We Deserve Answers

A new national effort suggests six questions to ask public officials about birth control.

by Andrea Camp

Blatant opposition to birth control by right-wing extremists has sparked a new wave of activism among American women, including the recent launch of the website Birth Control Watch (www.birthcontrolwatch.org). It promises to monitor actions, policies and statements that threaten access to birth control in America.

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Contra-Contraception 

By RUSSELL SHORTO

Published: May 7, 2006

The English writer Daniel Defoe is best remembered today for creating the ultimate escapist fantasy, "Robinson Crusoe," but in 1727 he sent the British public into a scandalous fit with the publication of a nonfiction work called "Conjugal Lewdness: or, Matrimonial Whoredom." After apparently being asked to tone down the title for a subsequent edition, Defoe came up with a new one — "A Treatise Concerning the Use and Abuse of the Marriage Bed" — that only put a finer point on things. The book wasn't a tease, however. It was a moralizing lecture. After the wanton years that followed the restoration of the monarchy, a time when both theaters and brothels multiplied, social conservatism rooted itself in the English bosom. Self-appointed Christian morality police roamed the land, bent on restricting not only homosexuality and prostitution but also what went on between husbands and wives.

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