On the anti-contraception movement.

[mmcirvin]

This is a great Salon article: expect to hear more from these people in the future. I hold out some hope that the push to ban contraceptives will be the moment that American cultural conservatism finally overreaches enough to lose popularity, but that may be naive.

Amanda Marcotte has an ingenious argument against the "pill as abortifacient" attack (though its dependence on conventional Earth logic may be its fatal flaw): since actual evidence indicates that the birth control pill normally works by preventing normal ovulation (and therefore fertilization), and over 50 percent of normally fertilized eggs either don't implant or spontaneously miscarry early in pregnancy, the birth control pill is actually the greatest preventer of zygote death of all time, if that's what you really care about.

Comments

[spasmsproject.livejournal.com]

I just read these articles to my boyfriend over our morning coffee (we live in sin and use contraception -- take that, Mary Worthington!), and he says Mary really ought to be working to get rid of women's right to "that pesky freedom of speech/press thing," and then everything will fall into place.

But seriously, we were talking about it and thinking that Mary would probably chalk those 50% of miscarriages (wouldn't want to call them by their actual name, "spontaneous abortions,") up to "God's will," making God the most ruthless baby-killer of them all.

Actually,

[vardissakheli.livejournal.com]

given Ratzinger's great new declaration of "original grace" last fall, we must conclude that God is just harvesting those good little zygotes before they have a chance to go bad and turn to "actual sin."