Anti-contraceptive advocates can no longer rely on the tacit agreement that contraception leads to illicit sex, loose women, and over-stimulated young men. Today, however, considerable social acceptance of sex for pleasure (at least for some people in some circumstances) means that straightforward arguments against contraception based on its immorality do not resonate as successfully as they once did. These beliefs undergirded the federal Comstock Act, which banned the distribution of contraception and information regarding contraception, as well as state-level mini-Comstock laws in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These Comstock crusaders believed that illicit sexual acts, including non-procreative sex facilitated by contraception, were immoral and this immorality was the cause of illness and harm to women. In fact, the modern claims that “contraception harms women” and “contraception is abortion” are modes of reasoning consciously modeled on the claims of nineteenth century anti-contraception crusaders. These claims circulated in anticipation of challenges to the contraceptive coverage requirement in the Affordable Care Act and were submitted before the Supreme Court in the Hobby Lobby litigation in the form of an amicus brief filed on behalf of a group called “Women Speak for Themselves.” Although these claims garnered significant attention recently during the Hobby Lobby litigation, in fact, the claims that contraceptives are bad for health and are morally equivalent to abortion have a long pedigree. The two arguments are: (1) that contraceptives are bad for women’s health, and (2) that many hormonal contraceptives are actually abortifacients that terminate pregnancy because, it is argued, they could prevent a fertilized egg from implanting into a woman’s uterine lining. This Article interrogates two critiques of hormonal contraceptives to reveal that both critiques are animated by moral arguments against all non-procreative sex dressed up in faulty scientific reasoning. While contemporary readers should be wary of this narrative’s medicalization of women’s bodies, the comic book’s subtle representation of expanded female autonomy and authority also signals how women’s health organizations might consider advancing feminist politics in a contemporary conservative era. However, beyond normalizing white, middle-class, heterosexual, married women’s use of Planned Parenthood resources, this domestication of contraception also subtly masked the normalization of professionalized medicine within the. In this case study, I contend that this Planned Parenthood comic book uses a generically familiar romance narrative in ways appealing to conservative readers and situating birth control as a normative part of the ideal American. In light of recent criticism targeting Planned Parenthood, this essay turns to Planned Parenthood’s 1956 comic book, Escape from Fear, as a rich historical text for considering the implications underlying the negotiation of ideological positions in the context of an increasingly conservative society.
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