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Lynn Gazis-Sax of Noli Irritare Leones asks how birth control came to be left out of most healthcare legislation.

Sharon Lerner at DoubleX ponders how birth control came to be a politically toxic issue.

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On the one hand, I can understand why birth control wasn’t included in the minimum benefits package. When you’re making a big change, and not including birth control simply leaves the status quo (rather than actively making the status quo worse), it’s easy to run from the least whiff of controversy, just to keep your bill intact. On the other hand, it’s discouraging that birth control, of all things, which practically everyone uses, should be controversial.

Read the quote in context here.

Actually I can say exactly how contraception became toxic in Congress so long ago. It’s actually the issue that first inspired me to start a website back when I thought I could become a regular political web-logger back in the days before actual blogging tools. That old website is now so long-gone I can’t even find the (hand-coded) source files.

Anyway, while I evidently no longer even have notes for my sources I learned the answer in an old print-based Washington Monthly from back in what must have been the early 1990s. What they said was that beginning in the 1970s pressure politics was such that no conservative Republican Senators would allow any legislation referencing birth control to move forward if it included support for abortion. No liberal Democratic Senator would support anything that didn’t include support for abortion. And no matter who brought it up or how reasonable the proposal was it always turned into a fight that would often spill over into other bills, with pro-choice attachments showing up here and anti-choice attachments showing up there and, since passions ran quite high, no possibility of resolution.

The result was a cordial agreement on both sides not to even bring it up. By the time the Monthly published the story the agreement was already nearly 20 years old. It would have been more than 30 years ago now.

What was particularly disgraceful was that at the time contraception itself wasn’t particularly controversial. Not for liberals, obviously, but also not for non-Catholic, pre-Reagan-revolution conservatives. And so absent the abortion issue what little legislation that did make it through tended to pass by overwhelming majorities in both parties.

Warn’t them the days though? Bipartisanship sure was great back then.