Mysogyny and Women's Health Policy

Maggie says:
Pick up a copy of The Nation at your favorite local bookstore this week and settle in for the most entertaining issue they’ve published in a while.

First off, the cover story is this absolutely incendiary piece on Dr. W. David Hager, poster boy for women’s health under Bush&Co. (I know, I know – the phrase “poster boy for women’s health” is not only an obvious contradiction, it perfectly sums up how patriarchal and off-the-mark Bush policy on women’s health really is.)

For those not following the latest drama at the Food & Drug Administration, Hager is the guy who single-handedly prevented Plan B emergency contraceptive from being sold over-the-counter at pharmacies. Right now Senators Clinton and Murray are holding up the nomination of the current FDA director until the agency revisits its decision about Plan B, but since that decision, Dr. Hager has been a fixture on the Christian circuit touting his record of “doing God’s work” to make Plan B less available. This article is incendiary because in contrast to Dr. Hager’s holier-than-thou record (the most paternalistic book title I’ve ever seen? Hager’s own As Jesus Cared for Women), Nation reporter Ayelish McGarvey explores how he treated his former wife in their blessed untion. A hint? Hager's holy vows apparently included a little something called marital rape.

The always razor-sharp Katha Pollitt has a great column on women’s health in this issue, too. In Virginity or Death!, she writes about the existence of a human papilloma virus vaccine that could wipe out the existence of this STD and the some 70% percent of cervical cancer cases it’s responsible for. Great, right? Not to the Christian right. (As Pollitt writes, “Not so fast: We’re living in God’s country now.”) So why is “living in God’s country” bad for women’s health? Because according to the Family Research Council, young girls may see the HPV vaccine as “a license to engage in premarital sex.” As if the threat of getting cervical cancer late in life makes girls abstain today.

Pollitt: “No matter what the consequences of sex – pregnancy, disease, death – abstinence for singles is the only answer [to groups like the FRC]. Just as it’s better for gays to get AIDS than use condoms, it’s better for women to get cancer than have sex before marriage. It’s honor killing on the installment plan.”

What’s at work here is not just conservative politics as usual, not just the religious right cashing in on election favors. We’re seeing a major shift in how women are viewed by a presidency, a shift that has lasting and very dangerous effects on the lives of women today and tomorrow. This isn’t just religious politics, it’s misogyny. This administration would rather see women dead than having sex outside of a marriage. Think about that: They’d rather us be dead.

Pollitt sums this up beautifully: “As they flex their political muscle, right-wing Christians increasingly reveal their condescending view of women as moral children who need to be kept in line sexually by fear. That’s why antichoicers will never answer the call of prochoicers to join them in reducing abortions by making birth control more widely available: They want it to be less available. Their real interest goes way beyond protecting fetuses – it’s in keeping sex tied to reproduction to keep women in their place. If preventing abortion was what they cared about, they’d be giving birth control and emergency contraception away on street corners instead of supporting pharmacists who refuse to fill prescriptions and hospitals that don’t tell rape victims about the existence of emergency contraception.”

Finally, Pollitt notes that “Antichoicers may pooh-pooh the effectiveness of condoms, but they aren’t calling to restrict their sale in order to keep boys chaste.” In other words, let our boys have condoms for when they go out on the town, but make sure the girl they bring home to marry is a virgin. To the Family Research Council, males can be boys on the town, husbands, fathers, and everything in between. Their lives have space for that. But as women, we can either be the girl they use the condom with or the one they bring home to marry. Nothing in between, and no space for anything outside those definitions.