Some more on undead sexist cliches and birth control

Ross Douthat’s column in the New York Times claims defending birth control rather than chastity as a way to get fewer abortions doesn’t work: Birth control is easily available everywhere, and liberal states have higher abortion rates than conservative ones so there you are. Therefore, as “even the fiercest conservative critics of the White House’s contraception mandate — yes, Rick Santorum included — agree that artificial birth control should be legal and available,” the conservative approach emphasizing “chastity, monogamy and fidelity” makes more sense.
I’m not convinced by his statistica: As Adele Stan points out, lower rates in red states could reflect that it’s harder to get abortions, rather than some higher morality. There are counter-statistics, too: The Netherlands has a comparable rate of teen sexual activity to the US but way fewer abortions or teenage pregnancies.
But I also disagree with his underlying premise that the justification for legal contraceptives is pragmatic: How well do they reduce abortions? I do think that’s a good reason to keep contraceptives legal and available, but the primary reason is, a woman’s right to control her fertility, to have the option to have sex without conceiving is a good thing. That includes abortion: If she doesn’t have any personal religious objections to what is, after all, a legal process (for the first two trimesters anyway), then she has a right to that too.
Some conservatives bitch about “lifestyle abortions” as if choosing whether you want to be a mother or not is as trivial as getting a new nail color. It’s not. If a woman doesn’t want to take that step, I think it’s a good thing she has the option to stay sexually active without having a baby. I also believe that whether two people use contraceptives or not is entirely their business, not the government’s.
Then there’s Douthat’s bullshit assertion that pro-lifers support contraceptives, it’s just that “to the extent that contraceptive use has a significant role in the conservative vision (and obviously there’s some Catholic-Protestant disagreement), it’s in the context of already stable, already committed relationships.”
I don’t know if he’s ignorant, fooling himself or lying but that’s not true. While Rick Santorum says he’s voted for contraceptive funding in the past (if true, I give him credit for that) believe it’s as wrong for married couples to use birth control as singles. So do lots of conservatives, Catholic and Protestant, as noted here and here and here. When conservatives condemn birth control, it’s true they bring up the Evil Slutty Girls Who Sleep Around (here, again) as a reason to oppose it, but I rarely hear them turn around and make an exemption for married couples.
[edited because I mistakenly attributed a column from Rod Dreher to Ross Douthat]
In other notes:
•Digby points out there’s no reason for Virginia’s vaginal-probe rule except to humiliate women getting an abortion. Roy Edroso recounts the right-wing enthusiasm.
•Fred Clark chronicles Rick Warren and other pastors announcing they’d sooner go to jail or even die than tolerate Obama’s new birth control rule. Which ignores the fact that refusing the law doesn’t bring the death penalty; churches are exempt; and Rick Warren’s church is in a state that already has that rule—and yet somehow he’s not in jail.
As Clark points out the, difference between these guys and real civil disobedience is that Martin Luther King’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail” was written while he was actually in jail, not yapping about how eager he was to be arrested.