Last week the media including the the national evening news channels all breathlessly ran with a miracle story out of St louis. That is giving out tons of free contraception reduced abortions up in St Louis.
My first objection was this story was it was framed in terms of the HHS Contraception mandate is of considerable discussion and indeed lawsuits. It was not clear from the story that the main argument against is the FED SHOULD NOT FUND BIRTH CONTROL. The main argument and complaints is the way the Federal Govt is trying to achieve it's aims violates religious liberty, the first amendment , and one very big important statute.
Besides some major dispute over a few forms of contraception that might be covered that some view as causing an abortion this was where the dispute is at. Further it is not clear at all how the relative few exceptions to opt out we would see would "lower" the abortion rate in any real sense even if the study was correct.
That being said besides that matter I had a rather skeptical attitude toward the results of the study of itself. See a good piece at THE CORNER that really calls into question the "results" - New Study Exaggerates Benefits of No-Cost Contraception .Again as I suspected there are problems.
However knowing this area and some of the problems of ST Louis one problem jumped out at me as I read the article last week. If 75 percent of women got a IUD as their choice then what about that little STD problem that is epic there. That very much went unmentioned.
Thankfully Jennifer Fulwiler has decided to look into that major elephant in the room and the results are very troubling. See The Shocking Ethics Behind the Contraceptive Choice Project .
WHOA a a 46 percent jump in syphilis, a 31 percent rise in gonorrhea and a 3 percent increase in chlamydia." Who would have thought that? This is perhaps an example of what big government programs do perhaps. Cause perhaps some very big harm.
Fulwiler goes into more ethic problems too.
The study authors, as well as the media outlets who have championed this project, show a laser-like focus on reducing the fertility rates of women, particularly those who are poor and minorities -- even at the expense of their overall health. Given the powerful control that these invasive contraceptive measures exert over a woman's body, I wouldn't be surprised if this program of free IUDs and under-the-skin implants did lead to fewer pregnancies as compared to other methods of contraception. But, if that's the only goal, wouldn't permanent surgical sterilization be even more effective? Perhaps full hysterectomies, just to be safe? The slope that we have begun sliding down is a dangerous one, and leads to a terrible, ugly place.
The New York Times coverage of the Contraceptive Choice Project noted that "women’s health specialists said the study foreshadows the potential impact of the new health care law." Indeed it does. And women have now been given a glimpse of a system which has zero interest in their wellbeing, and sees them only as breeding machines to be kept under control.
It has been a while But I can recall it was all the rage among some of my fellow misguided conservatives in some Legislatures to mandate some form of birth control if one was getting some form Govt assistance. Lets hope some diverse political forces don't combine in the future
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