Rush Limbaugh has been getting a lot of attention for calling Sandra Fluke, a feminist Georgetown law student, a “slut” and a “prostitute” for demanding taxpayer funding for her contraception. Fluke disingenuously suggested that most students are not able to make ends meet due to the supposedly high cost of contraception. Most college students are not from poor families, and contraception is available for free (condoms) or at low cost through Planned Parenthood and such. Rush pointed this out, but he made the entire issue out to be akin to theft from the taxpayer, and that’s an oversimplification of the issue.
Whether or not employers fund birth control, it’s widely available, and the funding isn’t really the problem; it’s cheap even for employers. The reason Fluke and others care so much about this issue is that they see it as extending “empowerment” and “choice.” Also, like many feminist causes, it absolves women of the responsibility to pay for something. In the feminist utopia, women can have and do whatever they please without having to work for it, pay for it or suffer any inconvenience whatsoever because of it. This is the feminist movement in a nutshell. It’s all about infinite options and zero responsibility.
However, there’s something to be said for keeping women like Ms. Fluke sterile. First, it lowers the risk to some dupe (and the collective dupes known as taxpayers) she might decide to put on the hook for support. An ounce of prevention here could be a good thing. That said, I don’t think it should be entirely in Ms. Fluke’s power to demand that others give her whatever option she wants. Instead, she should be given an incentive to take birth control, but not without proving it.
Here’s the idea:
Give women like Ms. Fluke the option of getting paid to get quarterly Depo-Provera shots at a government clinic. After each shot, she could take a ticket to the clinic desk and receive a check, perhaps enough to cover the next three monthly iphone bills. This way she could fool around to her heart’s content, and as long as she’s taking the shots we don’t have to worry about “unintentional” pregnancies. However, if she wants to use contraceptives on her terms, she can pay for it and the potential consequences.
The reason it’s necessary to set something like this up is that women will take contraceptives only when they want to, so employers providing them for free won’t cut costs in the long run. Contraceptives are so widely available these days that any responsible woman – the kind who can hold a job or stay in school, for example – should have no problem avoiding pregnancy, no matter how many different men she consorts with per day (which is why you can safely bet that very few pregnancies are actually “unintentional” these days). However, if the companies and schools provide both prenatal coverage AND contraceptives, she’ll simply toss the contraceptives when she decides to have a baby and hit up the employer for costs associated with pregnancy.
Therefore, if the goal, as Obama puts it, is to save taxpayer money and increase revenue by preventing pregnancies amongst working women, the birth control should be both incentivized and conditional. That is, women who take it receive some benefit, but if they refuse to do it on the employer’s or government’s terms they have no right to coverage and receive nothing. Additionally, if they cheat on the birth control and get pregnant, they should be liable for the prenatal costs. If they didn’t cheat and the shots simply weren’t effective (very rare), there would be a record of that at the clinic. With a good system, cheating could be effectively prevented (so long as nurses didn’t collaborate, which is always a risk) in any event.
The problem with the Obama proposal, as with so many other policies directed toward women, is that it simply expands their options while removing yet one more layer of responsibility. This has not worked up to now. In fact, the only thing that did work, as one can see from declining birth rates among women on welfare since welfare reform in the 90s, was making support conditional.
