Plan B as Sociology
Gre'gre asked why my post about Plan B is sociological. I will attempt an answer here. The easiest answer is that everything is sociological. hehe. Seriously, though. Everything can be viewed through a sociological lens. But, a better answer can be constructed if we draw on what Mills meant by the "sociological imagination." First, he calls for us to examine the world by attending to history, biography, and the intersection of the two in society. What makes this particular historical moment unique? Who are the people in power? Who are the elite? What's the historical context of individual biography? Etc. But, more pertinent to this particular issue (Plan B) is Mills' admonishon to see personal troubles as public issues. Dana L. was facing a personal trouble. She had an unintended and problematic pregnancy. Lots of women face this personal trouble. But, what is the public issue behind it? Is it merely an individual phenomenon of irresponsible sexual behavior? No. There is something going on in the culture at large that both allows for and complicates these "personal troubles." Dana L. is part of the larger cultural battle over gender ideology, marriage, sex, reproduction, etc. Our particular historical moment is marked by extreme controversy over things like this. Individual biographies are intricately tied to public issues, social issues, public policy debates, etc.
So, this is sociological because it is a marker of our time. It illuminates the contestable nature of culture; the battle between public and private; the ways that moral battles are desiguised as political, etc. It is sociological because it is the intersection of history and biography in society - and requires us to see personal troubles as public issues.
19 comments:
You'd know way more about different schools or methods or groups of sociology (however you want to put it) than I would, but the description you've given here seems to me the best approach, and also the most pragmatic, in the philosophical sense of the word. (I've commented on this before.) Pragmatism, before it goes too far, always tries to tie institutions and beliefs and arguments and cultural constructs and fighter jets and everything else to people--to actual situations and decisions. What do you think about that?
I heard C. Wright Mills tied a fighter jet to some people before, but they ended up suffocating at altitude.
I think on your previous post, your "I-don't-want-checmicals" example was a little disingenuous....I think there's a very valid case for saying, "I don't want to take hormones", but not much for chemicals in general. I'm by no means against "the pill", but hormones are always much more medically serious than low doses of things like caffiene and riboflavin. Disrupting the menstral cycle isn't really at all like getting a little boost in the morning.
Also, I was thinking this morning that it's interesting to me that you take the position you do on this, given J. Morgan's resistance to the de-humanizing effect of progress on humanity. Plan B seems like the sort of thing he'd argue against, consistent with his thoughts on cloning and organ transplants, because the ability to prevent or deter pregnancy provides a level of control over our lives that de-humanizes us. Pain and circumstance, unfortunate or chaotic as they might be, are part of the human condition and experience, he's seemed to argue, and it's very important that we be very careful with technology and medicine. I may be misrepresenting him on this - perhaps you could get him to post up his thoughts?
I usually come out on the other side of these issues from him, favoring any form of advancement that gives us more control over our bodies, our lives, our futures. I just think it's important that we not DEMAND this control, and understand that we'll never be able to control everything. So while I'm in favor of contraceptives and Plan B, I don't think it's acceptable to get an abortion when these options are out of reach or fail us. I think it's fine for us to try and control our lives as much as possible within certain ethical boundaries. As soon as our desire for control removes those boundaries, and "control" itself and the perceived right to absolute control over one's future becomes our basic morality, we've gone wrong.
“I think on your previous post, your ‘I-don't-want-chemicals’ example was a little disingenuous....I think there's a very valid case for saying, ‘I don't want to take hormones", but not much for chemicals in general.’”
Do you drink milk? Ever heard of rBGH? Or how about IGF-I? rBGH is an incredibly potent hormone, complete synthetic, that has no connection with the human body or human bodily processes whatsoever, but one that you consume in spades unless you buy organic milk, cheese, ice cream, and all other dairy products. Even worse is IGF-I: a hormone that is shared by cattle and humans. That increases milk production in cattle when it is artificially elevated by means of injection. For women, though, who consume average amounts of dairy, it triples the risk for ovarian cancer.
