 |
|
|
 Editorials | July 2005 
Is There Life After The Morning-After Pill?
 Kelly Arthur Garrett - The Herald Mexico
| | Women across the political spectrum have figured out that their bodies belong to nobody but themselves. They may honor their Church and love their religion, but they're not about to cede total control of their reproduction rights to priests or politicians. |
The modest central plaza in Mexico City's southern Tlalpan district has a leafy, pueblo-like feel. Its pleasant vibe hummed noticeably last Tuesday afternoon as hundreds of locals gathered for the final event of a days-long women's health fair.
From folding chairs under a temporary canvas, the assembled neighbors hear an informational talk on the virtues and necessity of condoms for birth control and disease prevention.
As the good-humored young woman speaker demonstrated proper application technique on a male volunteer's extended fingers, there were plenty of smiles and giggles from the audience. But not much embarrassment. And zero outrage. Couples of all ages nodded as she talked about eroticizing rather than just tolerating condom use.
Señoras commented knowingly amongst themselves as they learned that the prophylactic latex is the same synthetic used in infants' pacifiers. Middle-aged men with their arms folded in front of them nodded as the subject of unwanted pregnancies came up. Grandmothers looked up and down from their knitting, taking it all in without missing a stitch.
Kids ran up and down the aisles, as kids do. There was nothing unusual about the gathering. These were plain folks, a typical cross-section of the population. It was a safe bet that most of them would be attending Mass sometime that week a few steps away.
In that colonial era church, however, they would be told that everything they heard under the canvas is wrong. Birth control and safe sex may be vigorously promoted by the government, but they are forbidden to the faithful. This is a basic and familiar contradiction in Mexican life.
The Church lost this battle long ago. Overpopulation, sexually transmitted disease, the social cost of unwelcome births, and the poverty-exacerbating effects of pell-mell pregnancies are problems too big for their solutions to be subjugated to outdated sexual mores that were always honored more in the breach anyway.
Besides which, women across the political spectrum have figured out that their bodies belong to nobody but themselves. They may honor their Church and love their religion, but they're not about to cede total control of their reproduction rights to priests or politicians.
There's no going back.It's in this context that Church leaders and their allies in right-wing organizations aimed their offensive last week at the Health Secretariat's new policy of making the morning-after pill available through public health services. The pill was already approved in January of 2004; the new rules simply extend emergency contraception to the neediest. That little tweak, however, opened up space for a flame-fanning campaign that went beyond the always-expected (and usually ignored) clerical reaction to liberal advances. Strictly speaking, there's really no controversy. That's because there's no widespread disagreement.
There's been no significant public backlash against the pill, which uses a progesterone dose to prevent fertilization up to 72 hours after unprotected sex or condom failure. For the most part, people like the idea of a safety net.
Nor is the public at large responding to the argument that the pill is equivalent to abortion because it might on rare occasions prevent a just-fertilized egg from implanting in the uterus. For one thing, no solid evidence exists that this actually happens. And even if it did, medical science (though not all scientists) now defines conception as starting with implantation, so the point is irrelevant.
At any rate, this is arcane quibbling as far as the masses are concerned. What people see is a pill that rectifies a mistake within a day or two. That's a far cry from the idea of terminating a fetus, no matter what your position on abortion is.
Also not catching on is the bizarre accusation by Church leaders that Health Secretary Julio Frenk is somehow "imposing" the morning-after pill on the Mexican public. Actually, the review process leading to both approvals was painstaking and inclusive. Even the Defense Secretariat was involved.
And, of course, the new policy is meant to make emergency contraception available, not obligatory. If anybody's attempting any "imposing," it's those who would unnecessarily burden a woman and society with an unwanted pregnancy because of a rape, an accident or a mistake. People see that.
Though the controversy is a false one, the threat is real not just to Mexico's hard-earned church-state separation but also to the quality of political discourse. Those who seek to inject religious doctrine into public policy may be a small minority, but they're a powerful one.
As Susan Jacoby, the premier chronicler of the current breakdown of church-state separation in the United States, put it in an interview last year, "By very virtue of the intensity of their religious beliefs, they care more about their issues than a lot of more secular people, and they do more to see that their influence is felt."
What stands out about the anti-contraception crowd is its over-the-top rhetoric. The morning-after pill, we're told, is a "weapon" that "kills innocents." It will cause "moral and social degradation." It "violates in the deepest way the morality of Mexican society."
If that kind of language sounds divisive, it's meant to be. Reaction triumphs when it successfully equates progressive change with chaos or evil. Which brings us to the most disturbing aspect of this fake controversy it's partly an inside job.
The governing National Action Party's (PAN) own interior secretary, Carlos Abascal, breathed life into the moribund debate by publicly criticizing the pill's availability and indicating that the decision would be reviewed, even though his department has nothing to do with the issue. This directly impugned his fellow secretary Frenk, and underlined the growing split in the PAN ranks over the role of religion in party politics.
Abascal's extremist bent is no secret. It came up when he was chosen earlier this year to replace Santiago Creel as interior secretary. According to the magazine Proceso, he once wrote a book openly calling for a Christian state in Mexico, even criticizing civil marriage as a usurpation of proper Church authority.
But he's not alone. One by one, fellow panistas criticized the pill as an abortifacient. Each tried to outdo the other in their support for "life." First Lady Marta Sahagún is a pill supporter, but she still made sure she emphasized her pro-life credentials. Pan precandidate Creel reminded us that he represents "a party that respects and promotes life."
His rival Felipe Calderón described himself as "a defender of life." Anybody familiar with the trend of U.S. politics over the last few decades knows down which road all this talk about supporting "life" can lead. In a narrow sense, being pro-life simply means anti-abortion, by no means an unusual position in Mexico. But as an overreaching and facile conservative political posture, it can accomplish much more. In the name of "life," Americans have been convinced to support the death penalty, war, and an unfettered market in street guns.
It works because it offers folks an easy choice. Fobaproa is boring and confusing. But, life? Who can't get behind that? We can only hope Mexico doesn't take that route. The upcoming campaign promises to be vapid enough without devolving into a contest over who loves life the most.
The last thing we need are endless TV spots of overcoached candidates accompanying their practiced little fist pumps with the likes of, "My commitment to life is unassailable."
kellyg@prodigy.net.mx |
| |
|
Vallarta Weddings
Tell a Friend
Site Map
Print this Page
Email Us