Oh, The Demanding Vagina, and Why It Deserves Non-Prescription Contraception
" I'm tired of hearing about your rights. Just because you have a vagina you think it's fair for me to pay for your birth control when you don't want kids, and for your kids when you have them through programs and child care. It's not fair. Get a job and be responsible for yourself."
How many times has this argument been stated? It's priceless in it's inaccuracy. It marginalizes a public health concern and removes it from the public sphere entirely. It's singular in it's responsibility. It's YOUR vagina. They're YOUR kids. It's YOUR decision to have kids.
One might ask, where is the man who had sex with the woman, who created these kids? Let him bear some responsibility as well, and leave the rest of us alone. That's a less common counter argument, but it's still made. While there are millions spent yearly to attempt to force men who may not be inclined to participate in the responsibility of the children born of sex, that's not really the point either.
Imagine, rather, for a moment, the amount of money that can be saved if those cases didn't exist, because women, at the onset of puberty, were given free access to birth control? If those cases never occurred, how much money could be saved annually from government programs to help struggling parents, food subsidy programs, medical and dental programs for children of low income parents?
Think about this, and then hopefully you can start to see how our vaginas ( actually, our uterus, but you can only get there via the vagina, so that stays. In matters of sex, no one wants the uterus. No one sings about the uterus, no one flashes the uterus, no one talks about wanting to touch the uterus. The uterus and what occurs in those dark recesses of the woman's reproductive system are almost an afterthought to sex, in today's Western society.) are a public health concern.
Obama's health care mandate rules that women should have access to prescription contraception without a co pay. Is this a great step for women? Yes, it really is. Is it enough? No, not by far. The biggest and most public battle at the moment is the right for employers to not cover methods they don't 'agree' with, specific measures as they MAY inhibit the proper attachment of a fertilized egg by altering the lining of the uterus, technically creating an environment so hostile for a newly fertilized egg that it can't attach, and therefore, causing the earliest possible abortion.
Is it fair to allow companies to have an opt-out button on whether they'll cover birth control based on religion? Sure, we have to respect other's religious beliefs, by all means. But it's also not fair, for imagine if you applied the same logic on a broader scale- imagine if the president disagreed with abortion and outlawed all abortion clinics or potentially abortive drugs. Would that be fair?
Now imagine a company is looking at insurance plans, and the one that covers birth control is more expensive than the one that doesn't. Will they use the opt out button, even if it's not a particularly strong belief of the founder and major shareholders that abortion is wrong? Who could resist the temptation, when confronted with hundreds of thousands of potential savings a year? In this aspect, is it a financial incentive for the company to deny birth control coverage to their employees?
Back to the real life U.S. situation at hand- statistics have long shown that women who have children later in life are more economically sound, use less aid programs, have fewer children, and there's anecdotal evidence that the children born are likely to follow their parent's life and also have children later, pursue careers and have an economically sound base in which to raise their own children.
Statistics also show that children raised in poverty, with a myriad of home lives and poor education opportunities, tend to have children younger, have more children, and live less economically stable lives, utilizing the full range of government aid from food stamps to childcare programs. Their children also tend to follow the same paths, having children younger and attaining lower levels of education and income through their lives.
In other words, it's far harder to climb out of a hole then if you never fall into one. Which is the entire point of this blog post:
Imagine if birth control was free, non-prescription, and funded by the government, to all women of child bearing age. No more legal wrangling between contraception rights and religious freedom. No more wrangling between parental rights to know and minor's rights to choose in birth control. No more having to take the time off work to refill your prescription every month.
How many 'unintended' births would go unconceived? How many women would be able to break the cycle of poverty and poor education before bringing a child into the struggle with them? How many children's lives would be saved from lack of nutrition, proper medical care, or uneducated parenting?
What if instead of trying to fix the problem from the end that's over run with the outcome of a broken system, we stem the flow from the origin and simply give women free, unfettered access over their rights to reproduce on their terms?
As to the question as to whether it's safe to supply a previously prescription only product over the counter, not only did the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists officially recommend doing so in December of 2012, a journal Contraception studied birth control access in 147 countries and found that oral contraception was legally available without a prescription in 62% of the countries studied, and only around 1/3 of the studied countries required both a prescription and a physical screening.
When women can walk into the local drugstore and leave with a month supply of birth control pills as easily as they can a box of condoms, then that's fair. That's enough, that's total reproductive freedom, and that's what's right.
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