Why So Upset About Contraceptives?

Noah Rothman advises Republicans against going to war with birth control. Dan Savage ponders the right’s motivations:

[W]hy are conservatives fighting so hard to make contraception harder for women to obtain? Because they don’t think people—young people, poor people, unmarried people, gay people—should be able to enjoy “consequence-free sex.” Because it’s sex that they hate—it’s sex for pleasure that they hate—and they hate that kind of sex more than they hate abortion, teen moms, and welfare spending combined. Knowing that some people are having sex for pleasure without having their futures disrupted by an unplanned pregnancy or having their health compromised by a sexually transmitted infection or having to run a traumatizing gauntlet of shrieking “sidewalk counselors” to get to an abortion clinic keeps them up at night.

But Douthat wants to reframe the debate as “less about whether sex should be consequence-free and more about whether, on a societal level, it really can be”:

[T]his argument would not demand that pre-pill consequences be re-attached to sex, to better return women to drudgery and childbearing. Rather, it would make the point that notwithstanding social liberalism’s many victories those consequences haven’t exactly gone away; it would question whether more and cheaper contraception suffices to address some of the social problems associated with sexual permissiveness; and it would raise the possibility that a broader reconsideration of current norms and policies might offer more to American women in the long run than strangling the last craft-store patriarch with the entrails of the last reactionary nun.

Marcotte, on the other hand, looks at how opposition to contraception correlates with the belief that women should be financially dependent on men:

By claiming women are getting something for “free,” conservatives are reinforcing this myth that women can’t actually be independent—they either need to rely on the government or a husband. That’s what Jesse Watters was getting at on Fox News, talking about single female voters who want the contraceptive benefit, who he called “Beyoncé voters”: “They depend on government because they’re not depending on their husbands,” he argued, ignoring that women are actually demanding the right to the health care they are paying for.

Rush Limbaugh sounded a similar note this week, denouncing men who support the contraceptive benefit by saying they are “Pajama Boy types having sex, sex, sex,” and that “Today’s young men are totally supportive of somebody else buying women their birth control pills. Make sure the women are taking them, ’cause sex is what it’s all about.” Yes, men support women’s reproductive rights only so they can have lots of sex while foisting the responsibility of providing for women onto the government, which Limbaugh falsely claims is providing the contraceptive coverage.