Posted on 12/20/2012 7:52:04 AM PST by SeekAndFind
At American pharmacies, a woman can get the controversial morning-after pill without a prescription but not the basic daily pill for issues ranging from birth control to painful periods.
One conservative Republican says it’s time to put contraception over the counter, in accordance with recent guidance from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, eliminating the mandate that has angered religious employers and taking the wind out of the Democrats’ sails on “birth-control politics.”
As a Roman Catholic, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal understands why groups have filed suit against the Obama administration’s mandate to provide birth control without co-payment.
“As a conservative Republican, I believe that we have been stupid to let the Democrats demagogue the contraceptives issue and pretend, during debates about health-care insurance, that Republicans are somehow against birth control. It’s a disingenuous political argument they make,” Jindal wrote last week in the Wall Street Journal.
“As an unapologetic pro-life Republican, I also believe that every adult (18 years old and over) who wants contraception should be able to purchase it. But anyone who has a religious objection to contraception should not be forced by government health-care edicts to purchase it for others. And parents who believe, as I do, that their teenage children shouldn’t be involved with sex at all do not deserve ridicule,” he added.
Jindal contends that continuing the status quo would needlessly add to healthcare costs while lining the pockets of pharmaceutical companies.
“Contraception is a personal matter — the government shouldn’t be in the business of banning it or requiring a woman’s employer to keep tabs on her use of it. If an insurance company or those purchasing insurance want to cover birth control, they should be free to do so. If a consumer wants to buy birth control on her own, she should be free to do so,” he wrote.
But will the GOP sign on to this plan to defuse a combustible Dem talking point (see most of the 2012 DNC)?
It’s difficult to tell right now. Jindal’s op-ed was published mere hours before the Newtown, Conn., school shooting seized the headlines — and the attention of every lawmaker on Capitol Hill, turning the lame-duck narrative toward a gun control debate.
Liberals are split on Jindal’s call, simultaneously praising him for an enlightened viewpoint and accusing him of pandering to independent and Democratic voters while not-so-secretly wanting to torpedo the controversial ObamaCare mandate.
“Jindal understands that, like it or not, Democrats were quite successful at demagoguing Republicans this year over their opposition to the contraception mandate. And yet, the Republican base is still dead set against the idea that ‘religious institutions’ should be required to pay for contraceptives for their employees. How to square this circle?” wrote Kevin Drum at Mother Jones. “Easy: if contraceptives are sold over the counter, then the issue disappears.”
Putting the pill over the counter gives contraception advocates the universal access they wanted – more women would use it without a doctor’s visit being required. But some argue that access will be restricted if there’s any out-of-pocket expense – even if going over the counter knocks the price down as expected and is comparable to buying a box of Pepcid or Claritin. They also contend that other, more expensive contraceptives such as IUDs should still be covered through a government mandate, and that kids under 18 should have access to the pill, too. See Sandra Fluke for this train of thought.
“The idea here is that, oh, OK, now we have to pay for it again? To me that sounds like thanks but no thanks. We won the election, thanks,” Christina Page, author of How the Pro-Choice Movement Saved America, told the Daily Beast in reaction to Jindal’s op-ed.
One can’t imagine that opposing OTC contraceptives would look good to voters in either party who want convenience and savings and would cheer at the idea of not having to go through a doctor to get a pill they may have been using for years.
Not to say that opposition won’t come from Jindal’s side, though, in the form of social conservatives who just wouldn’t want wider access to birth control.
“Pro-lifers tend to believe that contraception is the root cause of many societal evils; divorce, rampant misuse of sexuality, sexually transmitted diseases, and abortion,” Austin Ruse wrote at First Things. “…Perhaps, though, the toothpaste will never get back in that tube.”
“Democrats have wrongly accused Republicans of being against birth control and against allowing people to use it. That’s hogwash,” Jindal wrote. “But Republicans do want to protect those who have religious beliefs that are opposed to contraception.”
Still, Jindal got chided by the church even though he made his personal views clear. “The Archdiocese of New Orleans disagrees with Governor Jindal’s stance on this issue, as the use of birth control and contraceptives are against Catholic Church teaching,” Sarah Comiskey McDonald, communications director for the Archdiocese of New Orleans, told EWTN News Dec. 14.
