Why aren't pro-lifers and pro-choicers pro-contraception?

• Author: McWilliams, Rita

On one side of the walkway to a Georgia Avenue clinic less than a mile from the U.S. Supreme Court, men and women surge forward with full-color photos of aborted fetuses. On the other side, women join hands in a human shield, blocking the pamphleteers. Threading her way between these two factions this chilly Saturday morning is a lone woman-make that girl-wearing sweat pants, a hair ribbon, and braces.

Both camps on the sidewalk claim they care deeply for this young woman. The anti-abortion "counselors" say they want to prevent her from committing an act that will plague her the rest of her life. Members of the "clinic defense force" say they are protecting her fundamental right not to carry an unwanted child.

But both sides have already failed this woman. In this age of scientific technology, an era in which birth control should be cheap, effective, and widely used, she shouldn't be here in the first place.

The recent Supreme Court decision forbidding family planning organizations using federal money to advise clients on abortion illustrates a truth that has existed quietly ever since Roe v. Wade: the selling out of contraceptives in the battle over women's wombs and fetuses' futures. Anti-abortion forces would rather refuse the underprivileged millions of dollars for birth control counseling than allow such advice to include abortion. Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) and its pro-choice supporters may choose to forgo $34 million-and, perhaps, the contraceptives that money would buy for low-income women-instead of adjusting their counseling protocol.

While judging the merit of the high court decision involves more than an opinion on abortion-restricting doctors' ability to advise their patients raises important ethical and constitutional issues-the current controversy reveals something both sides would rather not admit. While European countries press ahead with aggressive contraceptive research and education, contraception in the United States has devolved, since the advent of the pill, from a critical end in itself into a mere accessory in the abortion debate. As a result, the United States today has one of the highest abortion rates in the industrialized world. Yet the number-1.6 million each year-is only part of the story. Seventy-five percent of the women who choose abortion do so, according to their own assessments, out of financial and personal convenience-to avoid interference with school, work, or other activities. And half of them say that they were using no contraceptives at all.

Logic suggests that pro-life and pro-choice activists would hail new technology like Norplant that makes it easier and safer to prevent pregnancy; that they would put aside their differences to make contraception available to teenagers, to teach its proper use; that they would speak up to assuage the anxiety that still clouds our thinking about contraception. Instead, obsessed with abortion, they have forgotten a critical corollary of the cause: ensuring that most American women never face the decision to abort at all.

Anti-abortion protests have gone further than scuffles on abortion clinic sidewalks. There have been torchings at dusk and bombings at dawn. The seven million or so members of the nation's far-flung pro-life movement claim to be driven to action by one principle: to preserve the new life inside a mother's womb. To abort a fetus, whether it's 1 or 45 weeks old, they say, is to murder.

So when it was announced in February that Norplant, a convenient form of contraception expected to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies by hundreds of thousands, was approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), one might have thought the news would be met with jubilation from those struggling to prevent abortion: Anything that reduces unwanted pregnancy, after all, reduces the motive for murder. Yet instead of praising this abortion preventative, many anti-abortion groups oppose it. Martin Luther called contraception homicide. John Wesley promised that those who used contraceptives would lose their souls. Judie Brown's take is more or less the same. Sex exists for one purpose only, she argues: to initiate life.

Brown is the founder and president of the American Life League (ALL), one of the least conciliatory of the anti-abortion groups. ALL's primary goal is the passage of a constitutional amendment to ban all abortions except those to save the life of the mother (with the stipulation that equal effort be made to save the life of the fetus). But the 259,000 "member families" of ALL have another, less publicized goal: to pull the pill and the IUD, two of the most popular contraceptives in America, from the market. ALL considers these methods "abortifacients" because they prevent a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterus.

Yet ALL doesn't find just abortion, the pill, and IUDs morally offensive. It denounces the diaphragm, the condom-"any kind of artificial jam, jelly, anything you want to call it," says Brown-except what she calls "natural child spacing," or what was once known as the rhythm method. "Anything that interferes," she summarizes simply, "is a bad thing."

Of course, every movement has its extremists. But in this case, one of them is the powerful National Conference of Catholic Bishops, which last year launched a multimillion-dollar anti-abortion campaign with the aid of Hill & Knowlton, one of the most sophisticated PR firms in the country. And make no mistake: To the Catholic hierarchy, anti-abortion is also anti-contraception. "God created us body and soul together," says Helen Alvare, director of campaign planning and information. To use contraception, she says, "is to say the body and soul are two separate beings." With contraceptives, "a man and a woman are not coming together completely."

Unlike ALL and the Catholic Church, the nation's two largest pro-life groups, the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) and the Family Research Council (FRC), don't oppose contraception outright. They say they simply have no opinion. (Except, of course, when unmarried teenagers are involved. Despite the fact that the U.S. has the highest rate of teen pregnancy in the First World, they disapprove of even teaching young people about contraception.)

Although ardently opposed to abortion, the FRC "doesn't really get into contraception very much," says Charmaine Yoest, public policy analyst for the influential evangelical group. "We think it is a personal decision for people, particularly when you are concerned with adults."

"We don't have a position on it," echoes Nancy Myers, communications director of the mammoth NRLC. "We don't have a position on breast cancer or a variety of other medical issues either."

Yet NRLC is not a single-issue lobby. It also fights for the rights of handicapped infants and opposes euthanasia. "We believe it is the same life at either end...