Anti-Choice & Anti-Birth Control

"Their [anti-choice organizations] aim is not about reducing abortion -- it includes restricting people's access to contraception, it includes transforming our sex lives, it includes transforming our families. That's the goal, and [restricting abortion] is just one vehicle toward that end."
-Cristina Page, author of How the Pro-Choice Movement Saved America: Freedom, Politics, and the War on Sex

In her book, Page argues that the pro-choice movement is "doing a better job at what the public understands to be the pro-life agenda than the pro-lifers are." Unlike the "pro-life" movement, pro-choice organizations are dramatically reducing the number of abortions and fighting for pro-family, pro-child policies. Read an AlterNet interview with Page here:





Photos from the April 2004 March for Women's Lives in Washington DC, one of the largest marches ever held in the capital's history. If you don't remember hearing about it, you probably didn't.

Page, a veteran of the editorial departments of Glamour and Ms. magazines, and the current vice president of the Institute for Reproductive Health Access at NARAL Pro-Choice New York, describes how she had been searching for a pro-life counterpart with whom she could engage in a reasoned, honest search for common ground. She found one: a feminist-identified woman who worked for a Right to Life chapter, and on the 30th anniversary of Roe v. Wade in 2003, they published a jointly authored op-ed in the New York Times.

"The Right to Agree" laid out a series of shared goals, including pro-family and pro-child policies like affordable child care and support for single mothers, an end to violence and violent language in the abortion debate, and the adoption of legislation mandating that health insurance cover contraceptives. While pro-choicers responded with mild support, pro-lifers were outraged, particularly at the statement of support for broad access to contraception. It was then that Page realized that the anti-contraception pro-lifers were not, as she'd assumed, on the fringe of the movement but rather the ones who set its agenda.

Referring to the book's relatively slim profile (it weighs in at just 236 pages), Page described it as "in many ways a breezy tour through frightening truths," but How the Pro-Choice Movement Saved America is tenaciously researched and extensively documented (40 of those pages are endnotes). Digging deep into the evidence, Page unveils the hidden anti-contraception agenda of the pro-life movement and outlines how how close we are to losing not only the constitutional right to abortion provided by Roe but also our rights to safe, accessible contraception.

It's time for politicians and activists who are in favor of keeping abortion safe, legal and rare to expose these hypocritical anti-contraception "pro-lifers."