Jindal could open a new conversation in Washington, though, as there hasn’t been legislative attention to this sort of unfettered contraceptive access this Congress.
Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) introduced the Religious Freedom Protection Act of 2012 — which has been stuck in committee since February — to address the key concern with Obama’s mandate. Sen. Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii) introduced a bill that would expand contraception education in an effort to prevent teen pregnancy. Nothing’s come close to what Jindal proposes.
“Access and cost issues are common reasons why women either do not use contraception or have gaps in use. A potential way to improve contraceptive access and use, and possibly decrease unintended pregnancy rates, is to allow over-the-counter access to oral contraceptives (OCs),” the obstetricians and gynecologists’ group wrote in their committee opinion. “…Weighing the risks versus the benefits based on currently available data, OCs should be available over-the-counter. Women should self-screen for most contraindications to OCs using checklists.”
Women who take the pill would find such checklists very familiar: smoking increases risks, shouldn’t be taken with a history of blood clots, taking antibiotics decreases efficacy, etc.
Considering his experience as the head of Louisiana’s Department of Health and Hospitals (at age 24) and as an assistant secretary of Health and Human Services in the George W. Bush administration, Jindal has the credentials to back up his proposal.
He also likely has a 2016 ambition to move it forward.
Jindal’s race began with a shot at Mitt Romney soon after the election.
“What the president, president’s campaign did was focus on certain members of his base coalition, give them extraordinary financial gifts from the government, and then work very aggressively to turn them out to vote,” Romney said in a mea culpa call with top donors shortly after his loss.
The new chairman of the Republican Governors Association, at a press conference at the group’s meeting in Las Vegas, lashed out at the comments as “absolutely wrong.”
“One, we have got to stop dividing the American voters. We need to go after 100 percent of the votes, not 53 percent. We need to go after every single vote,” Jindal said.
And though his birth control message may be viewed cynically as simply an attempt to woo women voters, Jindal’s proposal serves a greater purpose of letting the GOP launch a key offensive on the Democrats’ “war on women” narrative while putting at ease those who object to having to pay for employees’ birth control.
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Bridget Johnson is a career journalist whose news articles and opinion columns have run in dozens of news outlets across the globe. Bridget first came to Washington to be online editor at The Hill, where she wrote The World from The Hill column on foreign policy. Previously she was an opinion writer and editorial board member at the Rocky Mountain News and nation/world news columnist at the Los Angeles Daily News. She has contributed to USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, National Review Online, Politico and more, and has myriad television and radio credits as a commentator. Bridget is Washington Editor for PJ Media
Oh, well. We’ve gone round and round about this. I think I have been clear enough. I think you have.
Over-the-counter or by-prescription should have nothing to do with politics. It is medical. For elective things like BC it has moral and other issues.
Obamacare makes medicine political. I think Sandra Fluke was a disaster for the Democrats as a poster-child for government involvement in sexual medicine. She sucks, and she’s ugly. She makes the issue ugly. She makes the Catholics look reasonable, by just defending what they believe.
You never answered my assertion that this is not the end, but just the beginning of what will be demanded as “healthcare” under Obamacare. This “over-the-counter” strategy won’t work to keep public money from being used to murder babies in the womb, or perform surgery to sexually mutilate people.
This isn’t a solution. It’s a dead-end. By trying to end the debate it validates Obamacare and invites the escalation.
I don't get why you think this. Sandra Fluke worked very well for the Democrats. We laugh at it, we think she's ridiculous, but that is not how the voters saw it. I mean, we lost man - and we lost pretty bad. The election wasn't that close and you really can't even take much solace in our holding the House considering we only achieved that due to gerrymanding - more of the American public actually voted for Democrat House candidates by over 1 million votes.
Look, conservatives like us see Sandra Fluke and think shes a buffoon, but the American public just aren't with us on that. Same with ridiculous stuff like The Life of Julia. We see something like that and giggle at the Democrats admitting they are socialist nannystaters - unfortunately a voting majority agreed with the Obama campaign (especially women) and thought The Life of Julia is perfectly reasonable.
