Last week’s Vice-Presidential debate injected women’s issues back into the campaign, and that’s a good thing. It’s good for the Democrats because it makes them scrappy. The day after the debate, Joe Biden was in La Crosse, Wisconsin, telling an audience that booed and cheered full-throatedly in all the right places, “If I leave you with no other message today, I want you to remember this one: Barack Obama and I are absolutely, positively, firmly committed to ensuring that our daughters and our granddaughters have the exact same rights and opportunities to control their lives as my sons and grandsons.” And it’s good for voters in general—including the mysterious Undecideds—because it underscores one of the starkest differences between the Obama and Romney tickets.

Romney has been blurry on abortion. Not that he can’t change his mind—all politicians should be allowed that exercise of integrity without being knocked as “flip-floppers.” But on this topic, Romney is contradictory enough to suggest obfuscation. While running for governor of Massachusetts, he promised that he would “preserve and protect a woman’s right to chose”; as governor he vetoed a bill expanding access to emergency contraception. While running for the Republican Presidential nomination, he declared himself proudly pro-life, yet earlier this month he told the Des Moines Register that, if elected President, “There’s no legislation with regards to abortion that I’m familiar with that would become part of my agenda.”

Unlike its standard-bearer, the Republican platform could not be clearer: “Faithful to the ‘self-evident’ truths enshrined in the Declaration of Independence,” it reads, “we assert the sanctity of human life and affirm that the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed.” The platform endorses “a human life amendment to the constitution” and “legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections apply to unborn children” along with “the appointment of judges who respect traditional family values and the sanctity of human life.” (That last bit sounds a lot like one of the “litmus tests” that conservative critics of the courts, including Ryan, like to accuse liberals of applying to their judicial nominees.) The Democratic Party platform, just to remind us of the difference, “strongly and unequivocally” supports Roe v. Wade and asserts that “abortion is an intensely personal decision between a woman, her family, her doctors, and her clergy; there is no place for politicians or government to get in the way.”

This is the campaign in which not only the right to abortion but, astonishingly, the right to contraception, too, has come into play. In the debate over the Obama Administration’s mandate requiring Catholic-affiliated institutions to provide coverage for birth control in their employees’ health insurance, there was, of course, the moment when Rush Limbaugh called the Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke a “slut” for defending the rule in testimony before Congress, a smear that Romney chose to not quite condemn. Last spring, the question of how much women cared about these kinds of attacks was very much in the air, and it did not seem to bode well for the Republicans.

So it was surprising that, when Martha Raddatz asked Paul Ryan and Joe Biden about abortion at last week’s debate, Ryan himself introduced the issue of contraception. “Look at what they’re doing through Obamacare with respect to assaulting the religious liberties of this country. They’re infringing on Catholic charities, Catholic churches, Catholic hospitals.”

You could see this as a sign of Ryan’s genuine commitment on this issue, or as Amanda Marcotte does on Double X this week, of how “important a target for the anti-choicers” contraception has become. But in either case, it marks a fundamental difference between the tickets. What Biden went on to say—that no Catholic institution would “have to be a vehicle to get contraception in any insurance policy they provide”—was a bit misleading. The rule exempts churches, but not Catholic-affiliated institutions like hospitals and universities. What it does do, by means of a compromise that the Administration proposed under protest, is to allow those institutions to outsource the birth-control coverage to insurance companies. They’re still providing it, in effect—but through a third party. It’s a reasonable compromise for institutions that, after all, often employ or educate many non-Catholics. But the Catholic bishops have not accepted it, and have launched at least a dozen lawsuits against the Administration (none of them, judging by legal precedent, are likely to succeed), and clearly have Paul Ryan’s support. As a Jesuit priest named James Martin wrote in a column last week, “Ryan is a Catholic who is clearly opposed to abortion and not so clearly in support of programs that would directly help the poor. Biden is not so clearly opposed to abortion and clearly in support of programs that would directly help the poor. They represent, in a sense, two distinct types of ‘Catholicisms’ alive in our country today.” They expose two very different political approaches to reproductive health and freedom, too. (As Adam Gopnik points out, it’s also a different approach to the role of religion in public life.)

You often hear the argument that it’s patronizing when political candidates appeal to women about women’s issues. What women voters really care about is what everybody cares about, and this year, that’s the economy. You hear that line a lot, not surprisingly, from Republicans. (“Women are pocketbook voters,” Romney’s press secretary said not long ago.) It sounds like bracing, egalitarian common sense. And it contains an obvious truth: women do care about the economy. They also care about education, military spending, health care, and, yes, the autonomy conferred by contraception.

Moreover, the fact that sometimes gets lost in this parsing and claiming of voter motivation is that access to contraception and abortion are economic issues. They are matters of health care, as the Democrats like to emphasize, and they are moral matters, as the Republicans like to. But there is a reason why the dramatic rise in women’s work-force participation in the nineteen-sixties and seventies coincided with the wider availability of a reliable birth-control pill and abortion. Women’s ability to pursue education and careers is predicated on their ability to plan when they will give birth. The health and prospects of their families rests in part on mothers’ access to reproductive health care. When some, usually more affluent, women can easily obtain birth control, and others cannot, that has real economic implications, both for individuals and for social equity. Romney and Ryan would prefer that you forget it, but women’s issues are everybody’s issues.

See our full coverage of the campaign season at The Political Scene.

Photograph by Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post/Getty.