Ellen Chesler

Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow
Roosevelt Institute Profile

Recent Posts by Ellen Chesler

  • The WPA Had a Low Price Tag but a Lasting Legacy

    Apr 8, 2013Ellen Chesler

    The WPA looks like a small investment by today's standards, but it remade the country.

    There’s hardly a community in the United States without a park, bridge, school, or library constructed by the WPA. Just think of the built legacy right here in New York: Hunter’s College’s handsome mid-century modern building on Park Avenue; LaGuardia Airport; the bucolic parkways, enduring beachfront facilities and swimming pools of Robert Moses; stunning murals in public spaces throughout the city.

    The WPA looks like a small investment by today's standards, but it remade the country.

    There’s hardly a community in the United States without a park, bridge, school, or library constructed by the WPA. Just think of the built legacy right here in New York: Hunter’s College’s handsome mid-century modern building on Park Avenue; LaGuardia Airport; the bucolic parkways, enduring beachfront facilities and swimming pools of Robert Moses; stunning murals in public spaces throughout the city.

    So it is actually surprising to learn on this anniversary that the entire federal appropriation for the legislation in 1935 was only $4.9 billion. And total spending across the country reached only $13.4 billion before the program expired in 1943, when wartime conscription and the recovery of private industry and manufacturing finally ended the unemployment crisis brought on by the Great Depression.

    Of course, money went a lot further back then. Salaries at 30 hours per week were pegged to prevailing wages and varied considerably by region, ranging from $20 to $100 per month. Federal spending on some WPA projects also leveraged state and local funds, adding by one estimate up to another 10-30 percent in investment. All together the program funded some 8 million jobs and put a meaningful dent in the number of unemployed who were looking for and able to work.

    This was far from a foundation for state socialism or a “seed bed for Communists,” as some of the program’s strongest critics on the right then described it. Spending was also, by and large, not politically motivated or determined by partisanship, as many feared it would be – with jobs distributed across party lines and, just as meaningfully, across ethnic and racial divides, even in the south. To placate unions skeptics on the left, no formal job training was allowed, and yet evaluations of projects demonstrated high levels of efficiency and little corruption or waste.

    Yet the WPA was most definitely a watershed in the history of American state building. The country’s entire GDP was only $860 billion in 1935. Of that, a mere 5 percent or so represented total government spending, and most of that money paid for local school teachers, police, fire, and sanitation.

    Federal Social Security expenditures were just ramping up. Defense spending was still negligible, with U.S. foreign policy focused mainly on being a “good neighbor” as FDR memorably put it. Even as the president promised to invest in public works and social welfare to reboot the economy, he also committed to rebalance the budget, and by attempting to do so in his second term actually prolonged the economic downturn. More public works, not less, would have been a good thing, stimulating and vastly expanding the private economy, as World War II wound up doing only a few years later.

    Today, U.S. government spending, inclusive of local, state, and federal, domestic, foreign, and military expenditures, represents some 40 percent of our giant $13.67 trillion GDP. Years of Republican presidencies notwithstanding, we live in a mixed-economy and a country remade by Franklin Roosevelt.

    This 78th anniversary of the WPA inspires us to find in our history a model for increased investment in public works today, perhaps leveraging the private sector, not just hard-strapped states and municipalities. With the WPA as a model, federal resources can easily capitalize a U.S. infrastructure bank, which could in turn raise capital in markets across the globe. The financial structure is not complicated. All we need is the political will.

    Might it be helpful to remind deficit hawks that Roosevelt was reelected in 1936 with 60 percent of the popular vote and 98 percent of the electoral vote in 1936, with a budget in deficit but the WPA underway?

    Ellen Chesler is a Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and author of Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America.

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  • Emergency Contraception Use Spreads, but Many Women Are Still Left Out

    Feb 26, 2013Ellen CheslerAndrea Flynn

    New evidence shows more young women are using emergency contraception but we still have work to do to reduce all barriers.

    New evidence shows more young women are using emergency contraception but we still have work to do to reduce all barriers.

    A federal study released recently shows that use of emergency contraception (EC) in the United States, known colloquially as the “morning after” pill, has more than doubled in the past decade. This is good news. It demonstrates the critical and expanding role the method may now be playing in enabling women, particularly young women, to prevent unplanned pregnancies. But there are still serious hurdles women face in accessing this method of birth control. While access has expanded, there is still work to be done.

