Summer of Love?

To the majority of college students, summer is about getting laid. On a more refined level though, it is about sexual freedom thanks to the 1967 Summer of Love which went hand in hand with low-cost birth control and reproductive rights. So how did President George W. Bush mark the fortieth anniversary of free love? In true Orwellian style of course: pushing up birth control prices and passing more pro-life legislation.
By revising the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005, a law which previously offered incentives encouraging drug companies to provide discounted birth control to low-cost health care providers, the Bush administration has forced many health clinics across the country to hike up their prices. Whereas the cost of birth control at student and community health clinics was once $10 a month, it is now anywhere from $30 to $50. Not surprisingly, the law is putting pressure on women now scrambling to find an extra $200 or so a year to spend on birth control. As a friend of mine told me, though she knows she can switch to her parents’ insurance plan, doing so would sacrifice the privacy she had at her college’s clinic.

Though my friend, who uses the more expensive NuvaRing—a popular method that delivers hormones through a vaginal insert—can switch to a cheaper alternative, changing birth control isn’t fun as there are many side effects: nausea, weight gain, weight loss. But the new law doesn’t just affect the individual woman—if prices aren’t reduced soon, family clinics serving low-income women may be forced to shut down, leaving poor women with fewer resources from which to choose. But then again, Bush never cared about poor women. As Allison Steven’s points out in her Ms. magazine article “Sticker Shock,” “In every year he has held office, Bush has sought to freeze Title X funding, which pays basic operating costs at more than 4,500 family planning clinics serving millions of low-income women.” According to the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, Title X funding is now 61 percent lower than it was in 1980; had it kept up with inflation, clinics would receive more than $725 million a year instead of the current $283 million.

Not to worry though—we still have 4,000 “crisis pregnancy centers,” fake pro-choice clinics in which volunteers in lab coats show women graphic pictures of aborted fetuses and send them home with baby booties.

While Bush has cut financing for Title X, he has found plenty of dough to shell out for abstinence-only education, increasing federal funding from $80 million to $176 million. But as the Department of Health and Human Services April report showed, this method does little to prevent young people from getting it on. Not that anyone needed an official study to confirm that ripping a tape off a volunteer’s arms to symbolize what it feels like to be a used ho-bag is an ineffective way to teach sex.

If Bush’s aim is to reduce the number of abortions in America, why would he reduce funding for the very resources which prevent them? According to studies, contraception reduces abortion by 85 percent. As Cristina Page writes in How the Pro-Choice Movement Saved America: Freedom, Politics, and the War on Sex, “Imagine the outrage if the National Cancer Institute’s strategy was to discourage the use of the most successful cancer preventatives and instead tried to ban them.” Though some would argue that the use of contraception is a touchy subject for pro-life advocates, more than 85 percent of Catholics in America believe they should be able to practice effective means of birth control. It is largely because of this religious support that right-wing fundamentalists are now recasting birth control as abortion itself. As Army of God states on its Web site, “Birth control is evil and a sin ... why would you stop your own child from being conceived ... What kind of human being are you?” The irony of these pathos-inducing claims, as David Grimes, one of the world’s leading contraceptive experts, has pointed out, is that they actually lead to more unplanned pregnancies and abortions.

It was no coincidence that Clinton’s term was marked by the lowest number of abortions this country had seen in 25 years. As studies have shown, countries with the lowest abortion rates have liberal laws, well-financed contraceptive programs, and comprehensive sexual education. Conversely, nations with pro-life laws and abstinence-only programs increased the “partial-birth” abortions Bush so despises. When the majority of Americans have sex by age 16, it is ignorant to legislate with a virginal complex. It’s about time someone teach Bush a thing or two about the birds and the bees.

The author is a Barnard College junior majoring in English.