Country Mouse

In American politics, women’s bodies are not bodies, but parts. People like to talk about some parts more than others. Embryos and fetuses are the most charged subject in American political discourse. Saying the word “cervix” was the beginning of Rick Perry’s end. In politics, breasts are easier to talk about. I first understood this a few years ago, when I was offered, at an otherwise very ordinary restaurant, a cupcake frosted to look like a breast, with a nipple made of piped pink icing. It was called a “breast-cancer cupcake,” and proceeds went to the Race for the Cure.

Dividing women’s bodies into parts, politically, has only adversely affected women’s health. Planned Parenthood started offering cancer screenings in the early nineteen-sixties. At the time, the organization’s medical director, Mary Steichen Calderone, tried to convince the American Cancer Society to help pay for Pap smears, which can catch cervical cancer early, for poor women who came to Planned Parenthood clinics for contraception. The Cancer Society refused, not wanting to be affiliated with an organization that provided birth control at a time when, in many parts of the country, it was not only controversial—as it remains today—but also illegal. (It was only in 1965 that the Supreme Court ruled, in Griswold v. Connecticut, that contraception was protected under a Constitutional right to privacy.) “It was such a pity,” Calderone later said in an interview, “because here were these women going to be seen regularly, once a year or once every two years. They would have been ideal to give Pap smears to.”