The Right's Bitter Pill

Carole Joffe
May 05, 2005
Carole Joffe is a professor of sociology at the University of California, Davis, and a senior fellow at the Longview Institute.

“Contraceptive use in the United States is virtually universal among women of reproductive age: 98% of all women who have ever had intercourse had used at least one contraceptive method...82% had ever used the oral contraceptive pill.”

The above quote, from a recent CDC report on the use of contraception in the United States, points to the futility of current campaigns in this country to limit women’s access to contraception. Birth control is not only widely used, it is strongly supported by Americans. (Some 80 percent, in a recent poll, believed that contraception should be covered by all health insurance plans.) This does not bode well for the prospects of one of the most unusual new fronts in the never-ending abortion war in this country—the growing instances of "pro-life" pharmacists who refuse to fill prescriptions for oral contraceptives—a.k.a. the pill.