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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.

If the “pro-life” community was really “pro-life” instead of just anti-abortion then you’d expect them to give a rat’s ass about, oh, say, pre-natal care. As a movement they don’t. You’d expect them to care about infant mortality. As a movement they don’t. You’d expect them to care about stilbirth. As a movement they don’t. You’d expect them to care about maternal mortality. As a movement they don’t.

And since miscarriage “stops a beating heart” roughly as often as abortion (about one in four first pregnancies, about one in ten later pregnancies) you’d expect them to care about that too. As a movement, as individuals, as caregivers, and as “crisis-pregnancy” advisors they don’t.

My pro-choice partner and I got a good look at it when our planned, wanted first pregnancy ended in a miscarriage and the best we got from “pro-life” crowd while it was still on-going and presumably still rescuable was a chipper “oh well, just keep trying, I’m sure she’ll be pregnant again in no time.” Gee, doesn’t get any more “pro-life” than that, does it?

So! If you’re a reporter, a constituent, or just someone passing one of these “principled men,” (and it was overwhelmingly men) who voted for the Stipak amendment, and you have an opportunity to ask them questions, on or off the record, how about asking…

“Have you ever given an instant of thought about any of the above? Has anyone you know? If not how does this make you ‘pro-life?’”

Kevin Drum of Mother Jones gently pushes back at what’s effectively becoming a feminist ethnic slur before asking a really, really critical question about insurer’s reaction to the thuggish anti-abortion amendment in Saturday night’s House healthcare reform bill.

God knows we liberal dudes can be clueless sometimes, but are any of us really saying that this is no big deal?  That’s hard to believe.  What I can imagine us saying is that Bart Stupak had the votes and we didn’t.  That’s a huge problem.  But not a big deal?  Hardly.

On a related note, I wonder what the insurance industry thinks of this?  I know that if I were an insurance company, I’d sure rather cover an abortion (cost = $500 or so) than a pregnancy carried to term (cost = $10,000 or so).  But they’re probably too scared to speak up.

He said it here.

I’m tempted to digress and point out that that would be $10,000 for a routine pregnancy with no complications. The million or so c-sections a performed a year cost considerably more. Not even counting perpetual care the cost for treating a woman for a stroke from preeclampsia from an unplanned, unwanted pregnancy can quickly top $100,000.

Instead I’ll just say that there are procedures that have been used all year to obstruct assess the cost of various measures. So let’s start by asking the CBO to score Stupak’s hateful thuggery.

Heather Corinna, founder of Scarleteen.com and author of pure as the driven slush is a patient advocate at a local, independent women’s clinic that provides, among other services, pregnancy termination. Her post yesterday is almost literally a picture-perfect illustration of the meaning of “pro choice” and how that’s not just different but quantitatively different from being simply claiming to be “pro life” or, more directly, anti-abortion. Or even pro-abortion. Unless you’ve been to a clinic yourself it might be eye-opening even if you’re pro-choice.

We had protestors yesterday, one of whom walked right by a teen client in front of the clinic (and broke the law here in WA by doing so on our property) who was already upset, and who was already being pressured TO terminate outside by her boyfriend and family.

Anyway, it’s a cool, cool post.

I was able to get her inside, take her downstairs to my sitting room, and give her open time to talk about all of her feelings, what she wanted, and how she felt she was given no permission by anyone to make up her own mind.  She was able to say she felt very unsure, and was considering termination, but had also wanted to consider adoption but was told this was “selifsh” I gotta say, I hadn’t heard that one before about adoption, but you hear something new every day. She also informed me her mother had told her she could legally block her from remaining pregnant, which I let her know was false.  We were able to discuss both options in some depth, and she was able to hear someone tell her — and mean it — that ANY choice she made was an acceptable choice which could be her best one, and that none of her choices were selfish save that this was about her and it was really important she think of herself.  I was also able to open the pressure valve by letting her know that no matter what, when we have a client come for a procedure who says they are here due to being or feeling forced by others and/or says they do not want to terminate, we will not and cannot do a termination that day, and that I’d be happy to inform anyone she needed me to that that was our policy and my firm decision on that.  I let her know she was welcome, if she decided for herself she did want to terminate, to come back, even the next day if she liked, and we could still talk more about all of this regardless, but she did not have to worry about making up her mind that day.

It gets better. Read the rest of her story here.

The next few paragraphs are about a mediation session the client requested with her boyfriend who… well, to be fabulously generous let’s say he’s swallowed standard narratives about what teen pregnancy, and single motherhood, and, um, being female, period, so deep the hook’s caught in his rectum. Such that his own shit comes out of his mouth any time the line gets tugged on. Anyway, after some (highly readable) processing Heather ads

I can’t know what she wound up deciding unless she does come back, but in the end, my sense was she was going to be likely to terminate, and was feeling that may have been best for her from the start, she just needed everyone to back the hell off so she could get all the information and breathing room she needed to consider her options, and so she could make her own choice. This is actually a pretty common occurrence, especially with teens who also tend to face people not giving them autonomy in most things, so they often already feel talked over and controlled as it is.

It doesn’t matter to me what she chooses, but my sense is whatever it is, it’s a lot more likely to be her choice now, and whatever she feels is best.

Choice. It’s what human beings do. And not because humans always make some pre-determined right choice, even when given all the information, space, and freedom to make it. But because at the end of the day it’s human being, her or himself, who lives with their own choice. As opposed to surviving the imposition of other people’s choices.