Right to Reproductive Control

I can understand the emotions and logic which lead people to try to outlaw abortion. I can even see where the arguments against requiring insurance companies to pay for birth control lie (so long as those insurance companies are being consistent about which other drugs they will or won’t cover). But I absolutely cannot understand the position that all “artificial” birth control forms are abortifacient and thus some Kentucky counties are going to refuse federal family planning money as it would tie those counties into having to make these forms of birth control (most particularly chemical forms such as birth control pills) available. Rather, the local Right-to-Life group is moving on to trying to prevent these drugs from being given. At the least, they want to prohibit funding to organizations through which birth control can be obtained, even if the funding would not used to pay for that birth control.
Just in case anyone is confused here, if you want to reduce the number of abortions in this country, reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies would be a good first step. Taking away the most effective, and easiest to use, forms of birth control will increase unwanted pregnancies. What’s left? Diaphrams – which are notoriously tricky to insert properly and ineffective if inserted improperly. Condoms – which also have some reliability issues and require the man’s cooperation. If you want to hold women to a zero-tolerance policy on unwanted pregnancies, then you have to give women the power to prevent those pregnancies.
Oh right – there’s also abstinance. Which is a very good option for many groups of people (teenagers, I’m looking straight at you). But take a look around our society and the amount of sex in our media and then tell me that as a national solution to unwanted pregnancies, that’s going to work anytime in the near future. Hell – if the introduction of the AIDS risk into the sexual scene didn’t kill the problem, a moral argument from the government in the midst of thousands of competing messages isn’t going to. Those people who want to build a society where sex is only acceptable for procreative purposes are crossing way over the line of protecting societal good and are trying to impose their own, almost certainly religiously based, morals on everyone to the probable detriment of societal good. [via News We Can Use]