Tag Archives: Contraceptives

News

Sandra Fluke: Georgetown students spend $3000 on contraception

62 Comments

From CNS News, a very funny story.

Excerpt:

A Georgetown co-ed told Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s hearing that the women in her law school program are having so much sex that they’re going broke, so you and I should pay for their birth control.

Speaking at a hearing held by Pelosi to tout Pres. Obama’s mandate that virtually every health insurance plan cover the full cost of contraception and abortion-inducing products, Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke said that it’s too expensive to have sex in law school without mandated insurance coverage.

Apparently, four out of every ten co-eds are having so much sex that it’s hard to make ends meet if they have to pay for their own contraception, Fluke’s research shows.

“Forty percent of the female students at Georgetown Law reported to us that they struggled financially as a result of this policy (Georgetown student insurance not covering contraception), Fluke reported.

It costs a female student $3,000 to have protected sex over the course of her three-year stint in law school, according to her calculations.

“Without insurance coverage, contraception, as you know, can cost a woman over $3,000 during law school,” Fluke told the hearing.

$3,000 for birth control in three years? That’s a thousand dollars a year of sex – and, she wants us to pay for it.

Yes, us. Where do you think the insurance companies forced to cover this cost get the money to pay for these co-eds to have sex? It comes from the health care insurance premiums you and I pay.

But, back to this woman’s complaint that she’s spending $3,000 for birth control during her time in college.

“For a lot of students, like me, who are on public interest scholarships, that’s practically an entire summer’s salary,” she complains.

So, she earns enough money in just one summer to pays for three full years of sex. And, yes, they are full years – since she and her co-ed classmates are having sex nearly three times a day for three years straight, apparently.

The problem with government-run health insurance is that it turns into nothing but vote buying. The government forces everyone to pay for coverages they don’t want so that they can redistribute the wealth from people who don’t engage in risky, costly behaviors to people who do. It encourages people to be more reckless and irresponsible when someone else is paying for it. In economics, this is called “moral hazard”. Promiscuity costs money – money for contraceptives, abortions, etc. What happens when support for promiscuity it is counted as “health care” is that people who abstain from promiscuity end up subsidizing the promiscuity of others. And that’s why we get more of it – you get more of anything when you reduce the costs of it.

The most troubling thing about subsidizing premarital sex is that research has shown that premarital sex reduces the stability of marriages as well as the quality of marriages. Another study showed that teenage premarital sex increases the risk of divorce. Furthermore, the more marriages break down, the more society pays to deal with the fallout – $112 billion per year according to a recent study.

The same thing happens with subsidized single motherhood by choice – the more that the government subsidizes single motherhood by choice, the more of it you get. Many women want the baby without the husband now, and it’s easier for them when the government pays for it by taking money from workers and businesses. This is in spite of the research showing how harmful the decline of marriage is to society, especially because the decline of marriage leads to increased child poverty and increased violence to women and children.

The testimony by Sandra Fluke reminds me of that Christina Hoff Sommers book “Who Stole Feminism?” where the feminists just make up numbers out of nowhere in order to blame men and portray themselves as helpless victims in need of new laws, policies and bailouts. I guess this is what they learn to do in Women’s Studies programs.

What’s scary to me is that women like Sandra Fluke become lawyers and judges and they do influence what society will look like. Men have to make decisions about what to do in a society that does not support men or marriage very much anymore.

UPDATE: A little bit more information about Sandra Fluke.

I put that in quotes because in the beginning she was described as a Georgetown law student. It was then revealed that prior to attending Georgetown she was an active women’s right advocate. In one of her first interviews she is quoted as talking about how she reviewed Georgetown’s insurance policy prior to committing to attend, and seeing that it didn’t cover contraceptive services, she decided to attend with the express purpose of battling this policy. During this time, she was described as a 23-year-old coed. Magically, at the same time Congress is debating the forced coverage of contraception, she appears and is even brought to Capitol Hill to testify. This morning, in an interview with Matt Lauer on the Today show, it was revealed that she is 30 years old, NOT the 23 that had been reported all along.

In other words, folks, you are being played. She has been an activist all along and the Dems were just waiting for the appropriate time to play her.

The whole thing was engineered, but don’t expect the mainstream media to report that to you.

Related posts

News

Does improved access to contraception reduce the number of abortions?