My point is not to get all weird and organic-y about food additives; but just to say that we put all sorts of chemicals and hormones in our body all the time, most of which have no connect with our natural bodily processes. Birth control puts naturally occurring hormones in a woman’s body to effect levels of naturally occurring hormones in a woman’s body, and not by very much. It seems arbitrary, then, to single out birth control from the litany of things that contains huge quantities of hormones and chemicals.
“Disrupting the menstrual cycle isn't really at all like getting a little boost in the morning.”
Well, I would agree, but since birth control doesn’t disrupt the menstrual cycle, it doesn’t seem too relevant.
“Plan B seems like the sort of thing he'd argue against, consistent with his thoughts on cloning and organ transplants, because the ability to prevent or deter pregnancy provides a level of control over our lives that de-humanizes us.”
I mean, for the record, my general argument is that the view that we are human because we are moral, choosing, producing, social beings is just too simple and ignores a lot of what has historically been considered just as much part of being human. We forget that being constrained, weak, mortal, and frail are also essential parts of being human. The language of “progress” wants to ignore that aspect of being human in favor of a myopic focus on elevating choice. I just think we need to be balanced about it.
So, yeah, I do have a problem with “Plan B” and birth control of any kind (that includes NFP) because I think it is dehumanizing. That said, I think we live in a dehumanizing age. I don’t think we could escape being dehumanized by choosing not to use birth control, because, in so doing, we would just be being stupid and ironic by using our agency to increase our futility. So that’s where we are. As far as I can tell, we are just trapped, so we do the best we can.
I hate to derail the conversation, but I feel the need to address a couple of comments made in the comments made to your post. (phew)
j. morgan caler, lollydolly - From what I've read, the pill does mess with your menstruation. According to the gyno info I've seen, you don't technically menstruate a single time when you're on the pill. You just experience the withdrawal bleeding of not having taken the hormones. The pill was originally designed in 1957 to block menstruation entirely in the case of women who were too mentally impaired to really handle having one. Later, the idea of using the formula in a different regimen as a contraceptive was floated and the pill as we know it came out in 1960 with the withdrawal-period designed to make women feel more comfortable because the creators thought we'd get all freaked out if we didn't experience the pain, bloating, PMS, and bleeding that menstruation entails. Maybe in 1960 that was necessary, but today? Blocking it out when it's not medically necessary makes sense to me. Of course we should keep doing research into the health and safety of these methods, but after almost 50 years of pill usage (some of which has been continuous in the case of anemia sufferers and such), I think we can feel a little more comfortable about it, no?
FYI, see this article for some discussion of recent developments toward a period-free life for menstruation-aged women, and this website for more information about contraception and period control as well.
Re: redhurt's comment that: "Disrupting the menstral cycle isn't really at all like getting a little boost in the morning." The menstrual period is different thing than most bodily processes. It does absolutely nothing FOR the human being enduring it, and in fact, it's more like having a built-in downer (accompanied by even tastier side-effects like pain). In that case, disrupting my period is more like restoring my natural morning. Correct me if I'm wrong, but spermatogenesis doesn't slow men down much in their everyday lives (leaving aside the question of the need for regular emissions), but ovulating and menstruating have unpleasant physical effects on a large majority of menstruating women.
Obviously, I welcome correction if I'm wrong, lollydolly, considering your medical expertise, but that's what I've heard so far and the opinions I've formed from that medical advice.
Also apologies that I can't make the links open in a separate window (one large enough for the job), but blogger doesn't seem to like "target" commands. Help, redhurt?
Lollydolly, I’m not sure why you got so annoyed with Redhurt about what he said, which was, “hormones are always much more medically serious than low doses of things like caffiene and riboflavin.” He didn’t say anything about “warfarin, amiodarone, ketoconazole, theophylline, or erythromycin” and wasn’t talking about “natural” medication. Even the caffeine thing; I don’t know that he was specifically concerned with caffeine or safety concerns for people with heart disease, it was just an helpful example. He was simply saying that it seems too simplistic to equate the seriousness of taking birth control and drinking Diet Pepsi. That, I think, we could both agree is fair.
