The Purity Myth

by Jessica Valenti

  A similar component of informed consent laws is ultrasounds—more specifically, requiring women to view an ultrasound before obtaining an abortion. (Again, so that they understand the whole “abortion” thing.)

  Twelve states have an ultrasound-related requirement built into their abortion laws.20 This means that the doctor is required to perform an ultrasound, and in some cases must ask the patient to view it. Disregard for the moment that an ultrasound requirement can add up to $200 to the already high cost of getting an abortion; what’s even more distressing is that this requirement assumes, yet again, that women don’t understand what an abortion is. And the reasoning behind the ultrasound requirement is definitely not coming from a place of informed consent. Its purpose is to shame women into thinking that if they really knew they were getting an abortion—”killing” a “separate” being—they wouldn’t have one.

  When Kansas senator Sam Brownback introduced the Ultrasound Informed Consent Act in 2007, which required women seeking abortions to have an ultrasound, he didn’t say he was concerned that women weren’t getting all the information they needed to make the best decision for themselves and their families. No, instead Senator Brownback said that he was hopeful that the bill would “cause a deeper reflection on the humanity of unborn children.” Deeper ref lection—because clearly, a woman who has taken a pregnancy test, found out she is unexpectedly pregnant, discussed her options with her family, decided to terminate the pregnancy, made an appointment at a women’s health clinic, gotten dressed in one of those terrible paper gowns, gotten on the doctor’s table, and put her feet in the gyno-stirrups hasn’t thought about her pregnancy enough.21bv

  And as if feeling compelled to explain to pregnant women that abortions are abortions and fetuses are fetuses weren’t bad enough, other legislation mandates outright lie to women. Informed consent laws in Texas and Mississippi require doctors to tell women that abortion and breast cancer are linked. The problem is, they aren’t. Yet, despite studies and statements from highly regarded medical groups, like the National Cancer Institute, that refute any such connection, the virginity movement continues to promote this falsity in abstinence-only education, in its lobbying work, and now in five states’abortion legislation.22 What better way to scare women than to tell them that a perfectly safe procedure could actually give them cancer?

  Another kind of paternalism that’s surfaced in the abortion debate is the idea that women who have abortions are victims—of the men who impregnated them, of abortion providers who are just in it for the money. From this standpoint, anyone is responsible—except the woman getting the abortion. This line of reasoning serves several purposes: First, it enables the woman-as-moral-child model that’s so pervasive in virginity-movement thinking (and evident in informed consent laws). How can poor, unknowing women be blamed for medical procedures that they just can’t mentally grasp? The other, more politically savvy purpose is that it allows anti-choice leaders and legislators to dodge questions about criminalizing women who have abortions.

  After all, if abortion becomes illegal, then women who have abortions would go to prison. But anti-choice activists can’t say that they want women to go to jail—most Americans would never support that. It’s a political reality that they don’t want to own up to.

  In 2005, for example, a team of pro-choice activists filmed anti-abortion advocates trying to answer the question “If Roe were overturned, should women who have illegal abortions be punished?” If so, what should their punishment be?

  The video made the rounds in the political and feminist blogosphere, gaining attention for the fact that not one protestor was able to answer these questions. They all cited women as “victims” of doctors, or simply said they had never thought about the question.23

  In 2007, then-presidential hopeful Republican Mike Huckabee responded similarly to the question: “I think if a doctor knowingly took the life of an unborn child for money, and that’s why he was doing it, yeah, I think you would, you would find some way to sanction that doctor. . . . I think you don’t punish the woman, first of all, because it’s not about . . . I consider her a victim, not a criminal.”bw24

  By painting women as victims, the virginity movement doesn’t have to deal with the political fallout—a lot less support for its cause—of saying that women who have abortions belong in prison.

  It’s also telling that Huckabee assumes abortion providers are men. (I suppose that makes it easier to portray them as taking advantage of poor widdle women.) Yet again, we’re seeing the women-don’t-realize-they’re-getting-abortions-when-they-get-abortions argument in action.

  This kind of thinly veiled condescension is also evident in the earlier mentioned trend of pharmacists’ refusing to give women contraception. The pharmacist assumes hebx knows best, ignoring the decision made between a woman and her doctor. Not only is this invasive and presumptuous—it’s also sometimes illegal.

  For example, a pharmacist at Kmart, Dan Gransinger, wrote in an Arizona Republic letter to the editor in 2005 that pharmacists who take issue with dispensing EC should simply lie to their female customers:The pharmacist should just tell the patient that he is out of the medication and can order it, but it will take a week to get here. The patient will be forced to go to another pharmacy because she has to take these medicines within 72 hours for them to be effective. Problem solved .25

  Something is amiss when a pharmacist can write to a local paper and unabashedly, and without fear of consequences, advocate breaking the law and lying to female customers.

  One woman (who preferred not to be named, for fear of losing her job), a Wal-Mart pharmacy employee, emailed me to say that her supervising pharmacist refused to stock EC—a violation of store policy.