1 Comment

This article from the liberal New York Times answers that question. (H/T Mary)

Excerpt: (links removed)

To begin with, a lack of contraceptive access simply doesn’t seem to be a significant factor in unplanned pregnancy in the United States. When the Alan Guttmacher Institute surveyed more than 10,000 women who had procured abortions in 2000 and 2001, it found that only 12 percent cited problems obtaining birth control as a reason for their pregnancies. A recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study of teenage mothers found similar results: Only 13 percent of the teens reported having had trouble getting contraception.

At the same time, if liberal social policies really led inexorably to fewer unplanned pregnancies and thus fewer abortions, you would expect “blue” regions of the country to have lower teen pregnancy rates and fewer abortions per capita than demographically similar “red” regions.

But that isn’t what the data show. Instead, abortion rates are frequently higher in more liberal states, where access is often largely unrestricted, than in more conservative states, which are more likely to have parental consent laws, waiting periods, and so on. “Safe, legal and rare” is a nice slogan, but liberal policies don’t always seem to deliver the “rare” part.

What’s more, another Guttmacher Institute study suggests that liberal states don’t necessarily do better than conservative ones at preventing teenagers from getting pregnant in the first place. Instead, the lower teenage birth rates in many blue states are mostly just a consequence of (again) their higher abortion rates. Liberal California, for instance, has a higher teen pregnancy rate than socially conservative Alabama; the Californian teenage birth rate is only lower because the Californian abortion rate is more than twice as high.

These are realities liberals should keep in mind when tempted to rail against conservatives for rejecting the intuitive-seeming promise of “more condoms, fewer abortions.” What’s intuitive isn’t always true, and if social conservatives haven’t figured out how to make all good things go together in post-sexual-revolution America, neither have social liberals.

At the very least, American conservatives are hardly crazy to reject a model for sex, marriage and family that seems to depend heavily on higher-than-average abortion rates. They’ve seen that future in places like liberal, cosmopolitan New York, where two in five pregnancies end in abortion. And it isn’t a pretty sight.

This is similar to what we know from other countries like Spain, where increased sex education has led to higher rates of abortion.

What happens in other countries?

Here’s the article from Life Site News.

Excerpt:

Abortion advocates often promote contraception by claiming that as contraception use increases, the number of “unwanted” pregnancies and therefore abortions will decrease. But a new study out of Spain has found the exact opposite, suggesting that contraception actually increases abortion rates.

The authors, who published their findings in the January 2011 issue of the journal Contraception, conducted surveys of about 2,000 Spanish women aged 15 to 49 every two years from 1997 to 2007.  They found that over this period the number of women using contraceptives increased from 49.1% to 79.9%.

Yet they noted that in the same time frame the country’s abortion rate more than doubled from 5.52 per 1,000 women to 11.49.

This UK Daily Mail story explains how more contraception means more abortion in the UK.

Excerpt:

Most pregnancies among girls under 18 ended in abortion last year.

Out of around 40,000 pregnancies more than 20,000 were terminated – the first time more had chosen this option than become mothers.

The figure is higher than 2007, when it just hit 50 per cent, and consistent with a steady upwards trend since the Government started its controversial Teenage Pregnancy Strategy in 1999.

Figures out on May 21 will also show that for the first time the number of abortions performed on women living in England and Wales topped 200,000.

The teenage pregnancy strategy, which has cost taxpayers more than £300million, was meant to halve the number of conceptions among girls under 18 in England between 1998 and 2010.

Ministers have tried to slash teenage pregnancies by freely handing out contraceptives and expanding sex education.

But the fall in pregnancy rates has not met Government targets, and in 2007 the rate actually rose.

Teenage pregnancy rates are now higher than they were in 1995. Pregnancies among girls under 16 – below the age of consent – are also at the highest level since 1998.

So handing out contraceptives left and right at taxpayer expense raised the rate of abortion.

Birth control pills and breast cancer

Many studies showed that taking birth control pills caused an increased risk of breast cancer.

Study 1: (March 2003)

RESULTS: Among the youngest age group (<35 years, n = 545), significant predictors of risk included African-American race (RR = 2.66: 95% CI 1.4-4.9) and recent use of oral contraceptives (RR = 2.26; 95% CI 1.4-3.6). Although these relationships were strongest for estrogen receptor-negative (ER-) tumors (RRs of 3.30 for race and 3.56 for recent oral contraceptive use), these associations were also apparent for young women with ER+ tumors. Delayed childbearing was a risk factor for ER+ tumors among the older premenopausal women (Ptrend < 0.01), but not for women <35 years in whom early childbearing was associated with an increased risk, reflecting a short-term increase in risk immediately following a birth.

