This is completely ridiculous. Every household out there already has all the birth control they would ever need. In a variety of styles, colors, and flavors...
Maybe I’ll be paying for it, but its cheaper than paying for the offspring.
This is completely ridiculous. Every household out there already has all the birth control they would ever need. In a variety of styles, colors, and flavors...
That opinion may be unpopular around here, but I second that!
Birth control always has been free. Don’t do it!
Then maybe you should re-read the article, especially this paragraph:
“We intuitively think that eliminating the co-pay for birth control will help alleviate the rate of unintended pregnancies, but this may not be so,” says Dr. David Friedman, assistant clinical professor of gynecology at Manhattan’s Mount Sinai Medical Center. “If the abortion rate reflects the rate of unintended pregnancy, then populations with free birth control, like those on Medicaid, should have lower abortion rates. But the opposite is true. Although the Medicaid population made up only 18.92 percent of New Yorkers in 2009, they had 39.75 percent of abortions. [My addition: and over 70% of the out-of-wedlock childbearing.] This lends pause to the notion that eliminating co-pays will have any constructive effect on preventing unwanted pregnancies.”
Oh.
Now, why would that be?
(Think, think, think.)
The problem seems to be this:
Your idea that contraception reduces unintended pregnancies is a perfectly reasonable inference from pharmacological evidence, but not a reasonable inference from societal evidence. Your conclusion is obvious, common-sensical, and factually incorrect.
This is because contraception has two principal results, one intended and one unintended.
A contraceptive reduces the odds of any particular act of intercourse resulting in pregrancy.
But the easy availability of contraceptives spawns a mentality which holds that intercourse, once intended for procreation and for pleasure, is now intended for pleasure tout court.
The first (intended) consequence has resulted in fewer births per x number of acts of intercourse, albeit with a 3% - 30% typical-use failure rate (Link, an inbteresting one) ---an offensive term, but its meaning is "pregnancy rate." The second (unintended) consequence has been a massive increase in the frequency of intercourse between people who are not married to each other, hardly even like each other, are not building a life together, and/or, even if married, have no intention of being co-reesponsible for a baby.
Altogether, 53% of unplanned pregnancies occur to women who are using contraceptives (that includes the Pill, condoms, jellies, jams, and sprays), but nearly 100% of these women are surprised, affronted, feel angry, betrayed, etc. by the now-shocking fact that sex led to pregnancy.
This number is greater than the number of men who feel that way, because increasingly, men don't think about it at all. ("Pregnancy? Well, whatever. That's her problem.")
This leads to promiscuity, divorces, abortion, skyrocketing STD's (HPV now infecting one in four sexually active Americans), sub-baboon levels of sexual responsibility, mutual contempt between men and women, mutual contempt between parents and children, etc.
Contraceptives were the paraphernalia of Ye Olde Sexual Revolution. That's old news. That happened 50 years ago. What's happened since --- the 50 million American abortions and the 30% American illegitimacy rate (in the most contraceptive - subsidized communities, 70% illegitimacy) is the result.
(Just waiting for the typical liberal response: It didn't work? Well, that's because we didn't do it enough! Do it earlier! Easier! Faster! Door-to-door! Coast-to-coast! Make it mandatory! Above all, let's throw more money at it...)
I wish somebody could explain the thinking in wanting to force democrats to have more kids than they normally would, my own view is that there are too many of them now...