Contraception and the Coming of Secularism: Reconsidering Reproductive Freedom as Religious Freedom

When a woman slips a diaphragm snugly against her cervix or swallows a pill at the same time every morning so that she can engage in sexual intercourse with a man without becoming pregnant, what is the nature of her act, and who decides? More than half a century ago, the Supreme Court of the United States legalized contraception for married (implicitly) heterosexual couples across the nation. In a 1965 ruling on Griswold v. Connecticut, in which Estelle Griswold was fighting to keep open her Planned Parenthood birth control clinic in the face of state attempts to shut it, the court ruled that the constitutional right to privacy entailed that married couples had the freedom to use contraceptive tools to prevent pregnancy. By 1972, the Supreme Court had extended the right to access contraception to all people, married or unmarried (Gordon 2002). Since that time, academics and church leaders alike have often pinpointed the legalization of contraception as a key juncture in the rise of what they called a secular society, in which women and men made decisions about what to do with their bodies without guidance from religious, mostly Christian, teachings.^[1]

Five decades later, a 2014 Supreme Court ruling heightened the presumed secularity of contraception, but this time by limiting women’s access to contraceptives. In a case that turned not on the right to privacy but the right to religious freedom, appellants challenged what was called the ‘contraceptive mandate’ in President Obama’s Affordable Care Act (ACA), by which employers were required to provide insurance plans that covered contraceptive costs. In an interesting twist for legal scholars, the evangelical Christian owners of Hobby Lobby, a craft supplies company with a workforce made up largely of women, deployed an innovative use of religious freedom. Hobby Lobby’s lawyers successfully argued that the government was infringing not only the owners’ right but also the corporation’s right to religious freedom by mandating the company to provide insurance that gave their employees access to contraception such as IUDs and emergency contraceptives (Gedicks 2015; Griffin 2015; Sepinwall 2015). In the wake of the 2016 election and the subsequent attacks on the ACA, the Republican government further weakened the contraceptive mandate, continuing to frame it as an infringement of religious freedom.

In this chapter, I ask how this shift came about: How did a woman’s access to contraception move from being understood as part of her constitutional right to privacy to becoming legally recognized as an inherent threat to the religious freedom of others, both people and corporations, far removed from the realm of her intimate relations? Has a tacit agreement that contraception is secular helped religious freedom to trump reproductive freedom? Whose arguments and experiences have been narrated in this shift? Which genres of testimony – theology, medical evidence, poetry – are given authority, and by whom? My answer, in part, rests on analysing changing definitions of the ‘religious’ and the ‘secular’ and the pressing weight these words can levy on the bodies of women.