Sex: the missing term from the contraception and abortion debate

Democrats call out the GOP's 'war on women' over birth control, but dare they whisper the idea of a sexually active woman?
romantic couple kissing behind an open book
Chloe Angyal: 'every woman is entitled to reproductive freedom, regardless of marital status.' Photograph: Bob Thomas/Popperfoto/Getty Images

Who takes birth control, and why?

Sociologist Michael Kimmel often encourages his students and readers to observe human culture from the perspective of a recently-arrived extraterrestrial tourist. It's a way to step back and free oneself slightly from just-so explanations about society, and sometimes, it produces surprising results.

A martian observing the political landscape in this election year would report back that, on Earth, birth control is a method used by mothers to make them better mothers. Sex? Sorry, our alien anthropologist shakes his presumably tentacled head. Never heard of it.

This year has seen an unprecedented number of attacks on contraception and abortion access in America. Thankfully, the result has been an unprecedented amount of public conversation about why contraception and abortion access are important and ought to be not just preserved, but expanded.

But more often than not, that conversation doesn't include sex. That is absurd: we are having a national discussion about birth control, without ever mentioning the basic human activity that can lead to birth.

When the Democrats and other pro-choicers argue for preserving and expanding access to birth control, they talk about pregnant rape survivors and mothers of three who want to ensure they can provide for the children they already have. They talk about Planned Parenthood's life-saving cancer screenings.

They don't talk about the millions of American women who aren't mothers and don't intend to be mothers, and just want to have sex. Lots of it. Purely for pleasure. Those millions of women get left out of this crucial conversation: their experiences obscured and stigmatized.

Of course, we need to ensure that pregnant rape survivors can get the morning after pill or abortions if they want them. It is true that 61% of women who have abortions are already mothers and are terminating pregnancies because they cannot provide the emotional and/or financial support that another child would need from them. And Planned Parenthood does, of course, provide life-saving cancer screenings and STI testing.

That is all true, and it should all be a part of the discussion about keeping contraception and abortion legal, accessible and affordable. But those can't be the only stories we tell about birth control.

A few weeks ago, Virginia Democratic state delegate Charniele Herring appeared on MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow show to talk about the restrictions being imposed on abortion clinics in her state. The restrictions, known as "Trap laws", are designed to make compliance impossible and closure inevitable. Herring made the case for the clinics in the manner that has become typical this year:

"These clinics provide healthcare. They provide preventative service, cancer screenings. That's things that keep us women alive and keep our bodies healthy so we can care for our families."

Yes, they do. They also provide birth control to women who haven't started a family yet, and maybe won't ever do so, but who want to have sex anyway.

We need to talk about families, but we also need to talk about sex. We need to talk about mothers, but we cannot ignore the existence and the rights of women who are not mothers. The GOP is waging a "War on Women", and the Democrats are fighting back – but only on behalf of certain kinds of women.


It boggles the mind that in a year when we all learned the phrase "transvaginal ultrasound", we are somehow still uncomfortable talking about why women like me and my friends take the pill. We don't take it so we can be good mothers, we take it so we can have good sex. There's nothing wrong with that. And as a party that claims to be fighting for women in this political war, the Democrats need to stop implying that there is. The same goes for the pro-choice advocates – myself included – who are speaking out against Republican encroachments on reproductive freedom.


We must stop pretending that this large group of American women does not exist. It's time to acknowledge the naked elephant in the room. I'm a member of that group, and we're starting to feel – any extraterrestrials living among us must forgive the word – rather alienated.