That’s a joke, isn’t it?
Certainly not to President Obama and his allies.
How else can one explain why Congressional Democrats
invited a Washington, D.C. law student, a single woman, to testify in favor of
Obamacare’s requirement that insurers be required to provide contraceptives at
no cost? Sandra Fluke, attending Georgetown
Law Center (my alma mater, I must confess), stated that contraceptives should
be free, essentially, so that she could engage in sexual activities.
Leave aside the moral and religious freedom concerns that
some may have for mandated “pill” coverage.
When reliable contraceptives first became available fifty years ago,
“family planning” was the primary selling point. Not exactly coincidentally, its general
availability coincided with the advent of the sexual revolution.
Plainly, certain influential and powerful interests in
America now believe (as a matter of health!), along with Sandra Fluke, that a
person should be able to pursue sexual pleasure without fear of biological
consequences or financial cost. Huh?
Ok, if pleasure is an insurable goal, why stop at
sex? Bungee jumping, perhaps? Or how about binge drinking? Risk taking among the young is common on and
off college campuses. Why not have society,
through our mandated Obamacare health insurance, pay for it all?
Absurdity to some is sound policy to others. Just ask a liberal you know.
What did Sandra Fluke really say, though? I didn't recall the word "pleasure" in her testimony, so I went did a quick search in the transcript. Nope. Nothing there.
ReplyDeleteWhat I did see was:
"For my friend and 20% of the women in her situation, she never got the insurance company to cover her prescription. Despite verifications of her illness from her doctor, her claim was denied repeatedly on the assumption that she really wanted birth control to prevent pregnancy. She’s gay. So clearly polycystic ovarian syndrome was a much more urgent concern than accidental pregnancy for her.
...Without her taking the birth control, a massive cyst the size of a tennis ball had grown on her ovary. She had to have surgery to remove her entire ovary as a result."
That doesn't sounds like any equivalency to binge drinking or bungee jumping to me.
As a Catholic young woman who does not believe in the use of birth control as family planning, I, in accordance with the Catechism, do believe in the medicinal, often life saving, use of these contraceptives for their homonal and theraputic affects.
That doesn't sound absurd at all. The absurdity lies in the fact that this often life saving drug is masked as a "pleasure pill", guilting and disgracing young women who need it.
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DeleteThis is a very complicated subject and calling this medicine "birth control" only complicates it further.
ReplyDeleteToday, birth control pills are used for a whole lot more than contraception. Both my daughters take or have taken birth control pills for medical conditions having nothing to do with contraception. Ditto for a number of their friends as well as a number of my friends.
Sure women use them for birth control, but in many situations (and I do mean many), birth control pills are medicine like antibiotics or beta blockers. Women who need them for medical reasons shouldn't be penalized because people (read men) think of the pills as nothing more than contraceptives.