  We are not allowed to order it, and if some comes in from the warehouse , he immediately arranges for it to be sent back. If someone calls asking for Plan B, we’re supposed to say that we’ve run out of stock. This pharmacist apparently has NO problem dispensing birth control or Viagra, Cialis, or Levitra, however. [And] it’s not just Plan B that pharmacists refuse to dispense. There have been two specific occasions that I can recall where women have brought in prescriptions for Cytotec and a pain pill, which is often used when women have had a miscarriage to pass any tissue that may be left. This pharmacist immediately began to question the doctor’s prescription and whether it was being used to cause an abortion. In both instances, he wound up talking to the women about it, I guess so he could have a “clear conscience.” One of the women had her young son with her, and she had to tell him to step aside so she could explain to the pharmacist that, yes, she had had a miscarriage and that was why the doctor had prescribed [Cytotec].

  Shocking, indeed, but this kind of paternalism is par for the course in the virginity movement. Pharmacists for Life International, a group of extremist anti-choice pharmacists, are even organizing to make it easier to deny women contraceptives—and the ideology behind their actions is steeped in patronization. In a Washington Post article profiling the group, pharmacist Lloyd Duplantis said, “After researching the science behind steroidal contraceptives, I decided they could hurt the woman and possibly hurt her unborn child. I decided to opt out.”by26 The actual woman and what she wants are not even part of the equation—because, again, the assumption is that she can’t make decisions for herself.

  Behind all this paternalism is a simple distrust of women. The virginity movement doesn’t just believe that women can’t be trusted to make decisions about their bodies—it believes men can make those decisions better.

  A group of legislators in Ohio, for example, proposed a bill in 2007 that would give men control of whether a woman could have an abortion. The bill would prevent women from getting an abortion without a written note of consent from the father of the fetus. Permission slips aside, if a woman seeking an abortion didn’t know who the father of the fetus is, she would not be allowed to obtain an abortion. In this particular legislation, distrust of women manifests itse
lf even more clearly in the stipulation that women would be required to present a police report if they wanted to “prove” that the pregnancy was a result of rape or incest—because their word is not enough. (Not to mention, how does a young woman “prove” incest unless she reports her parent or relative—something that is too scary and prohibitive for many girls? That may be precisely the point.)27 The bill is still being considered.

  Similarly sexist attitudes are at play in “marriage promotion” programs—which some women have to attend in order to receive their welfare benefits.

  In 2006, President Bush committed $500 million to the Healthy Marriage Initiative as part of the welfare-reform bill reauthorization. Instead of funding antipoverty measures that have proven successful—like education, childcare, and job training—this initiative supports programs (often religious) that tell women that marriage—not more education or a better-paying job—will save them from poverty. The idea is that women can’t escape poverty on their own—best that they marry out of it. But, of course, many women in poverty marry men in a similar economic position.

  And while the “healthy marriage” rhetoric sounds innocuous, its goal is most certainly not. This isn’t about helping welfare recipients have “healthy” marriages; it’s about ensuring that they have traditional marriagesbz—namely, marriages in which women don’t work. Instead of encouraging a two-income household, the classes teach women that it’s better for them to stay home and support their husbands.

  Given the promotion of family values that goes hand in hand with these programs, it’s noteworthy that in 2004, one of the Bush administration’s first marriage-promotion programs was charged with sex discrimination. The Pennsylvania-based marriage education course for unmarried couples with children offered employment services—but only to the men in the program. Another government-funded program, the biblically based Marriage Savers, makes the case that marriage is good for income because women can help men do better at their jobs by being, well, housewifely: “The married man won’t go to work hungover, exhausted, or tardy because of fewer bachelor habits, and because he eats better and sees the doctor sooner, thanks to his wife. She is also a good adviser on career decisions, and relieves him of chores, so he can do a better job.”29

  Never mind that women are 40 percent more likely than men to be poor, and that 90 percent of welfare recipients are women. Better that we’re married than given the opportunity to be educated and receive work training. Fear of women being unmarried—especially women with children—trumps logic when it comes to battling poverty. It’s literally more important to the virginity movement that American women adhere to traditional gender and sex roles than that they are able to make a living wage. (Add common stereotypes about “welfare moms” with hordes of children, and it makes sense that these federally funded programs are so keen to marry off poor women.)

  That’s really what paternalistic policies come down to—what men want and what men think is best for women. And, sadly, too many of the menca who are making decisions about women and their health are very much invested in the purity myth, which tells them unmarried, sexually active women are bad, wrong, and in need of help, and allows them to create legislation that limits women’s rights and opportunities with a clear conscience.

  PURE PUNISHMENT

  In 2007, while in Atlanta at the National Summit to Ensure the Health and Humanity of Pregnant and Birthing Women, I heard a story that forever changed the way I think about women, law, and punishment.

  Laura Pemberton told a roomful of pro-choice activists, midwives, doulas, and feminist organizers how she was taken from her Florida home—while in active labor—shackled, and forced to undergo a cesarean section she did not want. Pemberton had wanted to have a vaginal home birth, but when she became dehydrated during labor, she decided to go to the hospital to receive fluids. When a doctor noticed a scar from a previous C-section, the hospital staff panicked—many doctors won’t perform a vaginal delivery (VBAC) after a cesarean section. They told Pemberton that she wouldn’t be able to give birth vaginally, and that she would have to stay at the hospital. She refused, and went home to continue her labor. (She actually had to sneak out of the hospital, as the staff had called the district attorney to come and compel her to get surgery.)

