Contraception: Is the GOP waging war on women?

“What year is it again?” said Patt Morrison in the Los Angeles Times. Anyone watching Rep. Darrell Issa’s congressional hearing on the Obama administration’s contraception policy last week might have felt as if they’d stepped into the 1950s. The conservative Republican, who is chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, initially did not invite a single woman to testify, and in fact, rejected one woman who wanted to talk about her need for birth-control pills to address a medical problem. Instead, five male clergymen appeared before the first panel; after an uproar, Issa then brought in two token women who sided with the Catholic Church’s moral condemnation of contraception. No wonder three of the panel’s Democratic members walked out in protest. “I feel like I’m waking up on the set of Mad Men,” said Sen. Patty Murray (D‑Wash.). Have Republicans completely lost their minds? said Michelle Goldberg in The​DailyBeast.com. Now, they’re not only vowing to ban abortion, they’re challenging the need and morality of contraception even for married women. For the GOP, this could be another “Terri Schiavo moment.”

No one should be surprised, said The New Republic in an editorial. Ever since the Republicans took control of the House of Representatives last year, this heavily religious, male-dominated party has displayed a regressive—even radical—attitude toward women’s rights. First came the GOP’s attempts to defund Planned Parenthood last year. Then, the “casually ugly” statements of conservatives like Rick Santorum, who has smugly called for all abortions to be criminalized even in the case of rape or incest; last week, his billionaire backer Foster Friess crudely joked that back in the good old days, contraception consisted of telling women to “place aspirin between their legs,” so they’d keep ’em closed. Over the last 40 years, women have successfully fought for equality in this society, “and the ability of women to make their own reproductive decisions has been a central part of this revolution.” Republicans have put women on notice that these advances are all in jeopardy.

There’s no “war” on women, said Rich Lowry in National​Review​.com. Liberals would like to persuade female voters that their access to contraception is in danger, but that’s nonsense. “By any reasonable standard, we are one of the most lavishly contracepted societies in the history of the planet.” Some 99 percent of sexually active women have used some method of birth control, and condoms are cheap and available in almost every drugstore in the nation, “with no stigma attached.” The real war here is on religious liberty, said Kathryn Jean Lopez, also in National​Review.com. Obama’s policy on mandatory contraception coverage treats “pregnancy as a disease,” and dismisses as irrelevant those who deeply disagree. “It’s not about sex; it’s about tyranny.”

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If you want to talk about tyranny, said Dahlia Lithwick in Slate​.com, then let’s look at what Republicans are now doing in Virginia. This week, the state legislature passed a bill requiring all women to submit to an ultrasound before having an abortion. Since most abortions take place before the heartbeat is detectable from outside the body, the ultrasounds will be conducted by a vaginal probe. That’s right: In order to exercise their constitutional right to an abortion, women will be “forcibly penetrated” and humiliated at the whim of the state. In any other set of circumstances, “that would constitute rape.” The Virginia bill is a major tactical error by Republicans, said David Frum in TheDaily​Beast.com. In general, conservatives had the high moral ground here. With his contraception mandate, Obama trampled over the long-standing tradition of giving religious institutions an exemption from rules that conflict with their religious teachings. But now conservatives are engaging in extremism of their own; when they compel “physical intrusion into women’s bodies” in Virginia, it “dangerously complicates the narrative.”

In coming weeks and months, the battle of perceptions will be critical, said Gerald F. Seib in The Wall Street Journal. If Democrats succeed in portraying this philosophical conflict as a war on women, then the political rewards will be immense—polls show that 80 percent of voters “don’t consider birth control wrong.” But if Republicans can frame it as a “question of religious liberty,” the benefits will be almost as great—about 50 percent of Americans disapprove of Obama’s mandate on religious institutions. The party that wins the perception battle may wind up with control of Congress, and the White House, in 2012.