naturally, giving women control of their reproductive lives is, to the religious right, worse than state mandated abortion. On the heels of the discovery that voluntary family planning offered the best solution to China's woes, the anti-abortion movement got Bush to de-fund UNFPA precisely because of its work to prove to the Chinese government that their coercive policies were not effective.

Quietly, the anti-abortion movement is undermining efforts worldwide to give people the right to plan their families, leading to spiraling population and, with that, a long list of nightmares. The Time article offers this halting prediction by General Michael Hayden, director of the CIA, about what the future will be like if we don't take population growth seriously:

"By mid-century, the best estimates point to a world population of more than 9 billion. Most of that growth will occur in countries least able to sustain it."

Time continues, "The sheer increase in population, Hayden argued, could fuel instability and extremism, not to mention worsening climate change and making food and fuel all the more scarce. Population is the essential multiplier for any number of human ills." The problem is that few credit the religious right and their campaigns against agencies like UNFPA as the true source of the problem.

Many of us know, instinctively, that human rights hold the cure to most of the world's ills. Coercion and tyranny, whether waged by governments or ideologues, will always backfire. Until the environmental movement sees stopping the religious right as part of its mission too, we won't get far at improving conditions. Lucky for us, experts like Engleman are starting to make the connection.

Good news out of Wisconsin. Despite state anti-abortion groups' fervent attempts to roll back contraceptive access, Planned Parenthood affiliates of Wisconsin report that their ability to furnish Wisconsinites with greater access to family planning have led to a sharp decline in state's unintended pregnancy and abortion rates. A press release from the organization reveals:

"Currently, there are 600,000 Wisconsin women of reproductive age and over 300,000 of them are in need of publicly funded birth control and reproductive health services. Over the last five years, access to contraceptives for these women in need has greatly increased. The BadgerCare Plus Family Planning Program (formerly known as the Family Planning Waiver Program), which provides comprehensive birth control information and services, had 66,000 enrollees in 2006—its highest to date. Enhanced access to Emergency Contraception thanks to over the counter status in late 2006 has also improved women’s awareness of and access to contraceptive methods that work to prevent unintended pregnancy and abortion."

Still more good news, this time about bad policy. This week Women's Enews reported that:

"the number of states participating in the Bush's administration push for abstinence education is down 40 percent over the past two years, as skeptical states are rejecting millions of federal dollars. Around $50 million has been budgeted for 2008, and currently 28 states are in the program. Iowa and Arizona are the latest states to refuse their share of federal grants beginning with the next fiscal year. A congressional study last year concluded the programs were ineffective."

International contraception expert, Dr. James Trussell, is offering a new perspective on what's the best birth control method for women. His answer, one you can forget about. He explains, “The Pill is an outdated method because it does not work well enough. It is very difficult for ordinary women to take a pill every single day. The beauty of the implant or the IUD is that you can forget about them.”

Studies show if 7 per cent of women currently using the Pill switched to a long-acting method, then it would prevent 73,000 unintended pregnancies.