How Contraception Became Proxy for Women's Freedom

"Contra Justice Ginsburg, the Hobby Lobby decision is no cause for alarm," writes Helen Alvaré. She argues that even though Ginsburg's voice doesn't represent many women, "her arguments still have power" (particularly in the marketplace of male-female relationships), and they can't go unchallenged.

For significant and entrenched reasons, birth control has become a proxy for “women’s freedom” in the minds of many women, even if they’re not actually touched by the Hobby Lobby decision.

A significant number of women have good reasons to be anxious about the possibility of becoming pregnant when they are not fully willing and prepared. This is largely due to the situation in the “marketplace” of male-female relationships and the lack of policies helping mothers manage work outside the home.

First, regarding this marketplace, today it fosters non-marital sex, cohabitation, later marriage, abortion, and single parenthood (and thus female poverty). These phenomena are disadvantageous to women, and in the minds of many, can be mitigated or avoided by contraception. The mechanisms by which these results are produced are brilliantly summarized by leading economists.

The all-too-brief summary is as follows: when birth control and abortion separate sex from kids, non-marital sexual encounters increase as the perceived “risks” (children) appear to decline. Sex easily becomes the “price” of obtaining a romantic relationship, and “shotgun weddings” following a pregnancy disappear because women have the right of access to abortion. But because there are so many more uncommitted sexual encounters, and because contraception regularly fails, and because of continuing aspirations for children and relationships, cohabitation skyrockets, nonmarital births and abortions increase, and marriage is delayed or forgone (despite women’s fertility patterns and persistent desire for children). Single parenthood by women (and therefore poverty) becomes far more common.

It wasn’t just the “technology shocks” of the pill and abortion that shaped this marketplace; the law cooperated. The feminist legal establishment of the latter part of the twentieth century argued (and the Supreme Court agreed) that children imposed serious disadvantages on women. Contraception and abortion were thus achieved as constitutional rights. At the same time, leading feminist voices glamorized paid work and failed to pursue policies harmonizing motherhood with work outside the home. They played down differences between women and men, allowed the “ideal male worker” model to dominate women’s work lives, and let birth control and abortion policy constitute nearly the entire “women’s agenda.”

Alvaré suggests two responses. First to openly discuss and debate with peers "the nature and workings of the marketplace of relationships today," with the objective of "renewing female solidarity toward relinking sex, commitment, and children for the benefit of women, children, and men as well." Second to "cooperate on public and private policies enabling women to manage the demands and costs of education and employment, in harmony with their aspirations to marry and have children."