  Once she was back at home, a sheriff came to her house, at which point her legs were shackled together and she was forced to go to the hospital, where a hearing was being held about the rights of the fetus—her child. A lawyer had been appointed to her unborn child, but not to Pemberton. After being forced to have surgery, Pemberton sued. She lost. The state told Pemberton that her rights hadn’t been violated; doctors could operate on her without her permission because the rights of her fetus—as defined by the state—trumped her own.cb

  I was particularly struck by this woman, who was devoutly religious and pro-life but had come to talk about her experience to a mostly pro-choice audience. “I was raped by the state,” she said. She recognized that despite our political differences, all women are at risk under laws that dehumanize us and view us as little more than baby receptacles.

  As horrible as Pemberton’s experience was, she was luckier than others. In the early ’90s in Washington, D.C., Angela Carder became critically sick with cancer. She was also twenty-five weeks pregnant. The hospital sought a court order forcing the twenty-seven-year-old Carder to undergo a C-section, in the hope that the fetus could be saved; despite medical testimony that the surgery could kill her, the court privileged the fetus’s rights over Carder’s own life. Carder’s fetus, too undeveloped to be viable, died within two hours. Carder died within two days—the C-section was cited as a contributing factor in her death.31

  These laws—the ones that express a fear of female sexuality and seek to control it—have one distressing commonality: punishment. This kind of legislation is punitive in and of itself, of course—whether it’s criminalizing pregnant women who don’t have healthy babies or shaming women who want abortions—but purity policies’ consequences extend far beyond the language of a bill. Real women, like Pemberton and Carder, are suffering and dying because of laws that deem them less than full citizens.

  The most recent law that epitomizes this principle is the federal ban on abortion. In 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the first-ever federal law banning an abortion procedure.cc The Supreme Court actually struck down the law as unconstitutional in the 2000 case Stenberg v. Carhart, in part because it made no allowance for women’s health. But in 2007, when the court’s makeup had changed, thanks to two Bush-appointed justices, women were not so lucky—the court upheld the ban. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (currently the only woman on the Supreme Court) wrote in her dissent, “For the first time since Roe, the Court blesses a prohibition with no exception protecting a woman’s health.”

  Of course, other purity punishments exist that aren’t as dire as the ones outlined here, but they’re disturbing all the same. Take the teacher who was fired for being unmarried and pregnant (a sin against the purity myth if there ever was one), or students at Liberty University in Virginia, who can be fined—yes, fined—$500 and expelled for having an abortion.cd One legislator in Virginia even introduced a bill in 2005 that would make it a crime—punishable by a year in jail—for a woman to fail to report her miscarriage to the police within twelve hours.32ce

  So, you might ask, what does all this have to do with virginity: C-sections, abortion bans, miscarriage laws, and the FDA? Everything, really. The point of the purity myth is not only to valorize women who are “virgins,” but also to prop up the idea of the perfect woman as a blank slate, as powerless, and in need of direction. Women who want to control their lives, especially their sexuality, don’t adhere to the purity model. “Pure” women aren’t just virgins—they’re women who accept what extremist pharmacists tell them, who trust legislators over their own instincts, who don’t question the notion that men should be in charge. In the past (as in the case of American female suffragists), women wer
e told they shouldn’t foul themselves by getting involved in the dirty business of politics. Likewise, women today are told to trust that their government knows what’s best for them, their bodies, and their families. Power is not pure, so women shouldn’t have it—and they should be punished for trying to obtain it.

  CHAPTER 7

  public punishments

  “Rape, ladies and gentlemen, is not today what rape was. Rape, when I was learning these things, was the violation of a chaste woman, against her will, by some party not her spouse.”

  SENATOR DOUG HENRY (D-TN),

  2008

  THE GANG RAPE OF a California teenager was caught on video: While the sixteen-year-old was unconscious, she was raped vaginally and anally with pool sticks, a Snapple bottle, and lit cigarettes while her three assailants danced around her in between their assaults. At one point during the attack, the girl urinated on herself. In her rapists’ 2004 trial, the defense argued that the girl was eager to make a porn video and was just “acting” for the camera. The trial resulted in a hung jury.cf1

  A nineteen-year-old university student in Washington, D.C., after being drugged and sodomized in 2007, was denied treatment at local hospitals because she “appeared intoxicated”—not so surprising, given the nature of her attack. Even when the teen went to the police for help, she was turned away. Sergeant Ronald Reid, of the Metropolitan Police Department Sexual Assault Unit, was quoted as saying, “[I]f we don’t have reason to believe a crime happened, we wouldn’t administer a rape kit.”cg2

  A year earlier, in Maryland, a state court ruled that once a woman consents to sex, she can’t change her mind. Not if it hurts, not if her partner has become violent, not if she simply wants to stop. If she says yes once, nothing that happens afterward is rape.