    The study, conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and the National Center for Health Statistics, strengthens the case for promoting EC widely and making it more readily available. Based on interviews with more than 12,000 women from 2006-2010, the research finds that EC use among all sexually experienced women between the ages of 15-44 has increased to 11 percent (up from a baseline of 4.2 percent). That number is even higher among women 20-24, one of the highest risk groups for unplanned pregnancy. Nearly a quarter of this cohort now reports having used EC.

    This is no coincidence. In 2006, nearly a decade after EC first entered the market under the trade name Plan B and after years of stalling and political maneuvering by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the agency finally ruled that the product can be provided without prescription to women over the age of 18. A year later, a federal judge ordered the FDA to make it available to women over the age of 17. An important provision of the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act (ACA) also now promises to cover the cost of all methods of contraception, including this one.

    The government study confirms what we already know: accidents happen. Half the participants report having used EC out of fear that their initial birth control method had failed; the other half used it because they had unprotected sex. This reminds us that even women who have a “plan A” need a “Plan B,” or, as the product is now also marketed, a “Next Choice.” Nearly one-third of all U.S. women using contraception rely on the pill, and approximately 16 percent use condoms – both effective methods when employed perfectly, but also ones prone to human error. Condoms break, and sometimes women forget to take a daily low-dose pill. And then there are still the many women who, because of lack of access, cost, forgetfulness, or spontaneity, still don’t consistently use birth control and need protection after the fact.

    One of the most common arguments against EC is that it is really just an early abortion method masked as contraception. This simply has no basis in science, as most recently explained by the International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics. Unlike medication abortion, which terminates a pregnancy in its earliest stages, EC actually prevents a pregnancy from occurring.

    The next most popular and equally erroneous claim is that increased access to EC – and, for that matter, any program or product that provides access to abortion, contraception, or sexuality education – will promote risky sexual behavior. Studies from diverse countries over many years tell us this is not the case. But new research coming out of New York City now confirms that access to EC right here at home does not encourage young people to become more sexually active. In fact, it does just the opposite. The NYC Department of Health recently reported a 12-point drop over 10 years, from 51 to 39 percent, in the proportion of public high school students who are sexually active. Over the past few years, the proportion of sexually active students using contraception, including Plan B, increased from 17 to nearly 27 percent. Both trends coincided with an expansion of school-based health centers that provide free contraception (including EC), counseling, and sexuality education.

    So now we have homegrown data to show that when young people have access to sexual health information, no or low-cost products and services, they make better and safer decisions about their reproductive and sexual lives.

    But while the federal data illustrates an overall increase in EC use, it also reveals an educational and economic divide among women who use it, suggesting the need for better information and access for low-income women. The CDC study finds that EC use is highest among college-educated women (12 percent), compared to women who have only completed high school or received a GED (7 percent). A 2011 study conducted by researchers at the Boston University School of Public Health also found that while a majority of pharmacies in low-income neighborhoods do have EC available, they often provide incorrect information about eligibility.

    Add this to a number of other potential barriers, and it is clear why EC use isn’t higher.

    The drug is not actually sold over the counter, where it would be most accessible, but rather behind the counter, where a pharmacist must retrieve it. (Still, this makes it more widely available in the 72-hour window after unprotected intercourse when it works most effectively.) Nine states around the country have a “conscience clause” on the books that permits pharmacists to deny filling a prescription on religious or moral grounds. Only 17 states and the District of Columbia explicitly require hospital emergency rooms to provide EC and related services to sexual assault victims.

    The cost of EC is prohibitive for many potential clients. Plan B and Next Choice, the two most popular products on the market, range in price from $35 to $60 at a pharmacy and from $10 to $70 at Planned Parenthood and other public health clinics, which offer an income-based sliding fee scale and often include counseling and other services.

    Even at these high prices, the limited market for the product may not provide private drug companies any incentive to advertise it beyond women’s magazines or other niche marketing sites. This means that young women just becoming sexually active, and all women who do not regularly visit a clinic or a private physician, may never learn about it. Age restrictions requiring a photo ID and concerns about confidentiality may also be intimidating and restrict use.

    There are also a number of potential hurdles to EC provision under the Affordable Care Act. Will women be able to use their private insurance or Medicaid benefits to purchase it at a drug store? Or will they need to visit a Planned Parenthood or community clinic? What about the many states that are not planning to participate in the Medicaid expansion? How will low-income women in those states receive information about and access to EC and, for that matter, regular methods of contraception?