Study 2: (October 2008)

Oral contraceptive use ≥1 year was associated with a 2.5-fold increased risk for triple-negative breast cancer (95% confidence interval, 1.4-4.3) and no significantly increased risk for non-triple-negative breast cancer (Pheterogeneity = 0.008). Furthermore, the risk among oral contraceptive users conferred by longer oral contraceptive duration and by more recent use was significantly greater for triple-negative breast cancer than non-triple-negative breast cancer (Pheterogeneity = 0.02 and 0.01, respectively).

These are all things to think about when we start talking about using contraceptives as a way to reduce abortions.

News

Rick Santorum: Catholic bishops should not have supported Obamacare

8 Comments

Have you all heard that the Obama administration is forcing religious organizations to cover contraception?

Excerpt: (links removed)

HHS has issued a rule that requires non-exempt health care plans to cover all FDA-approved contraceptives, sterilization, and related education and counseling.

On the ground that certain FDA-approved contraceptive methods can sometimes “cause the demise of embryos both after and before uterine implantation,” many institutions also believe that the rule forces them to cover abortion.

Paying for, providing, educating about, or otherwise participating in abortion, contraception, and/or sterilization violates the religious or moral conscience of many individuals and institutions. Coupled with Obamacare’s new health care coverage mandates, the HHS rule therefore represents one of the broadest attacks on freedom of conscience ever in this country.

The rule includes an exemption for religious employers. But as Heritage stated in public comments submitted to HHS in 2011, the exemption “is too narrow to accommodate properly the interests protected by First Amendment freedoms.”

Indeed, according to The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, the exemption is based on “the stingiest definition” of a religious organization ever to appear in federal law. The definition likely would not protect many religious charities, hospitals, colleges, nursing homes, universities, and others.

The exemption also fails to protect individuals who object to enrolling in or contributing to plans that cover the morally controversial items now mandated by law.

The HHS contraceptive mandate powerfully illustrates the principle that freedom of conscience in health care goes hand in hand with more personal control and freedom of choice over health care decisions.

Why would I want to get coverage for contraception? I’m chaste. It’s wrong to force me to pay for contraceptives, when I don’t want them or need them. And I don’t want to lower the cost of premarital sex for other people by handing them free condoms. Medical insurance should not be a form of wealth redistribution or social engineering. I don’t want to subsidize the lifestyle choices of others. And I don’t want to normalize behaviors that I don’t agree with by making everyone pay for them.

In any case, let’s see what Rick Santorum thinks.

Here is an excerpt from an interview where Rick Santorum reacts to this attack on religion by the secular leftist Obama administration:

HH: Now I want to talk to you about two substantive issues, Senator Santorum. The first are these new regulations from the Obama administration. I read the letter from Archbishop Olmstead of Phoenix on the air. Archbishop Jose Gomez of Los Angeles has written a new article in First Things. It’s shocking, actually, what’s going on. Should this be a centerpiece of whoever the nominee’s campaign is?

RS: I talked about it in every speech I’ve given today. And here’s what I said, though, Hugh. I said that I took issue with the Catholic Bishops Conference, because Hugh, you may remember, they embraced Obamacare.

HH: Yes.

RS: They embraced it and said…here’s what I said to them. Be careful when you have government saying that they can give you rights, that you have a right to health care, and government’s going to give you something, because once you are now dependant on government, they, not only can they take that right away, they can tell you how to exercise that right, and you can either like it or not. And that’s the problem. That’s what the Catholic Bishops Conference didn’t get, that there’s no free lunch here, folks. If you’re going to give people secular power, then they’re going to use it in a secular fashion. And that’s why, you know, I hate to say it, but you know, you had it coming. And it’s time to wake up and realize that government isn’t the answer to the social ills. It’s people of faith, and it’s families, and it’s communities, and it’s charities that need to do this as it has in America so successfully for so long.

The funny thing is that most Catholics voted for Obama. So Rick Santorum is really calling them to account for that. He sounds so much like an evangelical Protestant, no wonder we like him so much.

Rick Santorum