The Female Body As Battlefield

By Anne Taylor Fleming, Politico

11 February 12

id I expect this? Did any of us foresee that in 2012 there would be a full-tilt battle about women's health and how it should be handled?

In the thick of the presidential race, with the continuing mortgage mess and a still-precarious economy, this is what engages the most passion - certainly from those on the right. It seems to be the cultural issue they think can carry them forward.

I am not talking just about abortion - a morally divisive issue that is always there, simmering. This involves even contraceptives - who should get them, who should pay for them, or not.

It's strange to realize that one of the dominant battlegrounds in one's lifetime is not some exotic place like Iraq - or even the war on terror. No, the ultimate battlefield has been the female body.

So here we are again, with the Republican candidates trying to outdo each other in the sanctity-of-life sweepstakes. They regularly have to do this to play to their religious base. But this round, the intensity has picked up. There is a new fervency in the air.

One candidate, Mitt Romney, has done a full 180 - from pro-choice to anti. Another, Rick Santorum, has suggested that even rape victims should keep their fetuses, however “horribly created” those babies-to-be. They are, he says, gifts from God, whatever their origins.

On some level, one shouldn't be surprised. The abortion pushback has been going on since the Supreme Court decided Roe v.Wade almost four decades ago. Within three years, we had the Hyde amendment, barring any federal funding for abortion. Since then, there has been constant effort by the activists.

They always had a rhetorical edge: the language of “life” versus the language of “choice.” One sounded big, emotional, a matter of deep values, while the other seemed wimpy and selfish by comparison.

The pro-lifers' passions often came with a deep faith, not easily dismissed. Those who believe abortion should remain legal often seemed to be at a linguistic - and thereby moral - gap.

I've never written much about abortion because I could never figure out how not to tumble into seemingly unsatisfactory clichés. A woman's right to choose? Was there not something more urgent, more elemental? The right to privacy? That didn't seem big enough either - though it was the right on which Roe rested.

Always there was the question: Would there come a time when Roe could be overturned or so hobbled by various state restrictions that abortion could indeed become difficult if not impossible? In 2011, there were a record number of anti-abortion provisions passed across the country. Some curtailed insurance payments. Others mandated waiting periods or parental notification or obligatory sonograms before any procedure could be done.

In Texas, the abortion provider would be instructed to show and describe the image on the screen to the supine patient. Could she cover her ears - or would that be illegal?

No question, the religious right has never been more emboldened, which is one reason why Santorum can say what he said. Probably why, in fact, he has three new shiny state wins under his belt. And four total, more than any other GOP candidate. He is the man of the hour - the current thorn in Romney's flip-flopping side and the scrubbed family man antidote to Newt Gingrich's multiple indiscretions.

But Santorum's rise is, in no small part, because of his uncompromising clarity on the issues the religious right cherishes - abortion at the top of the list.

Compare abortion's tenacious grip on the national imagination versus, say, the gay marriage issue - which seemed to have similar heat but is now losing its hold. More states are allowing it, and even some conservative commentators have endorsed the idea. There is a generational divide - among the young, the issue just doesn't galvanize the way abortion continues to.

A majority of Americans still support abortion rights, 57 percent in the latest ABC News-Washington Post poll, and an overwhelming 81 percent think it should be legal in cases of rape or incest. But they continue to express qualms when it comes to a woman terminating a pregnancy because it is unwanted - “if she is unmarried and doesn't want the baby.” The inference is that a woman is being selfish, her “choice” not defensible.

There is still a deep and exploitable queasiness around this whole matter - and, at base, what women are allowed or not allowed to do, what decisions they are entitled to make - which has helped keep it alive for so very long.

It cuts into the deepest notions of women's liberation, of how a woman can determine the contours of her own life. Dealing with pregnancy, deciding when and whether and with whom, to have a child, is at the center of a female life. Despite all the gains women have made, there is still a complicated reaction to the notion of women being sexually free without paying some kind of price.

Look at the two hit movies: “Knocked Up,” in which a gorgeous, professionally accomplished woman ends up pregnant after a drunken tumble with a goofy pothead and, stretching all logic, ends up falling in love with him and having the baby. Or take “Juno,” in which a plucky teenager, finding herself pregnant, responsibly finds someone to adopt her baby. Liberated women meet Rick Santorum. They speak to the continuing anxiety that women are somehow sailing free from hallowed institutions like marriage - witness the lowest marriage rates ever. These movies reel them back in.

The most decisive way to do this is to control women's reproductive options. Which brings us back to contraception. Even that is in play now with the recent contretemps over Planned Parenthood, perceived for years to be a mainstream women's health organization providing birth control and cancer screening, most often to poor women.

Many on the right have been trying to strip the organization of any federal funding - insisting it is in the abortion business. Though the truth seems to be that well over 90 percent of the organization's services are for contraception and cancer screening and other women's health services. The Susan G. Komen for the Cure breast cancer foundation walked into the controversy when it decided to pull its Planned Parenthood grants - eliciting a cry that, in turn, elicited a reversal.

It was a wild ride full of more passion and steam than any of the presidential debates. President Barack Obama has entered the fray by insisting that Catholic institutions such as hospitals and colleges (churches are exempt) must provide free contraception to employees in their health plans. This touched off another fury - all manner of commentators insisting that he was violating the separation of church and state.

Again, compared with all the hard issues at the heart of this political year, nothing has come close in terms of the vigor and anger generated by matters relating to the reproductive health of women.

That's where the long-simmering culture wars have come to rest: atop the female body.

Anne Taylor Fleming, a longtime commentator for “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer,” is now a columnist for Los Angeles Magazine. She is the author of two novels and one nonfiction book, “Motherhood Deferred: A Woman's Journey.”