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xchrom

(108,903 posts)
Tue Sep 11, 2012, 07:58 AM Sep 2012

Contraception Is Cheap Compared To The Cost Of An Unplanned Pregnancy

http://www.businessinsider.com/contraception-is-cheap-compared-to-the-cost-of-an-unplanned-pregnancy-2012-9



If there's a special relationship between the UK and the US, then talking points about reproductive health are like STDs: once the contagion has been incubated on the American side, it's sure to be transmitted to us in time. We caught the kerbside vigils, we got the disingenuous chatter about the "abortion industry" and soon we're going to suffer from something new. The very latest in the fight to make sure ladies get up the duff and stay up the duff shifts the argument away from whether women have the right to end their pregnancies should they choose to, and on to the question of whether they have a right to avoid getting pregnant in the first place.

It's not framed as a question of rights, of course. It's framed as a question of costs – because you can argue about ethics all you like, but money is its own argument and absolute. That's the tack taken by Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal on Sandra Fluke's appearance at the Democratic National Convention. (Fluke, you'll remember, is the American student who was labelled a "slut" and a "prostitute" by the ever-gentlemanly Rush Limbaugh because she campaigned for contraceptives to be covered by insurers.)

"She really does think – and her party apparently thinks – that in a spending crisis with trillions in debt and many in need, in a nation in existential doubt as to its standing and purpose, in a time when parents struggle to buy the good sneakers for the kids so they're not embarrassed at school … that in that nation [author's italics] the great issue of the day, and the appropriate focus of our concern, is making other people pay for her birth-control pills," writes Noonan, as if a course of oral contraceptives were a delicious sugar-coated snack and Fluke was selfishly dipping into the public pocket for the cost of her candy. (Personally, I'd say that a nation in "existential doubt" really doesn't need a lot of unplanned babies to worry about as well.)


Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/contraception-is-cheap-compared-to-the-cost-of-an-unplanned-pregnancy-2012-9#ixzz26A5A6g6i
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Contraception Is Cheap Compared To The Cost Of An Unplanned Pregnancy (Original Post) xchrom Sep 2012 OP
I have argued for years that insurance companies should be thrilled to pay for contraception liberal N proud Sep 2012 #1
Prevention is almost always cheaper. n/t porphyrian Sep 2012 #2
This has always been an argument, and it has always run up against the brick wall Tansy_Gold Sep 2012 #3
Amen. Nt xchrom Sep 2012 #4

liberal N proud

(60,302 posts)
1. I have argued for years that insurance companies should be thrilled to pay for contraception
Tue Sep 11, 2012, 08:21 AM
Sep 2012

The cost of the pregnancy and raising that child against the cost of a few pills that would prevent it should be a bean counters dream.

Tansy_Gold

(17,817 posts)
3. This has always been an argument, and it has always run up against the brick wall
Tue Sep 11, 2012, 08:26 AM
Sep 2012

of conservative morality.

NO COST is too high to the anti-woman lobby, if it prevents women from gaining sexual independence. The RWNC (right wing nut cases, for the uninitiated) are unable to process logic. There is no sense whatsofuckingever in arguing with them on logical, reasonable grounds. They are pathologically incapable of such reasoning.

They have it in their very, very, very narrow little minds that gawd made women to have babies and to have them in pain and shame. NOTHING ELSE MATTERS. If logic mattered, they would not be supporting the campaign of the man who destroyed their jobs. Farmers whose livelihood is threatened by corporate agri-businesses would not be voting for the candidates who are tools for agri-business.

Abortion is murder. Contraception is really a form of abortion. Some rape is legitimate. This is the kind of bullshit that comes out of brains so stunted, so twisted, so atrophied by lack of use that there is no connection to reality.

They are people who have refused for so long, out of morbid fear, to think at all that now they are completely incapable of it. Because this argument is so simple, so logical, so sensible that there is no logical reason for anyone not to understand it. The fact that they can't understand it and won't understand it should be proof enough of the absurdity of trying.

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