I was only 13 when my mother found out I was having sex. It
was a terrible time for us. She didn’t speak to me for a week. Her golden
child, the one with the good grades, who got up early and made a fresh pot of
coffee every morning, who never got into any trouble of any kind, was doing the
unthinkable. But she did the right thing. She took the proactive step to put me
on the pill. Unfortunately, that didn’t prevent me getting pregnant a mere 11
months later, but that’s a story for another day.
I have been on one form or another of birth control ever
since. The pill was never the right answer for me, personally. I have a hard
enough time remembering to eat meals every day, let alone remembering to take a
pill at a specified hour. So, I’ve tried just about everything, several
different brands of the pill, NuvaRing, the
patch, DepoProvera, and ultimately the IUD. The IUD is the best thing that ever
happened to me. No hormones, no remembering, no thought required, and I’m good
for 10 years or more. Yes, please! No babies until I decide I’m ready. And that’s the goal,
right? To allow women to decide when they are ready to have children, and
thereby reduce the instance of unplanned pregnancies, reduce the number of
abortions, reduce the number of single moms dependent upon our social safety
network, reduce the number of children in foster care, reduce the entire cost
on our overburdened system.
Which is why it is so incredibly difficult for me to
understand why, in the 21st century, we are still have a national
debate about the availability of birth control. Why? I thought this was a fight
our parents had won. A hundred years ago, you could be imprisoned for
counseling women about how to avoid becoming pregnant, and many women were.
Margaret Sanger underwent a great number of personal tragedies in her quest to
ensure that women had access to birth control.
And they won. In 1972 the Supreme Court in Eisenstadt v. Biard legalized birth
control for all Americans, reversing the Comstock laws that had criminalized the
simple act of providing contraception to women. North Carolina was the first
state in the country to recognize birth control as a public health measure and
to provide contraceptive services to indigent mothers through its public health
program. And the rates at which women utilize birth control have been on the
rise ever since. A 2013 Lancet systematic literature review found that 77% of
women in the United States of reproductive age used contraception.
So, again, I cannot understand why in the year 2014, nearly
a hundred years after Margaret Sanger opened her first clinic, we are still
having this debate about access to birth control. The requirement for health
insurance to provide contraception without a co-pay or deductible was one of
the only things the Affordable Care
Act got right. Let me say that again, the health
insurance company is providing that birth control. Not the government. The
right-wing messaging machine has been very adept at selling the notion that the
government, that you and I and our taxpayer dollars, are funding the late-night
shenanigans of whorish college sorority girls across this great nation by
providing them with access to birth control. When the reality is that we all
are contributing to an insurance pool that provides birth control to 77% of the women in this country of
child-bearing age, probably you, or your sister, or your aunt, or even your mom. And that same insurance pool is
unquestioningly providing unfettered access to Viagra, Cialis and penis pumps
for men who are very much not of child-bearing age, but want to get their kicks
in anyway.
And all of this is what leads me to my present outrage at
Speaker Thom Tillis’s plan for providing birth control over-the-counter while
removing the mandate for health insurance companies to provide birth control
free of charge. Please don’t be fooled folks. This is about money. Insurance companies
are none too happy about being required to provide expensive IUDs which can
provide 10 years of quality, baby-free life in one fell swoop, for free, when
you might easily abandon your plan, and thereby their premiums, leaving them in
the lurch. None too happy.
And so we have the present proposed alternative, designed to
trick women into thinking that the Republican party is really on their side.
That they want women to have access to birth control. But this is not a solution. Not a realistic one.
Making birth control available over the counter means that women who would have
been able to obtain the pill for free will now have to have to pay somewhere in
the neighborhood of $600 per year to keep their uteruses zygote-free. That may not seem like much to you, but when you are surviving on less than $1,000 a month, it's might as well be a million dollars. And what
does this do to women like me, for whom the birth control pill isn't an
effective option? What of my IUD? I’m expected to come out of pocket to the
tune of somewhere between $250 and $1,000 or more while my insurance premiums continue to pay for your
Viagra? I don’t think so. If I don’t get my little pink pill, or copper "T" as the case may be, covered by my
insurance, you don’t get your little blue pill either.