We're not winning these debates. The public is not with us at the moment. Lets just make the conservative argument and push to get government out of the business of regulating birth control pills. There is no reason these can't be over the counter at this point.
You never answered my assertion that this is not the end, but just the beginning of what will be demanded as “healthcare” under Obamacare.
Yes, Obamacare is bad. I agree, more bad stuff is going to come down the pike. What of it? Of course we agree on this, but we just lost an election. We lost this debate. We should keep pushing for repeal, though the odds of it happening now are slim to none. Elections have consequences and the Democrat victory this past November pretty much guarantees Obamacare's implementation. Just because Obamacare is going to result in more bad stuff, doesn't mean we shouldn't get government out of the business of forcing people to pay costly doctor bills to get a prescription for something like birth control pills.
Moral female Christians use birth control. It is a Practical choice that doean’t weigh heavily on the conscience, if at all. Regardless of philosophical reasonings of all the heavy weight thinkers, birth control is the choice over married abstinence, multiple pregnancies or children. These individuals call themselves moral Christian women. Perhaps many of you will have to rethink your classification.
Christian leaders were unanimous in speaking out against artificial birth control for almost 2,000 years. In fact, all Christians were united in their position that contraception was a violation of God’s will until the 20th century. As late as 1920, the Lambeth Conference of the Anglican Church stated its uncompromising rejection of all forms of artificial birth control.
All of that changed in 1930 when the Lambeth Conference of 1930 passed a groundbreaking resolution that allowed the use of contraception. Soon after, other Protestant churches followed suit, and now almost all have no objection to using contraception within marriage.
The Catholic Church has continued to stand apart. Besides “freeing up” our sexuality, the Pill was seen as a development that would reduce abortions by reducing unwanted pregnancies. In 1973, the year abortion was legalized in the U.S. and statistics were first gathered, there were approximately 615,000 abortions performed (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Abortion Surveillance statistics). That annual number has increased substantially since then, reaching a peak in 1990 at 1.4 million.
The ascendancy of pornography, which is filtering into mainstream media, is an assault on the well-being of women. From a very young age, girls are subjected to the pressure of conforming to the “norm” of no-strings sex and promiscuous behavior as projected in the movies, TV shows, and magazines all around them. All this has helped to solidify the image of women as sex objects.
Current statistics on the number of single mothers living in poverty contradict the belief that women’s lives would improve substantially with the advent of artificial birth control. From 1960 to 2000, the proportion of children in single-parent families headed by females has more than tripled in Europe and North America, and many studies have shown that coming from single-parent families plays a major role in the persistence of poverty.
More importantly, ghe birth control pill increases the risk of breast cancer by over 40% if it is taken before a woman delivers her first baby. This risk increases by 70% if the Pill is used for four or more years before the woman’s first child is born.
Ask yourself just how moral is any of this? Thank you, Dr. Sivana, for including me on your ping to this thread.
The morality of making birth control available to people who view themselves as both moral and Christian is that it is available to people who view themselves as moral Christians.
Further, contraception is transparently available to the segment of the population that engages in behavior that results in abortions.
There are laws that govern the sale of products to the under aged. If they can’t buy a can of spray paint, they can’t buy contraception w/o parental permission.
The practical and economic appeal goes far beyond a narrow philosophy that is maintained buy the most erudite religious thinkers.
Argh-”by the most erudite”
The examples you give of practical immorality are errant. Neither of those is practical at all. They are neither practical as policty or as individual choice - they are both acts predicated on desperation.
Please reference the specific Jinda agenda which legalized the sale of medication of this nature to underage children without adult consent.
Self medicating has its pitfalls. Individuals will perhaps sue the manufacturer instead of their physician for unintended outcomes. There will be huge headlines regarding each particular result.
This results in more self education as people will not simply take what the doctor prescribes. In general, I like philosophical constructs. In reality, I would like to prevent the need for abortion and for ending quasi contraception clinics that actually exist to perform abortion.
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