    In recent years, Planned Parenthood has put forward an effective reproductive health information campaign using online and cell phone platforms. Millions of women, and especially young people, are now texting or visiting its website each month to learn about and gain access to EC, along with other important sexual health information.

    The Obama health care plan needs to imitate and vastly expand this marketing approach if it is to be effective. At long last, the Affordable Care Act promises to provide a national policy that prioritizes women’s health and primary, preventive care. But we must seek greater clarity about its implementation. Our next challenge will be to buttress the ACA with an inventive, far-reaching public information campaign so a broad and diverse population can understand and access its many benefits. How about calling this campaign “Morning After in America"? For those Americans old enough to remember Ronald Reagan, this surely has a familiar ring!

    Ellen Chesler is a Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and author of Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America. Andrea Flynn is a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. She researches and writes about access to reproductive health care in the United States. 

     

    Contraception image via Shutterstock.com.

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  • What Did the State of the Union Say to Women?

    Feb 14, 2013Ellen CheslerAndrea Flynn

    The president didn't just lay out specific policies that will benefit women. He also shifted the theory of how government can help them.

    The State of the Union address is inherently a political exercise, intended to chart a course for governing but also to let important constituencies know that they are heard and valued. On Tuesday night, President Obama seemed intent on sounding down-to-earth, sensible, unthreatening, and easy to understand. He presented a long list of concrete proposals as if there couldn’t be any disagreement over their merits.

    The president didn't just lay out specific policies that will benefit women. He also shifted the theory of how government can help them.

    The State of the Union address is inherently a political exercise, intended to chart a course for governing but also to let important constituencies know that they are heard and valued. On Tuesday night, President Obama seemed intent on sounding down-to-earth, sensible, unthreatening, and easy to understand. He presented a long list of concrete proposals as if there couldn’t be any disagreement over their merits.

    For women, a critical voting bloc who helped deliver his second term, the president checked off many important boxes. He spoke about ending violence against women, guaranteeing them equal pay, preventing teen pregnancy, providing working families with more daycare and early child education, and promoting military women in combat roles. He also acknowledged that women around the world are drivers of prosperity and must be empowered if we hope to reduce global poverty and secure emerging democracies.

    Hearing this litany of familiar issues was reassuring, but the overall theme of the speech provided an even more important takeaway. Without much fanfare, the president put forward a reshaped agenda for government programs that are, as he put it, not “bigger” but “smarter.” This is vital for women because it would have the government target policies and marshal resources for women and families, which, in turn, prevent larger and costlier social and economic problems. It’s a welcome departure from forgetting about women and children and waiting around to address the unfortunate consequences after the fact.

    No grand principles were enunciated. But the president craftily put forward a theory of change that emphasizes strategic and comprehensive investments and interventions to establish a floor of well being for at-risk women and families.

    • He called on the House of Representatives to follow the Senate’s lead and reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act, not just as a moral imperative but because studies since its passage demonstrate the effectiveness of the social services and criminal justice reforms this pioneering legislation funds. Over two decades, rates of intimate partner violence and homicides have decreased dramatically, as the White House recently reported.
    • He called for expanding mandatory and free early childhood education – currently available to only three in ten American children – not just because it’s the right thing to do for hard-pressed parents, but because the data shows that it also boosts graduation rates, decreases teen pregnancy, and even correlates with palpable reductions in violent crime in communities across the country.
    • He promised to fight to increase the minimum wage and pass the Paycheck Fairness Act. This would close a real gender earnings gap. It would also benefit the nearly two-thirds of all minimum wage workers who are female, many of them single heads of households who can’t possibly lift their families out of poverty without this critical and long overdue intervention. Small businesses have long opposed a raise, despite studies that demonstrate a return to employers through increased productivity.
    • He mentioned the Affordable Care Act only in passing, but it too provides many additional preventive policies, which, as he noted, are already improving services while driving down health care costs overall. For example, the ACA has already brought comprehensive, affordable family planning and reproductive health care to more than 1 million women. By 2016, it could extend those services to as many as 13 million additional uninsured women if the many state challenges to contraceptive coverage and the Medicaid expansion do not undermine its potential reach and impact. And here again, as we have written previously, data demonstrates incontrovertibly that these services will dramatically reduce rates of unintended pregnancy and abortion.
    • While the focus of the president’s speech was primarily domestic, he also mentioned America’s responsibilities in the world and obliquely referenced the signature efforts of his administration to mainstream gender considerations into our diplomatic, defense, and development policies. Under the president and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the United States has joined 30 other countries in adopting a National Action Plan on Women, Peace, and Security, facilitated by the United Nations, which applies gender considerations and disaggregates spending across all agencies to require focused investment to improve the status of women. The government recognizes that this is not just the right thing to do, but also the smarter course if our aim is to meet the security and development challenges of our foreign policy. This shift in thinking lies behind the decision to promote military women to combat rank, for example, because in conflicts that involve civilian populations, as in Afghanistan and Iraq, women officers on the frontlines have played critical roles in connecting with local populations. And local women empowered by the U.S. presence have in turn become important agents in post-conflict resolution and peace processes and in relief and reconstruction efforts.