Besides, this isn’t so much a medical argument once some factual considerations are cleared up. The medical safety and reliability of birth control and biological facts about what and how these pills work is very important for setting the terms of the debate. I think that has been pretty well done by now here and I think we are all grateful to now have a clear picture of the biological and medical side of it. That said, those aren’t really the important questions. The important questions are the moral, philosophical, sociological, cultural, ethical, etc. That, I think, was the thrust of RedHurt’s comment and by far the most interesting thing he said. It is also, I notice, the thing that nobody wanted to talk about.
So, now that the medical/biological is cleared up, maybe we should try to talk about the big questions, many of which RedHurt outlined very well.
This conversation has derailed off the tracks of sociology. The reason everyone is so hot under the collar is exactly what I said before - this debate is not really about birth control or life or abortion so much as it's about deeply held assumptions regarding gender, sex, marriage, women's rights, etc. The reason I brought this whole Plan B thing up (see previous post) is that it speaks to a very prominent issue in today's culture - that is, we couch our moral arguments as political/social arguments. Conservatives don't want Plan B available because then 14 year old girls get to have responsibility free sex. Making is difficult to get Plan B makes it easier for us to be judgemental regarding unintended pregnancies. This is where you hear comments like "Well, if the whore would've just kept her legs closed..." "she needs to live up to the consequences of her actions..." etc.
On the other hand, liberals push for readily available and abundnant use of contraceptives because they are understood as the vehicle of women's liberation.
And so, we fight about contraception, abortion, and the like because it is easier than engaging the debates about gender roles, marriage, sex, what it means to be human, what it means to be parents, etc. Arguging moral positions in political, social, medical languages allows us all to go on pretending that ours is a "neutral" democracy where we make "rational" decisions, when in reality we are all unavoidably bound by moral commitments, worldviews, and deeply value-laden ideas about how life ought to be lived.
The sociological challenge of Plan B is figuring out who's using what tools for what purpose. How does Plan B fit into the cultural schema of conservatives and liberals? How do women and men talk about Plan B differently? How is Plan B similar to other vehicles in the past that led to/prevented/accelerated social/cultural change? Is restricting access to Plan B accomplishing the manifest goals that the administration intends? What are the latent goals and consequences of Plan B distribution? These are the sociological questions I intended to ruffle up when starting this series of posts.
Fine, returning to the discussion earlier. What about redhurt's final paragraph in which he exhorts us not to "DEMAND this control, and understand that we'll never be able to control everything." I guess you mean taking this to the ultimate conclusion of abortion (although your other comments about the nature of early vs. late-term abortions makes definition here necessary). But I'm still not sure what this means. I guess it's pretty obvious that we can't control everything, so how would this exhortation affect us? Would it just be in the statement: "don't take another life" as applied to fetuses or something more?
I missed Mair's comment when I posted, please ignore and focus on her much-better-articulated questions.
Wow! What a lively post! And to think I started all this because of my ignorance of Sociology and Plan B.
My biggest concern in reading all of your excellent comments is that I did not see anything from a Christian, God-fearing point of view. I believe in Romans chapter 1, Paul states that "professing to be wise, they became fools." And this is because the people did not consider God or give him the glory He is due.
So what is the Christian/Biblical point of view on this? How about we are created in God's image, we are fearfully and wonderfully made and we have been endowed with a natural, biological course that our body is supposed to follow.
J.Morgan states it correctly, As far as I can tell, we are just trapped, so we do the best we can.
WE have to live our lives as close to being pleasing to God that we can.
The only thing I'm getting hot under the collar about is why I got labeled as one of the ignorant masses. :) Look, Lollydoll - I'm not saying we shouldn't take drugs, I'm not advocating "natural medicine", and I'm not even arguing against the pill. I'm just saying that equating plan B with caffeine is disingenuous, and, while I'm not doctor, seems a little medically ignorant to me. I'm not picky about medical chemicals - I just think changing our ovulation for a month is a more profound choice than elevating your heart rate for an hour.
j. morgan, thanks for outlining your position, and explaining the other hormones to me.
