Health Care/Joan Retsinas

Welcoming Cupid!

At last the season of brotherly love, with its entreaties to love the people you normally abhor, has passed. We can forego the Greek love of mankind — Agape — too hard. All those unloveable people, from our national enemies to our deadbeat relatives, expecting cheerful tidings.

In this season for Cupid, we can turn to Eros, passion pure. As shown by Cupid’s eponymous arrow, this love can hurt — the “pangs” are real. This love focuses on one person, the “object” of our desire. It is not familial. It is not rational, or strategic, or even well-advised. Remember Shakespeare’s admonition: It is the ever-fixed mark, does not seek to alter or change. Remember too the adage: the heart wants what the heart wants. Sartre called it a “precipice” that you leap over, or into, depending on outcome.

Whatever this love is, it often, except for demure Victorian maidens and their hapless suitors, leads to sex. And sex can lead to pregnancy.

Of course, a couple in the throes of Eros may see a baby as a happy sequel to their love. Or not. The reasons for dismay are legion, from poverty to illness (of mother or fetus) to adultery. Maybe the motive behind the sex was not Eros at all, but power (think rape), or boredom, or a drunken stupor. The reasons don’t matter. What matters is that the woman does not want to bear a child at this time with this partner.

Enter abortion — a worldwide recourse for women faced with a pregnancy they don’t want, often women who can’t easily find contraceptives.

Throughout the past decades in the United States, our government has tried to block both options, abortion as well as contraception. Today Bill Baird and Sherry Finkbein are entries on Wikipedia; few people recall the names. (Bill Baird went to jail in 1967 for giving an unmarried woman a contraceptive; The Supreme Court eventually overturned the verdict 6 to 1. When Sherry Finkbein alerted pregnant women to the dangers of thalidomide in 1962, the Arizona hospital which had previously authorized her abortion blocked it; she went to Sweden.) Nor do people recall the stringent rules: Physicians could prescribe contraceptives only to married women. Customers bought condoms under the counter. In the complacency of today, we overlook those long-ago legislative barricades.

Planned Parenthood led the battle to free women from those barricades, giving women some control over their bodies.

Also, sex can lead, not just to pregnancy, but to illnesses. Chlamydia, syphilis, gonorrhea have not vanished — not even in those Red Belt communities that spurn sex education in schools. Pregnancy and childbirth can bring their own medical complications. Planned Parenthood has been there for women, offering them medical care.

Our president and his right-leaning solons want to strip Planned Parenthood of funding, even though it is the main source of health care for millions of women. Recently the Supreme Court refused to grant one state’s desire to strip funding from Planned Parenthood. Thank you to the majority of the Justices (not a unanimous decision). Presumably more cases will wend their way through the courts, through the state legislatures, up to federal regulators. Abortion, siting of clinics, distribution of contraceptives, insurance coverage — all are fair game for attacks.

Valentine’s Day offers a perfect chance to send a message of gratitude to this organization that shows its love — an Agape love — for millions of American women, rich and poor, native and foreign-born, old and young.

On this day for Cupid, when we heap flowers and candy on our beloved, or would-be beloved, let’s send a card, including a donation, to Planned Parenthood. And let’s send a note of gratitude to our officials who continue to fund this organization that recognizes Eros. Jumping the precipice of love is risky: all of us, men and women, need a safety net.

Joan Retsinas is a sociologist who writes about health care in Providence, R.I. Email retsinas@verizon.net.

From The Progressive Populist, February 15, 2019

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