Birth Control Too Expensive, Thank Bush!
Amy Jacobson recently wrote and article about birth control and how it is getting more expensive because of a law called the Deficit Reduction Act. That law is part of the problem, but there is more to it than that. A big part of the Bush Administration’s domestic policies on birth control and sexual education will set this country back fifty to one hundred years. Not just on abortion, but on all aspects of reproductive health. The Bush administration’s new head for the FDA’s Reproductive Health Drug Committee says that he is “pro-life.” Along with being against abortions, another part of his pro-life stance is his belief that birth control pills, IUD’s, the emergency contraceptive, and other hormone birth control methods are abortifacts, and refused to prescribe them for any of his unmarried patients as an OB/GYN. Yet all of the methods of contraceptive stop a pregnancy before there is even a fetus, so his argument is glaringly wrong. He also refused to recommend condoms to his male and female patients despite the fact that they are very effective in preventing the spread of sexually transmitted infections and pregnancy. This tells you a lot about Bush’s motives when it comes to reproductive health.
Another blow for birth control is the republican party and Bush’s endorsement of “conscience clauses” that allow pharmacists who disagree with birth control or the emergency contraceptive to not have to fill out the prescription, even if the pharmacy carries the pills and sells them in other branches. So even if you can afford the pill, if your pharmacist doesn’t want you to have it, you might not be able to get it. Several pharmacies don’t carry plan-B in this area as a result, so even if you go in to see a doctor first, you can have trouble getting the drugs you need.
Then there is the Bush Administration’s forceful push for abstinence only education. Several states including Texas, teach abstinence only. Bush made abstinence only mandatory in Texas several years ago. The result? Texas has the highest rate of teen pregnancies in the entire U.S. Several other states that have implemented abstinence only have reported similar trends in teen and single mother pregnancies. Unfettered, Bush has pushed a new expensive abstinence only program, 4parents.gov. This program has released a new video whose main approach at keeping kids abstinent until marriage includes telling them that if they do not stay abstinent then they can expect to become crack whores or other worse things. They also send the message that being gay is wrong and is a disease, and that a single mother is essentially screwed. And finally, now that birth control is becoming harder to attain, and sex education is being sabotaged, there are more single mothers out there. Bush being the fiscal conservative vetoed SCHIP which would help single mothers give their kids health insurance. So is this really a good thing for our country’s future?
Nathan Hansen,
Junior,
Mathematics
