Free Birth Control on Demand for All!

White House Obstructs Morning-After Pill for Teens

It’s a good rule of thumb that if someone, somewhere, desperately needs help, the government will do its best to make sure they don’t get it. The Obama administration last month struck another blow for human misery—perhaps not its largest or worst, but painful enough—by refusing to allow girls under the age of 17 easy access to morning-after emergency contraceptives. A small tentacle of rationality had crept out from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) when the agency on December 7 approved the contraceptive “Plan B One-Step” for over-the-counter sales to anyone, regardless of age, who needs it. This move toward humaneness and common sense was promptly crushed by Obama and his Health and Human Services secretary Kathleen Sebelius the same day in an unprecedented overruling of the FDA. So now women 17 and older must still ask a pharmacist for the pill, while those younger must beg a doctor for a prescription, if they can even find one willing to give it to them in time.

Obama claimed patriarchal privilege “as the father of two daughters” in justifying the ban, an obvious ploy to cater to Christian fundamentalist voters for this year’s elections. Certainly, concern for young girls has nothing to do with it. This is a vicious attack on young women, particularly young black and Hispanic women who have the highest rate of teen pregnancy, reflecting their limited access to health care in this deeply racist, class-divided society. The vast majority of people start having sex in their teens and almost half of all girls have had heterosexual sex before their 17th birthday, most beginning at age 15 or 16. Yet in this irrational society abstinence is the agenda pushed in many “sex” education programs.

Obama and his “Health” secretary float above the apparently thorny issue of teenage pregnancy because they don’t want to deal with the dreaded “A-word” (abortion) or with the real needs of teens having babies. As of October 2011, 36 states require minors to get parental consent before seeking an abortion, and even then nearly 90 percent of counties have no abortion facilities at all.

Unrestricted access to contraception and abortion is essential for women, including teenagers, to have control over their own fertility. Leon Trotsky, co-leader with V.I. Lenin of the October 1917 Russian Revolution, wrote that birth control and abortion are among women’s “most important civil, political and cultural rights” (The Revolution Betrayed [1936]). We call for free abortion on demand as part of free, quality health care for all as well as free 24-hour childcare!

What idiotic justifications were made for denying the morning-after pill to younger teens? Secretary Sebelius claimed she was worried that 11-year-olds, some 10 percent of whom have begun menstruation, might not understand the label instructions. Outraged feminist Katha Pollitt pointed out on her Nation blog (8 December 2011): “Here are the instructions, courtesy of an alert commenter at www.nytimes.com: ‘Plan B One-Step dosage consists of a single tablet taken once. A second tablet or dose is not required. The Plan B One-Step tablet should be taken as soon as possible and not more than 72 hours (3 days) after unprotected intercourse or contraceptive failure.’ If a sixth grader can’t understand those elementary, crystal-clear instructions, we should just move back to the caves, because civilization is finished.”

U.S. civilization may not be finished, but it is moving backwards in a period characterized by vicious cycles of social reaction to buttress the decaying capitalist-imperialist order, upheld by Obama as much as by the foam-flecked Republican right he seeks to co-opt. Katha Pollitt and the feminists aren’t helping either; she bitterly commented that Obama “must be assuming” that pro-choice Democratic women “are captive voters—we have no place to go. That may be true.”

This is an honest confession from Pollitt of the losing lesser-evil strategy of “fight the right.” While Obama and the Democrats may seem rational in comparison to the frighteningly demented bible-thumping Republican lineup, the Democrats represent the interests of the same bourgeois ruling class. Both parties push their anti-sex agenda on young women, effectively condemning teens to early motherhood, yet both parties rule a society where poor, young, working-class women and their babies cannot thrive. Unemployment is endemic, higher education is increasingly unaffordable, and police brutality and imprisonment are “the future” for increasing numbers of minority youth.

The Obama administration’s ruling on the morning-after pill shows that the religion-drenched, cruel priorities of bourgeois electoral politics trump the needs of some of the most vulnerable members of society. Sexual repression is all about social control. The capitalist class seeks to buttress the family—the main social institution oppressing women—which along with organized religion and the state forms a triad that props up the exploitation of labor.

Opening the road to the expansion of human freedoms, including freedom of sexuality, requires socialist revolution to abolish the capitalist system of exploitation once and for all. For women’s liberation through socialist revolution!