Contraception Conversations

It was one of those awkward conversations that I wish I would have handled differently. The subject of birth control came up, and I actually asked the girl I was dating at the time, "We are using birth control, aren't we?"

Yeah, I know.

She chucked and patted my hand. "Don't worry, sweetie," she said, "I've got it taken care of."

That long-ago conversation, which took place at a time when condoms weren't sitting out on the shelves in the Personal Care section of your local Wal-Mart, came roaring back to my consciousness when the nation's media recently started talking about contraception. A lot.

The excuse for the eruption of contraception conversation was a rule created under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act--yes, Obamacare--requiring religious organizations to cover birth control pills without copay for employees. Oh, that's for employees of such entities as hospitals and universities that receive federal money and employee people who are not members of the religion. It's a rule that's a matter of law in several states, and it's something many Catholic hospitals and universities just follow as policy.

But America's Catholic bishops were geared up and waiting for the announcement of the rule and executed a well-organized campaign against it, including personal statements and suggestions that parishioners lobby their Congressmen and Senators. According to the bishops, this was an unprecedented attack on religious freedom.

Republicans became Catholics in a heartbeat, including the Southern Baptists, because nothing gets a Republican's heart racing like an attack on religious freedom. Just ask the Muslims who wanted to build that community center in Manhattan.Even better, getting the nation talking about contraception, especially birth control pills, gets into an area that some Republicans have been quietly pushing for a while now.

By "quietly pushing," I mean they don't talk about it on Fox and Friends.

That doesn't mean they're not serious about it. Republicans in some states are trying to amend state constitutions to say that life begins at conception. Since the birth control pill works by preventing a fertilized egg from implanting in the wall of the uterus, these Republicans say the birth control pill is essentially a form of abortion, which they want to outlaw in all cases.

In case that's too subtle, let me spell it out: Some Republicans want to outlaw birth control pills. Period.

American bishops have their own reason for deciding to pick this particular fight on contraception and, really, they still have to answer for decades of child sexual abuse by parish priests before I will give their moral outrage any merit. And polls suggest that most parishioners choose their own path on contraception.

But the Republicans are serious, and they're in this for the long game. They want to abolish contraception. If they get their way, that conversation I had so long ago will never be repeated by anyone. For all the wrong reasons.