‘We won’t go back’ to a pre-Roe v. Wade society. We don’t have to

On Aug. 5, Greene Square in Cedar Rapids was briefly visited by a 20-foot tall inflatable model of an IUD, or intrauterine device named “Freeda Womb.”

“Women don't talk about their IUD, and certainly not in public,” reads the Americans for Contraception website. “So Freeda is standing up for herself, making herself known, and making sure if people come for her, she will be standing tall in defense of our freedoms.”

(Yes, apparently the 20-foot inflatable IUD has not only a name, but a gender.)

Last week, Freeda was in Chicago, parked outside the Democratic National Convention. Also outside the convention only blocks away from the United Center was a large mobile trailer owned by Planned Parenthood, out of which the organization offered free vasectomies and medication abortions.

That’s right — 20 to 30 lucky individuals got to climb up into a trailer to be given pills to induce an abortion or get their vas deferens snipped.

Democrats are weird.

Of course, this important political message is part of the mobilization against restrictive abortion laws implemented in multiple states after the Dobbs v. Jackson Supreme Court ruling of June 2022 returned the question of how to regulate abortion back to individual states.

Believe it or not, this Republican does not favor restrictive abortion laws, including Iowa’s recently-effectuated law prohibiting abortions after detection of what is legally assumed to be a heartbeat, which usually around six weeks into a pregnancy.

Don’t get me wrong — I believe abortion is immoral. I believe human life is sacred, including in the womb, and I believe that the desire to not have a child is not sufficient reason to have an abortion.

But I also understand that prohibition cannot be applied with surgical precision, especially via law. Because of that, some will invariably find themselves caught between the law’s good intentions and its unintended consequences. Despite our age of advanced medical technology, there still is too much that can go wrong at six weeks into a pregnancy that threaten the health and even the life of the mother without legal hurdles for a physician to clear before they intervene to evacuate a failed pregnancy.

But if I can’t agree with the Republican position on abortion for technical reasons, I can’t agree with Democrats’ position for logical reasons. The rhetoric from the Democratic left isn’t that anti-abortion politicians should ease up; their position is the extreme insistence that any and all restrictions on abortion, regardless of gestation, are nothing more than a means to control women’s bodies.

While percentages suggest a rarity of late-term abortions, even 0.9% of the 625,798 abortions performed at 21 or more weeks of gestation in amounts to over 5,600 lives lost via late-term abortion in 2023. That’s a lot of human beings.

Democrats claim that returning abortion to the states, some of which have passed stringent abortion laws, will rob women of the choice to control their own bodies and avoid unintended pregnancy. But they forget about the decades of social progress women have made since Roe v. Wade.

“We won’t go back” to those limited options, Democrats say.

The good news is that don’t have to. We women of childbearing age have so many resources available to us today that our mothers could never have dreamed of.

Our mothers grew up in the 1960s, 70s and 80s when sex ed curriculum focused largely on anatomy and puberty, the conception and birthing process and preparation for family life. Learning was done primarily via pamphlets and awkwardly staged films that by today’s standards seem nothing less than archaic.

Most, if not all questions about sexual activity itself weren’t covered in the classroom, so our mothers — and our fathers — didn’t have the same information available to them as teenagers that future generations would.

This was in part because of resistance to sex ed over fears that it would lead to more teen sexual activity and unplanned pregnancy, which were still terribly taboo at the time. This taboo is highlighted in one sex ed film from 1964, which shows a single mother leaving the hospital carrying her newborn baby right behind a married couple leaving with theirs.

“Because it is socially and morally not accepted,” says the film’s narrator, “It can cause sorrow and heartache to the unwed mother. To raise and support the child, she’s without the help of a husband.”

While the married couple leaves in a car after the father places the newborn in his wife’s arms in the front seat, the “unwed” mother walks down the front steps of the hospital carrying her baby and her suitcase by herself and begins the journey home on foot.

“There is only one sure way to avoid undesired pregnancy, the narrator says as the film ends. “Avoid sexual intercourse.”

While multiple forms of contraception existed in the 1960s and 1970s, availability and accessibility paled in comparison to what exists today. The first birth control pill, Enovid, was approved in 1960, but some states prohibited the sale of oral contraceptives to unmarried women as late as 1972. Diaphragms and cervical caps were available only by prescription and required the use of spermicide for best results. Like condoms, their effectiveness could be easily compromised if they were not used properly.

Those of us who were adolescents in the 1980s and 90s fared somewhat better when learning about human sexuality. Although the HIV and AIDS pandemic beginning in the 1980s prompted a new nationwide focus on abstinence-only sex education, its scope expanded to include the development of personal maturity and healthy relationships.

One of the earliest lessons from my 10th grade Perspectives on Life class at Linn-Mar High School in 2000 was on famed psychologist Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs from his paper on human motivation. I can still recite them in order from memory: Physical, safety, belonging, self-esteem and self-actualization.

We Gen Xers and Millennials who attended Linn-Mar were fortunate. The same teacher who taught Maslow’s hierarchy to the 10th-graders began the class unit on human sexuality by telling us that there was nothing she wanted to impress upon us more as teenagers than “abstinence, abstinence, abstinence.” She was also a realist, however. By the end of the quarter, we were also familiar with the various methods of contraception available for use, including some that are now largely obsolete such as the female condom.

Contraception had come a long way by then. A solution containing the hormone progestin was approved in 1992 for use as an injection called Depo-Provera, known to us as “the birth control shot.” By the time we started college, all of my female friends and I were talking about Ortho Evra, or “the patch” -as an alternative to birth control pills, the use of which had now been commonplace for decades.

By the time most of us had left college in the mid-to-late 2000s, my female peers and I were seeing ads for contraceptive devices like the Nuva Ring, which is inserted in the vagina and delivers hormones directly to the uterus. The emergency contraceptive pill Plan B had become a household name, and more long-term birth control options such as the Mirena IUD and other hormonal implants were becoming more widely used. 64 years after the first birth control pill revolutionized human sexuality, a daily pill to prevent pregnancy is seen by many women as a less appealing option.

All of that progress puts the childbearing women of today in a better position than anyone who came before them. Today, contraception — in many forms — is available in abundance, either covered by insurance or at out-of-pocket costs that are as little as $7 per month for a generic version of the pill. In 28 states, the pill is available without a prescription. Gov. Kim Reynolds has introduced legislation to make birth control pills, patches and rings available without a prescription in Iowa. If that becomes law, Iowan women could face bigger risks from the side effects of the pill itself than those associated with unplanned pregnancy.

And while smartphones and social media pose a constant threat to the mental and emotional health of the 95% of American teenagers who have a smartphone, the same avenues through which they can be influenced with harmful content can also provide them with ways to find instant answers to their questions, whether via Google search or regularly watching videos from licensed physicians who have set up their own social media channels to educate viewers on sexual and reproductive health.

There is so much that today’s childbearing-aged women can do to prevent an unintended pregnancy before abortion ever factors into the discussion. We’re a long way from the days when women and girls with little information and few resources would turn to back-alley abortionists.

We all want to avoid the limitations our mothers faced in the past. To do that, we have to be wise enough to know what’s available to us in the present. And we have to know that whatever the laws say, we have always been in control of our futures.

Comments; 319-398-8266; althea.cole@thegazette.com