I think plan B acts as a vehicle for culture change by promoting the sort of freedom I was asking j. morgan about - they promote control over ones body we haven't experienced historically, specifically to neutralize certain gender specific differences regarding the freedom to have sex. I think it's hard to talk about because for women, it as contraception represents a liberation from gender constraints, and crticism looks like an attack on this freedom.
Can you give us any statistics on differences in sexual practices and trends since Plan B started distribution? Out of fear of displaying any more upsetting ignorance, I can't really speculate on the goals and consequences of it's distribution.
Redhurt -
Plan B is fairly new as a means of contraception. I think it has only recently gotten enough attention for most women to know it's an option. That said, I don't know how many "statistics" are available. But, I did find this older article at the Washington Post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/12/AR2005071200990.html
It states:
"Making emergency contraception available without a prescription in Britain did not lead women there to rely on it rather than other birth control methods or to an increase in unprotected sex, a new study has found.
The three-year study of more than 20,000 women found that over-the-counter availability had little effect. About the same percentage of women used the emergency contraceptive before and after it become more easily available in January 2001 -- about 8 percent annually.
The researchers concluded that fears that nonprescription emergency contraception would change contraceptive practices were unfounded, as were hopes it would reduce unwanted pregnancies."
I don't know if any similar studies have been done in the US. I have to wonder why it doesn't seem to have reduced unwanted pregnancies in the UK, and perhaps it's because of lack of knowledge about the availablity of Plan B. I also suspect that women who are most vigilant about preventing pregancy wouldn't find themselves in need of Plan B.
I'm still giving thought to the whole control and humanity issue. I'm also still trying to sort out Gre'gry's suggestion that we formulate a Christian response to the issue. The trouble here is that I doubt there is A Christian response, but rather, numerous responses.
As for it's part in cultural change, Plan B appears to be fuel for the culture war over definitions of the family, parenthood, and the moral assumptions behind such decisions. These battles aren't yet "won" (and probably won't ever be), so it will be interesting to see how the whole debate plays out.
Redhurt - You were gracious when I pointed out your (minor) mistake earlier, but what I was really saying was that you, an educated person, were unclear on the distinction between Plan B and RU486 so the problem was wide-spread if it reached as far up the class structure as you. That's all I meant, and I'm sorry if that upset you.
greg-ry - I think Mair is right when she says that there will be multiple positions formed from the Scriptures. The Bible is complex and intricate and interpretation is difficult. The other problem facing us is the pervasive power of patriarchal tradition which has seeped into the church over centuries. Separating out what is biblical from what is merely church tradition from fallible men is difficult, particularly when you're looking that a structure that can't really admit mistakes easily (Roman Catholic Church, for instance). Lest we forget, it is Christians who are leading the fight to make Plan B unavailable based on their reading of Scripture. It is Christians who claim that women won't be sexually moral if there's no risk of pregnancy. It is Christians who are fighting to put me in a house, surrounded by "as many children as God ordains" while my husband claims to be the ultimate authority in our relationship and my body falls apart from numerous pregnancies. I have watched Christian women who live that life look tiredly at me as they try to make curriculum decisions for their 6 homeschooled children while their husbands look on, bored and uncooperative. Christians are as guilty as the culture in which they live of blithely ignoring personal troubles and making public proclamations of How It Should Be. You (greg-ry) phrased it as a personal striving toward glorifying God with our right thinking, and with that I agree. But Christians on the whole have their own ideas about what God's conclusions about women and motherhood and sex are, and great numbers of them seem to be fighting for something that looks alien to the gospel to me.
I want to form a Christian ethic for this topic, but I am also concerned for my non-Christian fellow citizens. Christians can be so insular in their formulations that they have no space to understand how someone who doesn't come from their perspective might look at it. Like it or not, we live in a pluralistic culture. If we form a Christian ethic, we need to form a Christian response to others - one that doesn't force an alien moral code on them. I think there is an ethical common ground, but we Christians have tried so hard to differentiate ourselves from the world that we've forgotten the common ground we'll need to legislate justly.
