I’m inclined to agree with this: If you can pay for aspirin, you can pay for birth control. Excerpt:
Religious concerns aside, the new White House rule leaves the birth-control mandate in place. Trump’s “tweak won’t affect 99.9 percent of women,” observes the Wall Street Journal, “and that number could probably have a few more 9s at the end.” Washington will continue to compel virtually every employer and insurer in America to supply birth control to any woman who wants one at no out-of-pocket cost.
Yet there is no legitimate rationale for such a mandate. Americans don’t expect to get aspirin, bandages, or cold medicine — or condoms — for free; by what logic should birth control pills or diaphragms be handed over at no cost? It is true that a woman’s unwanted pregnancy can lead to serious costs, but the same is also true of a diabetic’s hyperglycemia. Should insulin be free?
By and large, birth control is inexpensive; as little as $20 a month without insurance. For low-income women who find that too onerous, the federal government’s Title X program provides subsidized contraception to the tune of nearly $290 million per year. American women are not forced to choose between the Pill or the rent. And access to birth control, as the Centers for Disease Control reported in 2010, was virtually universal before Obamacare.
The White House is right to end the burden on religious objectors. But it is the birth-control mandate itself that should be scrapped. Contraception is legal, cheap, and available everywhere. Why are the feds meddling where they aren’t needed?
Condoms are cheap. Wal-Mart offers birth control pills at greatly reduced prices. But that’s not really the issue here; the issue is more simple than comparative costs. The issue is this:
Why the hell does anyone think it is the proper role of the Imperial government to subsidize people’s sex lives? Our poor – and mind you, we have little or no abject poverty in the U.S., only relative poverty – have cell phones, game consoles, laptop computers and microwave ovens. But for some reason, they expect the taxpayers to subsidize an elective medical product that costs less than a weekly cup of coffee at Starbucks.
Lunacy. Sheer lunacy.