    The president’s State of the Union provided a blueprint for a strong, positive government obligation to secure the wellbeing of women and families at home and abroad. Not a lot of detail was offered, nor was there any fancy philosophical framework for what would represent a palpable shift in U.S. priorities and our traditional ways of governing. He spoke as if this was all pretty much just common sense – the better part of wisdom.

    But certainly if Senator Marco Rubio’s response is any indication, the president’s intentions, however masked in straightforward, anodyne rhetoric, face innumerable obstacles to their realization. That should not, however, stop us from applauding and getting behind the potential for meaningful policy change.

    Ellen Chesler and Andrea Flynn are Fellows at the Roosevelt Institute.

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  • International Women's Day: Celebrating Where We Are and Gearing Up for Where We Must Go

    Mar 9, 2012Ellen Chesler

    While Republicans continue to chip away at women's rights at home, increasing rights for women around the world is having a huge impact.

    While Republicans continue to chip away at women's rights at home, increasing rights for women around the world is having a huge impact.

    Yesterday was International Women's Day, and celebrations took place all over the world. Perhaps none was more prominent than the event at the U.S. Department of State where First Lady Michelle Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton gave out "Women of Courage" awards for the fourth year in a row. They recognized 10 individuals selected by U.S. embassies around the world as examples of grit and bravery in the global struggle for basic human freedoms and women's rights. The recipients' stories are inspiring, if bone-chilling. They need to be heard by American women, whose status as full and equal citizens is being challenged just about every day by outspoken priests, pundits, and politicians who are questioning long-established rights to family planning and other women's health programs.

    Access to safe and reliable contraception has helped make possible the hard-won gains that women in the United States have achieved during the past 40 years in education, employment, and participation in public life. And no irony was lost in the fact that the Republican-controlled House of Representatives marked International Women's Day by holding another in what has been a constant drumbeat of hearings on some piece of legislation that would roll back fundamental reproductive rights and further politicize women's health.

    Meanwhile, largely unnoticed over in Foggy Bottom, Secretary Clinton handed awards to an Afghani woman persecuted under the Taliban who now runs the one radio station in the country that teaches women about their rights, and to a true heroine from Burma, recently freed by the military regime after 11 years in prison simply because she had campaigned for civilian government, who is now back advocating for women, ethnic minorities, and political prisoners. Recognition also went to a 27-year-old architect from Libya who has became a clarion voice of her country's liberation movement, to two women's rights activists protesting the state sanctioned oppression of women in Saudia Arabia and Sudan, and to a women's affairs minister from the Maldives pressing for laws against domestic violence and female genital cutting. In conferring this prize, Clinton remarked in no uncertain terms to spontaneous applause, "[W]e thank you for improving lives and sending the message that domestic violence is not a cultural practice, it is a crime."

    Rounding out the group was a Turkish parliamentarian who has become an international voice on the rights of the disabled and a Pakistani NGO leader from the country's most conservative provinces who has challenged a local ban on women seeking political office.  And finally there were a Brazilian police official once kidnapped by Rio street gangs and a Columbian journalist once tortured by arms smugglers, both still determined to campaign openly against the endemic violence women still face even as their countries experience modernization and growth.

    Ceremonies have indisputable value. Placing compelling human faces on the courage with which ordinary women around the world fight the many indignities they endure as a daily matter "isn't just the right thing to do," as Secretary Clinton often says and repeated yesterday in her brief remarks, "it's also the smart thing to do." Clinton has long stood firmly behind the fundamental principle of the global women's movement, to which she memorably staked a claim in Beijing in 1995: Women's rights are human rights, and human rights are the right of every woman.