One of the things that struck me most of about C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity was his statement that Christians should hold themselves to a standard of avoiding divorce within their community, but not legislating that in the larger community because non-Christians didn't have to live by our standards. He also pointed out that their extra liberty shouldn't change our position before God, so we should let them live peacably with us even if we disagree. I understand when discussing human life that the stakes are higher, but can we not adopt some similar tack in this case?
Not at all EAP - no offense taken, and you did a much better job explaining why Plan B and The Pill are different from caffeine than I did.
Sorry for not responding to this earlier, EAP, but on the "DEMAND control" issue:
I think one of the sociological relationships present in all forms of contraception is, as we've already stated, the way it changes the way humanity lives. The desire not to be controlled by and have control over our reproduction is both cause and effect where Plan B and other contraceptions are concerned.
My exhortation wasn't meant to be specific to abortion. I'm just saying that maybe it's not obvious to everyone that we don't have the RIGHT to control everything that happens to us. I think we need to encourage using technology in light of a bigger system of ethics rather than making "Control" our ideological king. I think that's what we've done in regards to contraception, and I think that's the issue at hand where contraception and abortion are concerned.
So, my position, and I think this is sociologically interesting, although I might be wrong, that "The Pill" is in and of itself fine, but it both springs from and encourages a culture in which the right to control one's reproduction is given an unhealthy degree of prominence.
Once again Wow! Is this what a blog is supposed to be used for? Who knows, but what I do know is that this string is very thought provoking!
e.a.p. I think I agree with everything you said regarding Christian. I don't believe that God intended for Christians to be militant, but rather full of grace, mercy and love, even if others don't agree.
Meanwhile, I believe that Christians need to have relationships with their non-Christian associates so at some point, they may be an influence and per chance save some. In the words of Paul, "19Though I am free and belong to no man, I make myself a slave to everyone, to win as many as possible. 20To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews. To those under the law I became like one under the law (though I myself am not under the law), so as to win those under the law. 21To those not having the law I became like one not having the law (though I am not free from God's law but am under Christ's law), so as to win those not having the law. 22To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some." 1 Cor 9:19-22
Red -
I think you're right about the "unhealthy degree of prominence" given to control in our culture. Not just reproductive control, either. I think we can see the Pill as an example of humans using technology to control all sorts of aspects of our lives which used to be seen as "just part of life." Depression is another good example. So, I think sociologically, there's a really important point in what you said. There's something about our culture that gives prominence to control. The difficult question is always the "chicken or the egg." Does all of this techonology create the illusion that we need control, so we all succcumb like cultural dopes - or is the techonology a response to our demands for control?
Mair - in answer to your "chicken and egg" suggestion about control and our culture, I would suggest we look back to the scientific revolution.
At least since Bacon's famous statement that "knowledge is power," the West has been focused on harnessing nature for its own ends - through theoretical and applied sciences simultaneously. My thought is that the drive for control came before the technology. Technology doesn't develop itself, and we had to be driven to overcome centuries of relative ignorance on the workings of the universe. Though scientists argue we're still largely ignorant, I doubt we can deny we're better off now than then.
Living under the status-quo culture of the first millenia AD, little progress was made and Aristotle/Ptolomy reigned supreme. Since the drive for "dominion" over the earth kicked in (through the Protestant Revolution, I would think), we've had much shorter theoretical hegemonies (Newton lasted 200 yrs instead of 2000). We're observing and quantifying to understand God's world (or man's as the scientific community embraces naturalism), yes, but we also want to improve everyday life. How do we otherwise explain the continuing preeminence of science? Except for the small faction of Christians/Pagans/New-Agers who mistrust it, everyone wants to know what science says about most topics. It's made elements of our life better, but as j morgan might ask, what do we give up in return?
I think the drive for control is endemic to American culture. It feeds right into our emphasis on the rugged individual.
*This topic of Mair's is pretty intense (disseration worthy, no?) but I find whatever we scratch off the surface interesting, at least. Thanks for the discussion. :)
I agree - it fits very well here.
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