Column: The secret lives of altar girls

I am a Catholic, born and bred. Until second grade, I thought the whole world was Catholic, that CCD and passing notes in church (I never said I was a good Catholic) were just a part of life. My church wasn't, and still isn't, particularly dogmatic, and when I go home on breaks and attend Saturday Mass, Father Luke gets us out of there in 45 minutes.

I began college with good-ish intentions, attending Mass with a handful of Epworth kids every few weeks, until about halfway through the first semester, when a girl got on the altar at the service's end and made an announcement.

"This is a petition about the morning-after pill," she said, her blonde hair perfectly arranged, a sweater set pulled smartly around her shoulders, "asking for a referendum on whether it should be covered by the student health fee. Whatever you think, please sign the petition."

As a Catholic, I should have been glad, happy that this purposeful young woman was chiseling whatever small chink she could from society's wall of immorality. Unfortunately, I'm also a feminist. Dyed in the wool. I didn't sign the petition. I also stopped going to church. Although I maintain my beliefs, I like interpreting them on my own--and besides, services here don't use the organ.

Birth control and emergency contraception (a more accurate name for the "morning-after pill," as you can still use it 72 hours after sex--well after the morning after) are tricky issues. In a high school project, interviewing pro-life/anti-choice activists, the subjects were often hard-pressed to make a judgment. Birth control doesn't remove a fetus, and in the case of emergency contraception, there's a 92 percent chance that it's working against an unfertilized egg--it's just an extra precaution. Even on the Duke Students for Life website, the issues of emergency contraception and especially oral contraception are largely ignored, save for a few expired links. From a secular standpoint, one could argue that introducing these hormones into the body is unnatural--surely that must count for something? But humans are also innately sexual beings, and the methods of birth control approved by my church--abstinence and rhythm--are on that count unnatural as well, not to mention, in the case of rhythm, utterly ineffective.

I find it interesting that Duke doesn't take much of a stand on the issue of birth control. It quietly offers contraception, including both the oral and emergency varieties, not covered by the student health fee, but at least at wholesale prices. I think that's great--but it's hard to find out about. Finding specific availability information on the Duke server is tricky, to put it mildly, and although the Healthy Devil's website will be revamped by next year, what about the meantime? Most of campus seems to think the Student Health Center is closed on the weekends, but it's open from 11 to 2, and anyone needing emergency contraception can get it then for about $8 (a hefty discount from the about $30 it costs at a drug store), or at regular hours during the week. Ray Rodriguez, the Healthy Devil's coordinator for health promotion and education, is a great and helpful resource--he provided me with the above information--but he shouldn't have to spend his day as a FAQ.

Last week I went to the first meeting of the newly formed Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance, and was pleased that their first project is a campaign to raise awareness about emergency contraception and its availability at Duke. For instance, it is advertising the 2000 policy change that allowed the Student Health Center to prescribe emergency contraception ahead of time, "just in case." Seeing these women make a concrete plan to spread the word felt empowering, and I'm eager to get involved.

I am aware that this makes me, in strictly dogmatic terms, a bad Catholic. Hell, because my mother was my dad's second wife, I've been doomed since birth--what was all that Sunday school for? I don't reject the church, but the value I see lies not in its teachings: I find at my church in New Jersey, my home, a sense of community and a connection to my neighbors. I treasure my memories of Sunday school and goofing off with my best friend at Mass. Some day I hope to bring my own kids there: kids that I want, who will grow up with both faith in their church and faith in themselves and who will toe the line in between as they please.