PLANK DECEMBER 18, 2012
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Lost amid the shock and horror of Friday's news was a remarkable op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who should no longer be called a "rising star" of the GOP. He commands attention by virtue of being smart, good at his job, and not a white guy. So it's significant that he chose to use his platform to break ranks with many social conservatives in his party by calling for over-the-counter sales of birth control pills.
Of course, Jindal did so by couching his argument in a hyper-partisan defensive posture, lashing out at "Democrats [who] demagogue the contraceptives issue and pretend, during debates about health-care insurance, that Republicans are somehow against birth control." Jindal recognizes that the vast majority of Americans support the use of contraception, and that the issue of access to contraception is a loser for Republicans. So he proposes to take the issue of birth control out of the political arena by endorsing a proposal from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) to allow adult women to purchase birth control pills over the counter. Women currently need a prescription to get birth control pills from a pharmacy.
In the op-ed, Jindal praised the ACOG proposal as "a common-sense call for reform that could yield a result everyone can embrace: the end of birth-control politics." Republicans haven't traditionally been terribly supportive of ACOG, an organization many conservatives believe is too sympathetic to abortion-rights supporters. In her confirmation hearings, Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan was questioned sharply by Republicans about her close work with ACOG during her time in the Clinton White House. And religious conservatives complained when they thought ACOG was insufficiently supportive of conscience protections for doctors who refuse to perform abortions.
Jindal's new support for expanded access to certain contraceptives is also surprising given his Catholic faith. A spokeswoman for the Archdiocese of New Orleans said on Friday that, "We disagree with the governor's opinion because, as the Catholic Church teaches, contraception is always wrong." It's also significant because—despite Jindal's protests that Democrats have unfairly portrayed Republicans as anti–birth control—Jindal's own political background includes actions that could be characterized as anti–birth control. As a member of Congress, he voted in favor of removing contraception from health programs abroad funded by U.S. foreign aid, and he cosponsored the Right to Life Act, which threatened to ban many popular forms of birth control.
Still, whether Jindal's column reflects a conversion or not, advocates who work to reduce the rates of abortion and unplanned pregnancy welcome such a high-profile politician to the cause. "This is just huge," says Sarah Brown, CEO of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy. "We need more people who identify themselves as opposed to abortion rights who are willing to find a way forward. This is a powerful way to reduce abortion, and he's saying you can be pro-life and pro-contraception."
I doubt Jindal's call will be echoed any time soon by other Catholic Republicans. But a growing group of evangelicals has also been vocal this fall about the need to promote family planning. Evangelical Protestants don't have the obstacle of church teaching against contraception the way Catholics do. In fact, in 2010, the National Association of Evangelicals conducted a poll of its board of directors and found that 90 percent of them approved of "artificial methods of contraception."
Given that position, the New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good—a group that includes heads of denominations and representations from evangelical organizations like missions and universities—released a 13-page "Call to Christian Common Ground on Family Planning and Maternal and Children's Health" in October 2012. The document was very blunt: "The research is not ambiguous. Contraception is credited with preventing an estimated 112 million abortions worldwide each year." It's very hard to reduce the abortion rate, the group argues, without supporting contraception. As a result, they want conservatives to stop blocking funding for family-planning efforts that provide both contraception and abortion.
It's unclear if Jindal would go that far. But if he wants to save his party from a losing issue, he'll have to do so.
13 comments
Maybe Governor Jindal will become a Democrat. Birth control pills, science - my goodness, what next?
- Sophia
December 18, 2012 at 2:11am
This is good reporting. Times change. Less now than before, but a frequent dinner conversation is people talking about their phones. I wonder what people would have said if I told them 30 years ago that dinner conversations would be people talking about their phones (What about? Color and cord length?). I wonder how colonists would have reacted if we told them there would be heavy political discussions about birth control. Would they think there had been sort of government takeover of our lives?
- Nusholtz
December 18, 2012 at 7:55am
I have thought for some time that Jindal is smart. This rather cinches the case. This is the kind of thing that could well rejuvenate the Republican party - if it doesn't tear it apart by revealing that half the party actually is seriously anti-contraception. Two other thoughts: First, the reflexive reaction by the local Catholic hierarchy is revealing. One wonders if the Catholic church will ever shed its historical fascination with the use of temporal means for the enforcement of church orthodoxy. However opposed to contraception by its faithful the church may be, expecting that to be enforced by the government through drug regulation is a strange theological position. Second, I have long thought that Democrats could do with some similar iconoclastic ideas to break certain stalemates in our political process. My favorite would be for Democrats to propose and promote the complete elimination of the corporate income tax, with the revenue replaced by a corresponding, progressive, bump in individual rates (including in capital gains rates). The corporate income tax is much beloved by liberals, who feel a need to extract money from successful corporations, but it is so widely manipulated, so much the subject of corrosive lobbying by this and that industry, and so good at encouraging business to park their profits overseas by various accounting dodges, we'd almost certainly be better off without it. Just the reduction in excuses for K street tax-provision-authoring lobbyists would be worth it. Plus, the government ought to belong to the people, and the people should thus pay for it. Corporations are not, and should not be considered to be, people.