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    But in the years since, she has also repositioned the issue not just as a moral imperative, but as a strategic condition of success in U.S foreign policy if our aim is to meet the world's most critical security and development challenges. She rarely misses an opportunity to remind her audiences that investments in women's rights and opportunities have immediate pay offs -- that when women gain equality of opportunity and when their labor is formalized, it's not just the women who benefit. Poverty declines, economies expand, public health improves, more children are educated, the conditions for democratic practice are secured, and conflict subsides. The evidence is no longer anecdotal.  Hundreds of empirically driven studies demonstrate a direct correlation between the improved status of women and the stability and well-being first of their immediate communities and eventually of entire countries and regions on which U.S. national security depends.

    But honoring the work of individuals, however worthy, can also make complex matters seem deceptively simple, as though we can change a very messy world one woman at a time. The vulnerability of women around the world, as we are seeing all too well in our own country today, is deeply embedded in the very real assaults of globalization on economies and cultures. As academic feminists like to remind us, we cannot ignore the deep "intersections" of gender, race, class, and power. Women's rights must be placed within a comprehensive human development framework that promotes social justice and well-being for all, along with women's full citizenship. And this is a tall order.

    Yesterday, this exact point was made by Laymah Gbowee, the feisty and outspoken Liberian who won the 2012 Nobel Prize for organizing market women to help bring peace to her war-torn country. "These women are working very hard. And yes, we can give them all the verbal support, we can give them all the honors," she said, "but until we continue to make it possible for them to work through resources, their issues will continue to be issues for politicians to use to make themselves look good when it's elections time." She concluded, "It's time for us to support our sisters, not just leave them with honor."

    Secretary Clinton spoke directly to that challenge, promising that next week, at a gathering in Washington of all U.S. ambassadors, she will issue the "first ever" secretarial policy directive on gender in an effort  to institutionalize a permanent concern that U.S. resources be  allocated in new ways. Complementing a recently released USAID gender policy, this directive will mandate specific steps toward promoting gender equality and advancing the status of women and girls in all aspects of U.S. national security and foreign policy and will require that budgets and expenditures be analyzed from an explicit gender perspective. Together with the creation of permanent high-level staff positions, including a Global Ambassador for Women's Rights, the aim has been no less than to transform a diplomatic bureaucracy and culture long either indifferent or outright hostile to recognizing women as potential agents of change.

    Just how this new way of thinking can work, however, was beautifully illustrated in a speech earlier this week at the Council of Foreign Relations in New York by the Obama/Clinton appointee at USAID, Administrator Rajiv Shah. He beckoned his audience to observe a common pattern in the age of the populations of the fastest growing and most stable countries in Latin America and East Asia today, where the percentage of workers between the ages of 15 and 64 is much larger than the percentage of the very young or very old. This phenomenon is a consequence of the demographic dividend that has resulted from decisions made collaboratively with the United States during the 1960s and 1970s in places like Thailand to expand access to voluntary family planning, to improve child survival, and to offer education and formal work opportunities to women and girls. Falling birthrates left behind just enough working-age men and women to grow economies in an orderly fashion, without placing them under too much strain. And the promising news is that at least several countries in Africa today are poised to follow.

    Which leaves us with what may be our greatest challenge today: how to explain this phenomenon to a crop of Republican presidential contenders and members of Congress who are poised to take away the very benefits of U.S. support for reproductive health at home and abroad that made these gains possible. A tall order, indeed.

    Ellen Chesler, a Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, has a chapter in a new book published this week by Seven Stories Press in collaboration with Human Rights Watch, The Unfinished Revolution: Voices from the Global Fight for Women's Rights.

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  • The Long History of the War Against Contraception

    Feb 14, 2012Ellen Chesler

    For those surprised about the recent fervor over Obama's contraception coverage decision, a look at its deep roots.

    For those surprised about the recent fervor over Obama's contraception coverage decision, a look at its deep roots.

    Republicans for Planned Parenthood last week issued a call for nominations for the 2012 Barry Goldwater award, an annual prize awarded to a Republican legislator who has acted to protect women's health and rights. Past recipients include Maine Senator Olympia Snowe, who this week endorsed President Obama's solution for insuring full coverage of the cost of contraception without exceptions, even for employees of religiously affiliated institutions. And that may tell us all we need to know about why President Obama has the upper hand in a debate over insurance that congressional Tea Partiers have now widened to include anyone who seeks an exemption.

