Technology gives women upper hand in abortion battle

     Technology is a friend to women. Oh, it helps men, too, with its laser levels and Helix 5 Fishfinders. But society places particular burdens on women, through the constraints of religion and marriage, the treadmill of family obligation. Technology levels the field, a bit, with its way of swinging open the cage door. Advances we think of as benign today, like the bicycle, were revolutionary for women when introduced, allowing them a path out of the house, unchaperoned mobility and a reason to wear pants, all in one fell swoop.
     Particularly medical technology. For centuries, the prospect of pregnancy went arm-in-arm with the harangues of moralists. Until Chicago's own G.D. Searle released Enovid, the first birth control pill, in 1960, and suddenly women could do what they want instead of what they're told. Spoiler alert: they wanted to have sex without worrying about babies.
     There's an entrancing book on the subject, "The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution," by my pal Jonathan Eig. He gives a great early history of the battle to wrest control over women's bodies from pious men, spotlighting Margaret Sanger, who popularized the term "birth control" and opened the first clinic in 1916, later shut down by police, since even a pamphlet describing contraception was considered obscene, and illegal to send through the United States mail.
     We are steadily sliding back toward those days. Moralists have hitched their wagon to would-be totalitarians, with restricting the right of a woman to control her own body — and the "babies" hereby saved — being the central plum used to rationalize depriving everybody, male and female, of all sorts of other basic rights, such as the ability to cast a ballot unhindered.
     Four years ago, the Trump-packed Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that made abortion legal throughout this country. Thirteen states promptly banned it, even in cases of rape or incest. The same religious zealots in a lather because a 12-year-old might check out Judy Blume's "Forever" from the public library would force her to have a baby.
     And what was the result of banning abortion for 40% of American women? The practice is way up, 21% since 2020, because of our old friend, medical technology, in the form of the RU-486, a two-drug regimen that is safe, effective, and can be sent through the mail.
     You would think this failure might humble those hot to impose their religion upon others; which is what banning abortion is, the enforcement of Christian morality through law. But nothing humbles them, and now some on the anti-abortion crowd are considering this exciting next step: charging women who have abortions with murder.
     This hasn't yet been done for two reasons. First, because the whole "killing babies" bit is just a religious construct, like Santa Claus. Rhetoric used because it works so effectively. The tell, the giveaway, is that while doctors can be prosecuted for performing abortions, and friends for driving the women to clinics, the actual murderess herself, putting this supposed crime in motion, is generally left alone.

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