Lynn Beisner discusses the defiant stance Melinda Gates recently took against the Catholic Church by stating that she and husband Bill Gates have sex without the intent to have children, and funding millions of doses of birth control for women.
Last month, Melinda Gates, who is well-known for her avoidance of the spotlight, addressed a packed house at the Ted Talks. As video cameras rolled, this good Catholic mother of three told the world that she and Bill are having sex with no intent of procreation. As acts of courage and defiance go, this may not seem like much, but for a woman who comes from a long line of devout Catholics, who has been educated by nuns and who continues to live in accordance with her Catholic values, this was one of the bravest acts of feminist defiance I have ever witnessed. What she was, in essence, saying is: “The Right would have you believe that only sluts use birth control. Do I look like a slut to you?”
Gates used the Ted Talks to announce the new agenda for the Gates Foundation: to not only make birth control universally available, but also to make it uncontroversial and to restore it as a key component of the global health agenda. The Foundation is taking a three-pronged approach: education and public relations work to quell the controversies around birth control; funding millions of doses of birth control and coordinating a supply chain to make it reliably available to women; and research into new forms of contraception.
It may be hard for some non-Catholics to understand the seriousness of the risk that Gates has taken. The Church has excommunicated and refused communion to its members who have supported women’s reproductive freedom. Still, she has made a public example of herself, talking about how she and Bill still enjoy an active sex life with no plans for future procreation, supplying birth control, undermining the Church’s rhetoric, and even helping women covertly defy their husbands and subvert the purpose of their conjugal duties. What makes her actions particularly brave is that she can afford the luxury of cowardice. She could have anonymously created a foundation that would have done all the work she has undertaken. Instead, she chose to openly and publicly defy the Church.
But she is not just engaged in overt defiance; she is using her power and privilege to help women who are disempowered and underprivileged to be covertly defiant. The type of birth control that the Gates Foundation will make available to women is Depo Provera, a quarterly injection. She is not shy in stating that the reasoning behind the choice is that it is easier for women to hide from their husbands. But even quarterly shots can be problematic for women who lack the basic freedom necessary to get to a clinic or who are victims of domestic violence. For these women, Gates is funding research for birth control that will make it even easier for them to hide their use of contraception from their husbands.
Gates is just one of millions of Catholic women who find themselves in conflict with their beloved Church. Even the Church’s most faithful daughters, nuns, have found themselves at sharp odds with the Vatican. The nuns who educated Gates have publicly thrown their support behind her work, saying that it is absolutely in keeping with Catholic values. The entire Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), which represents more than 80% of nuns in the United States, was recently investigated by the Vatican because the talk at their annual convention sometimes turns to “certain radical feminist themes.” It ended with the Pope publicly denouncing the nuns and placing them on a sort of supervised probation.
Where does this leave Gates, American nuns, and Catholic women in general? Their response reminds me of how a dear friend and mentor responds when asked how she can be a devoted Southern Baptist and an ardent feminist when the Southern Baptist Convention has declared that two are mutually exclusive. After a long reproving look, she says in her sweet Texas twang, “Why do they get to define what it means to be Baptist?”
Catholic women, like Melinda Gates and the nuns of the LCWR, have asked an even bolder question: Why does the Pope get to define what it means to be Catholic? The answer, at least for Gates and the nuns who educated her, is this: Our ethic of social justice, which includes ensuring equal access for all women and men to birth control, is more Catholic than the Pope’s ex cathedra declarations about sex and birth control. For some like Gates, their Catholic faith compels them not only to disobey church teaching by making contraception universally available; it also requires them to tear-down or to subvert the obstacles to contraception created by patriarchs like the Pope.
Gates, with her simple mission to make birth control universally available, may have just nailed the new 95 Theses to the door of the cathedral. She should expect consequences as severe as those suffered by Martin Luther, but we can all hope for reforms as sweeping as those he inspired.
The thing that concerns me about Gates’ mission is that I do not share her optimism. She believes that many of the controversies surrounding birth control are simple misunderstandings that can be corrected through education. She has launched a public relations campaign called No Controversy. At a website associated with No Controversy, Gates tries to dispel the most tenacious misconception, that men and women use birth control to become wantonly promiscuous. On it she tells her own story, how birth control allowed her to become better educated, break through the IT glass-ceiling, and even be a better mother. She is asking other women and men to contribute their stories of how birth control has transformed or enriched their lives in the hopes that it will start a wave of public support for universal, uncontroversial birth control.
What she does not seem to understand or perhaps does not want to acknowledge is that the recent controversy about birth control has been manufactured in response to men’s growing concern over women’s increasing independence.
As feminists, we have a tendency to see the glass of gender equality as half-empty. What we often forget is that patriarchs like the Pope are still trying to figure out how in the hell we got our own glass and how they can get it back. They notice the advances in gender equality that we sometimes miss or take for granted. And those stealthy never-ending encroachments into male privilege have reached a tipping point that has triggered some genuine alarm. In reviewing how it is that women have become more independent, they have rightfully identified birth control as the key to our freedom. They have discovered what we have always known: that you can imprison women more effectively with their own fertility than with laws, chains, or burqas. Without birth control, the women’s rights movement doesn’t just stall; it collapses.
That is why Melinda Gates should be a feminist icon and we should make her the Patron Saint of Defiant Women. Failing that, I think that just about all of us can and should visit her website and contribute our stories of how birth control has made our lives possible.
Lynn Biesner is the pseudonym for a mother, a writer, a feminist, and an academic living somewhere East of the Mississippi.
Photo credit Gates Foundation/Flickr
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