    It's a long time ago, but it is worth remembering that conservative avatar Goldwater was in his day an outspoken supporter of women's reproductive freedom -- a freethinker who voted his conscience over the protests of Catholic bishops and all others who tried to claim these matters as questions of conscientious liberty and not sensible social policy. With Goldwater on his side, Obama sees a clear opening for skeptics wary of the extremism that has captured Republican hopefuls in thrall to the fundamentalist base that controls the GOP presidential primary today. Holding firm on family planning -- even if it means taking on the Catholic hierarchy and other naysayers by offering a technical fix that would have insurers cover costs instead of the churches themselves -- is a calculated political strategy by the Obama campaign, not a blunder as it has been characterized by many high powered pundits, including progressives like Mark Shields of PBS and E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post.

    Recent public opinion polling on the subject is worth reconsidering. For years, it has been perfectly clear that a substantial majority of Americans see the value of expanding access to contraception and reliable sex education as essential tools to prevent unwanted pregnancy and abortion and to help women balance the competing demands of work and family. But unlike a zealous minority on the other side, these moderates have not necessarily privileged these social concerns over important questions of economics or national security that mattered more to them at election time.

    That's what seems to be changing. With his now-famous "nope, zero" response last spring, President Obama simply shut down Republicans in Congress who wanted to defund family planning as part of a deal to reduce the federal deficit. The action elicited a sudden surge in his popularity, especially in the highly contested demographic of women voters between the ages of 30 and 49 who voted for him in 2008 but wound up frustrated by failed promises and disappointing economic policies. Campaign polling has since uncovered a big opening for Obama with this group because they are furious over Republican social extremism. An astonishing 80 percent of them disapproved of congressional efforts to defund Planned Parenthood last spring. Polling among Catholics in response to last week's controversy shows identical patterns, with 57 percent overall supporting the Obama "compromise" to ensure full coverage of contraception, according to reporting by Joe Conason in The National Memo, and cross-tabs demonstrating much higher margins of support from Catholic women, Latinos, and independent Catholic voters -- all prime Obama election targets.

    If the numbers are so persuasive, why then have Republican conservatives strayed so far from the greater tolerance of the Goldwater age? Why have they allowed the family planning issue to tie their candidates up in knots in 2012? The answer is in just how outsized the influence of a minority viewpoint can be on a political party, so long as it represents the base of that party's support.

    A bit of history going all the way back to Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal is instructive. Back then, birth control was still illegal in this country, still defined as obscene under federal statutes that remained as a legacy of the Victorian era, even though many states had reformed local laws and were allowing physicians to prescribe contraception to married women with broadly defined "medical" reasons to plan and space their childbearing.

    The movement's pioneer, Margaret Sanger, went to Washington during the Great Depression, anticipating that Franklin Roosevelt, whose wife Eleanor was her friend and neighbor in New York, would address the problem and incorporate a public subsidy of contraception for poor women into the safety net the New Deal was constructing. What Sanger failed to anticipate, however, was the force of the opposition this idea would continue to generate from the coalition of religious conservatives, including urban Catholics and rural fundamentalist Protestants who held Roosevelt Democrats captive, much as they have today captured the GOP. It was Catholic priests, and not the still slightly scandalous friend of the First Lady, who wound up having tea at the Roosevelt White House.

    The U.S. government would not overcome moral and religious objections until the Supreme Court protected contraceptive use under the privacy doctrine created in 1965 under Griswold v. Connecticut. That freed President Lyndon Johnson to incorporate family planning programs into the country's international development programs and into anti-poverty efforts at home. As a Democrat still especially dependent on Catholic votes, however, Johnson only agreed to act once he had the strong bipartisan support of his arch rival Barry Goldwater's endorsement and also the intense loyalty and deft maneuvering of Republican moderates like Robert Packwood of Oregon in Congress. Packwood, in turn, worked alongside Ohio's Robert Taft, Jr. in the House and a newcomer from Texas by the name of George H. W. Bush. Bush would remain a staunch advocate of reproductive freedom for women until political considerations during the 1980 presidential elections, when he was on the ticket with Ronald Reagan, accounted for one of the most dramatic and cynical public policy reversals in modern American politics.

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    Reagan had supported California's liberal policies on contraception and abortion as governor, and Bush as Richard Nixon's Ambassador to the United Nations had helped shape the UN's population programs. But Republican operatives in 1980 saw a potential fissure in the traditional New Deal coalition among Catholics uncomfortable with the new legitimacy given to abortion after Roe v. Wade and white southern Christians being lured away from the Democrats around the issue of affirmative action and other racial preferences. Opposition to abortion instantly became a GOP litmus test, and both presidential hopefuls officially changed stripes.

