Soapbox

Conserving Common Sense

There was the most amazing letter in the newspaper today. The writer asserted that contraception should not be covered at all by health insurance, because pregnancy is not a disease and providing contraceptive coverage causes health costs to soar. He also stated that use of contraception increases pregnancy rates, and abortion rates, and besides, many contraceptives are abortifacents. Abstinence, he says, is the only effective means of contraception.

Wow. It’s hard to know where to begin with this. The entire premise of the letter is unrealistic, and makes the writer sound like a proponent of the midevil notion that all sex is sinful.

The health care cost comment is just plain ridiculous. Providing contraception coverage may actually lower health care costs because it would reduce the number of pregnancies the insurance company has to pay for. Covering a pregnancy, particularly a high-risk one, is many, many times more expensive than a year of birth control pills. You should also factor in the cost of treating STD’s and HIV, which can be prevented by using condoms.

Does the writer really think that the cost of birth control in this country is what is driving health insurance premiums? If so he needs to wake up and check out the cost of blood pressure or hyperactivity medication, or looked at a bill for cancer treatment, or for care of a premature newborn.

Are there more abortions in societites where contraception is introduced? Certainly there might be more legal ones, but abortion has been around for thousands of years, and it would be unrealistic to think that just because a population didn’t have Family Planning Clinics, there were no abortions going on. I don’t have specific numbers on abortion rates overseas, but I know that female literacy rates and family income increases, and fetal, infant and maternal mortality rates decrease in countries where couples are empowered to control their fertility. But I guess that kind of quality of life improvement doesn’t count.

It is true that contraceptives can and do fail when not used properly. I’m not sure what the overall pregnancy rate is for couples using birth control, ( it’s about 1% for people using the pill correctly) but I guarantee that it is lower than the rate for couples NOT using birth control!

His assertion that some contraception kills babies is puzzling. I’m not sure what method he is refering to, but it sounds like he agrees with the pharmicists who refuse to fill prescriptions for birth control pills because they “kill babies”. It is scary that educated health care professionals could be so shockingly ignorant about clinical action of birth control pills. For the benefit of the ininformed, “The Pill” prevent ovulation. With the pill, there is no egg to meet sperm, and therefore, no conception. Unless you believe that life begins at the moment that the zippers come down, there is no way in which the pill resembles any form of abortifacent!

My favorite part is his comment that abstinence is the only reliable form of birth control. This is technically true, and as a parent, I am a big fan of abstinence in certain situations. However, I challenge this writer to tell husbands across the nation that if their family cannot afford any more children, or if a pregnancy would be dangerous to their wife’s health, then they need to just stop having sex, forever, with their own wives! That should go over really well. He also needs to press insurance companies to stop covering the costs of drugs like Viagra and Cialis, since erectile disfunction is NOT a disease, and using these drugs will cause couples to have more sex- and more pregnancies.

Abstinence works- until it doesn’t. People are sexual beings, and no ammount of morality lectures, abstinence pledges and cold showers will change that. Refusing to provide contraception because you think the parents shouldn’t be having sex in the first place punishes the resulting babies for the actions of their parents. And finally, contraception may not be a disease, but even a normal, planned pregnancy is a vital and expensive health care issue. The writer of this letter needs to get his head out of the sand and start looking at the question realisticaly.