by Kenneth D. Whitehead
Crisis Magazine
A little while back in Crisis, I wrote about how supposedly pro-life Catholic candidate for a Virginia Senate seat, Ed Gillespie, when accused of wanting to overturnRoe v. Wade and enact a personhood amendment to the Constitution—as well as to “ban certain forms of contraception”—oddly replied that he actually wanted to make “contraceptives easier to obtain” by making birth control pills available without a prescription. At the same time, he skipped over the Roe v. Wade question entirely while in effect denying that he had ever favored a personhood amendment—even though support for such an amendment was included in the Republican Party’s platform while Ed Gillespie was chairman of the Republican National Committee.
The candidate’s reply thus did not seem to fit the charge lodged against him, or at any rate all of it. Accused of favoring typical measures constituting what Democrats characterize as a “war on women,” Gillespie instead hastened to make sure that the whole world knew that what he actually favored was an important element in the anti-life agenda of the Democrats. For some this reply may have seemed to be a fluke or a lapse or an inconsistency on the part of a professed pro-life candidate (who also happens to be a Catholic).
It turns out, however, that for some Republicans this seems to have become the preferred reply to the charge of conducting a “war on women”; it may even signal a trend. Colorado Republican congressman Cory Gardner for example, who is challenging Democratic senator Mark Udall, has not only adopted the same line in favor of the promotion of contraception; he has actually produced a television ad in which he assures a group of women, sympathetically nodding their heads in agreement, that: “I believe the pill ought to be available over the counter, around the clock, without a prescription, cheaper and easier for you.” And not only does Cory Gardner endorse birth control; he waxes enthusiastic about it; his plan, he tells the women in the ad, means “more rights, more freedom, more control for you.”
Kenneth D. Whitehead is a former career diplomat who served in Rome and the Middle East and as the chief of the Arabic Service of the Voice of America. For eight years he served as executive vice president of Catholics United for the Faith. He also served as a United States Assistant Secretary of Education during the Reagan Administration. He is the author of The Renewed Church: The Second Vatican Council’s Enduring Teaching about the Church (Sapientia Press, 2009) and, most recently, Affirming Religious Freedom: How Vatican Council II Developed the Church’s Teaching to Meet Today’s Needs (St. Paul’s, 2010).
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