We’ve always known the Conservative stance on sex had more to do with controling women than with preventing unwanted pregnancy and abortion. And now they’ve proved it once again.
In a common sense world, there would be no controversy over including contraception in the slate of preventive services that the federal government will soon require insurance companies to offer at no cost to their customers. Fairness alone should justify it, but there’s also the fact that it’s universally agreed that the results of not using contraception—unwanted pregnancy, abortion, teenage pregnancy—are best avoided. But the Heritage Foundation and the National Abstinence Education Association are demanding that the federal government make an exception in the new rules for contraception. As usual, I’m forced to think that perhaps the anti-choice movement actually prefers a high unwanted pregnancy rate, and therefore a high abortion rate, since they work so hard to preserve it.
Thankfully, the majority of Americans are a-okay with contraception.
Eighty percent of Americans say pharmacists should be required to dispense birth control regardless of their own opinions on the morality of premarital or non-reproductive sex. Three-quarters of American Catholics disagree with their Church’s anti-contraception policy. A recent survey of evangelical leaders—the family values crowd—found that 90 percent of them consider hormonal birth control and condoms “morally acceptable.”
Even the business community is on board.
The business community, too, is enthusiastic. A new report from the National Business Group on Health found that most companies would save money in the long run by providing their employees with co-pay-free birth control.
Of course, we are still #1 in certain areas…
Reproductive-rights advocates are openly lobbying the Obama administration to enact the birth control changes quickly, citing the United States’ high rates of teenage and unintended pregnancy—the highest in the developed world.
Now there’s something to crow about! I am over halfway through the book, Red Families v. Blue Families, and have reached several conclusions; the main one being that when Conservatives lament the dying of the “traditional family” they have a point – the Red Family model is in big trouble, mainly due to the fact that these kids aren’t practicing abstinence or birth control. So, in typical Conservative fashion, they want everyone in their sinking boat.