- IowaBeauty
December 18, 2012 at 8:12am
Jindal is a hypocrite pure and simple. He argues against taxes on the citizens of his own state yet accepts $10.5B, yup, that's billion $$s of Federal money (that's money from all us non-Louisiana citizens) to rebuild the flood control system after Katrina. Now the argument might be that New Orleans is an important port and that's correct but how much of the flood control protects the port area versus some 250,000 citizens. I don't care what his views are on OTC birth control his views on fiscal issues are straight Tea Party and on those grounds alone disqualification for any consideration of higher office.
- agoldhammer@yahoo.com-old
December 18, 2012 at 10:26am
Color me skeptical about Jindal's idea. It seems like it would be very easy to undermine this supposedly sensible idea with a host of other policies that make non-pill birth control harder to access and which generally limit OBGYN health care for women. And Jindal's concession seems to be to be minor in terms of the pill itself--are there really a lot of barriers to obtaining a birth control pill prescription? Okay, I've expressed my skepticism...but at least this moves things forward.
- polcereal
December 18, 2012 at 11:41am
Corporate income tax: interesting thought Iowa - but - I disagree. Corporations make big bucks from America, and this includes our gigantic defense system, the least of which is the "war on terror." More important: naval power and the Army Corps of Engineers, which has been vital in maintaining/repairing ports and waterways which enable commerce. And what about air and rail? The highway system? Somebody needs to help pay for all that. It's incredibly expensive. It also, desperately, needs maintenance and updating. This is true also of pioneering space/satellite/electronic technology that is now a vital part of business and commerce. These were originally taxpayer funded. Same with aerospace. There isn't a jetliner flying today which wasn't a direct heiress of the war machine in one way or another, from computers that help fly planes to the composite skin of the 787. So? Why shouldn't the companies which benefit from all this government, ie, people's investment, help pay for it?
- Sophia
December 18, 2012 at 12:20pm
Count me as a skeptic too. OTC sales would make insurers very, very happy. OTC drugs are not covered by any insurance policy and probably never will be. Also, as another commenter mentioned, OTC sales would likely reduce routine gynecological checkups.
- lindamwil1
December 18, 2012 at 1:53pm
I'm skeptical about Jindal's proposal as well, but I find it encouraging that evangelical organizations are realizing that if they really want to reduce abortions, they have to support contraception. It has always puzzled me that so many of the 'pro-life" people were also opposed to the best way of preventing abortions. The only conclusion I could draw was that they were not so much "pro-life" as anti-sex.
- VAliberal
December 18, 2012 at 2:28pm
I'd agree, mslyman, we often underestimate the complicated weave of pleasure and guilt that shapes people's attitudes to issues of intimacy, so to speak. You cannot be openly sex-positive in public life in America (and to be fair in quite a few other countries too, and I'm not even talking about the Islamic world). There is a default button-down solemnity in the US that, very occasionally, politicians get to break away from. Women have a slightly easier task doing that in some ways, but not in others. It's risky.
- ironyroad
December 18, 2012 at 3:11pm
"This is good reporting. Times change. Less now than before, but a frequent dinner conversation is people talking about their phones. I wonder what people would have said if I told them 30 years ago that dinner conversations would be people talking about their phones (What about? Color and cord length?). I wonder how colonists would have reacted if we told them there would be heavy political discussions about birth control. Would they think there had been sort of government takeover of our lives?" Good idea for a novel, Nusholtz. If I ever write it, I'll give credit to "Nush." "Jindal's new support for expanded access to certain contraceptives is also surprising given his Catholic faith." It's not surprising to Catholics. I understand that a solid majority of them use birth control.
- magboy47.
December 18, 2012 at 8:33pm
"So? Why shouldn't the companies which benefit from all this government, ie, people's investment, help pay for it?" Good question, Sophia. In 2010 G.E., which made many billions of dollars of profit in the defense industry that year, most of it from price gouging and cost overruns, then hired 2,400 tax lawyers, and presto! G.E. not only didn't pay any federal income tax for 2010, but stuck the taxpayers with a $4 billion REFUND. Corporate America often gouges the taxpayers and then refuses to pay taxes itself. To answer your question as to why they think they shouldn't pay taxes--it's because they're arrogant cowards. They're very much like churches in that respect. Churches don't pay taxes and collectively get in the neighborhood of a trillion dollars of free money annually from different levels of government, and then they want to dictate to we Americans what we can do and what we can't do. Again, arrogant cowards.
- magboy47.
December 18, 2012 at 8:53pm
Bobby's a clever boy. After his appalling Mr. Rogers impersonation after O's first SOTU, he's back to brass tacks as a policy nerd extroidinaire. This is a good, bi-partisan, idea.
- Robert Powell
December 19, 2012 at 3:19pm
I seldom vote Republican. Even so, we need two parties whatever we call them. I keep hoping that someone smarter than the worst idiots of the right will arise. I was hoping that Christie and Jindal might be leading the way. This issue rips both of them new holes. As far as birth control and abortion I am an Ernst Beckerian. Humans pursue "immortality projects" to avoid our existential despair about death. Two of the most common are making little copies of ourselves and praying to a non-existent deity and believing that we don't realy die. Sex is a lot of fun; then we see little copies. What's not to like? Most evangelicals i know are in denial about overpopulation and hysterical about killing fetuses. And even an ethical nihilist such as I am iz uncomfortable with casual abortion as a method of birth control.
- skahn
December 19, 2012 at 11:42pm