    Fast forward to 1992 and the election of Bill Clinton as America's first pro-choice president, coupled with the Supreme Court's crafting of a compromise decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey that put some limits on access to abortion but essentially preserved the core privacy doctrine of Roe v. Wade. The perceived double threat of these political and judicial developments unleashed a new and even more powerful conservative backlash that took aim not only at abortion, but at contraception and sex education as well.

    Exploiting inevitable tensions in the wake of profound social and economic changes occurring across the country as the result of altered gender roles and expectations -- changes symbolized and made all the more palpable by Hillary Clinton's activist role as First Lady -- conservatives, with the support of powerful right-wing foundations and think tanks, poured millions of dollars into research and propaganda promoting family values and demonizing reproductive freedom, including emotional television ads that ran for years on major media outlets. A relentless stigmatizing of abortion, along with campaigns of intimidation and outright violence against Planned Parenthood and other providers, had a chilling effect on politicians generally shy of social controversy. And Bill Clinton's vulnerability to charges of sexual misconduct left his administration and his party all the more defensive.

    Since the welfare reform legislation of 1996, aptly labeled a "Personal Responsibility Act," not only has access to abortion been curtailed, but funds for family planning programs at home and abroad have been capped. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been allocated to the teaching of sexual abstinence, rather than more comprehensive approaches to sex education. Just as tragically, U.S. programs addressing the crisis of HIV/AIDS -- admirably expanded during the presidency of George W. Bush -- were nonetheless made to counsel abstinence and oppose the use of condoms and other safe sex strategies, leaving women and young people all the more vulnerable to the ravages of the epidemic.

    Empirically grounded studies over and over again undermined the efficacy of these approaches, which also flew in the face of mainstream American viewpoints and basic common sense. With Barack Obama's election they have largely been revoked, enflaming the conservative base that put them in place and has lived off the salaries supported by government funding for faith-based social policy.

    Even more disheartening to conservative true believers is the promise that the Affordable Care Act will vastly expand access to contraception by providing insurance coverage for oral contraceptives. This guarantee, endorsed by all mainstream health advocates, also includes emergency contraception, popularly known as the morning-after pill, that holds the promise of further reducing unwanted pregnancy and abortion and was meant to offer common ground in an abortion debate long defined by a clash of absolutes. The strong dose of ordinary hormones in emergency contraception act primarily by preventing fertilization, just like daily contraceptive pills, but in rare instances may also disable a fertilized egg from implanting by weakening the uterine lining that it needs for sustenance, causing opponents to vilify it as an abortifacient.

    Supporting the Obama policy changes, on the other hand, is a new generation of progressive activists in reproductive health and rights organizations, energized by the intensity of the assaults against them, and now well-armed to educate and activate their own supporters by using traditional grassroots strategies and more sophisticated social networking. No institution has been more important in this effort than Planned Parenthood, with its vast networks of affiliates and supporters in every state, millions more supporters online, and a powerful national political and advocacy operation based in Washington D.C. that has been put to use to great effect in recent months.

    The strength of the Planned Parenthood brand, coupled with the organization's demonstrated ability to rally hundreds of thousands of supporters when it is attacked, has helped overcome traditional political reticence on reproductive justice issues. The Planned Parenthood Action Fund is already out with a strong new appeal warning politicians that women are watching. "Enough is enough. Back off on birth control," is the new advocacy mantra.

    Mindful of the numbers -- and with the added ballast of what now amounts to a daily drumbeat of progressive television talk and comedy that delights in pillorying Republican prudery -- Democrats are intensifying their resolve to take on this fight. Two things we can be sure of: Whoever emerges from the bloodbath of the GOP contest will try and backtrack from the birth control extremism of the primary. And Obama supporters, backed up by the advocacy community, will in turn stand ready to pounce on this inevitable flip-flopping.

    Both sides may well summon the spirit and words of Barry Goldwater, who cautioned against allowing faith-based extremism to gain control of the Republican Party. "Politics and governing demand compromise," he told John Dean, who reports on the conversation in his 2006 book, Conservatives Without Conscience. "But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know. I've tried to deal with them."

    Ellen Chesler is a Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and author of Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America.

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