Whether you have a teething baby, a sulky preteen or a college freshman, parenting is a difficult, demanding, never-ending job. Executing its many duties requires consistent doses of patience, maturity, discipline and a constant influx of money and time, even when they’re grown and gone.
And because that daunting task shouldn’t be attempted without the resources, desire or support necessary to do so, I find recent efforts to restrict women’s access to birth control coverage both disturbing and despicable.
During a high-stakes election year, it’s odd that instead of focusing on job creation, the Middle East or the housing crisis to win the confidence of voters, political candidates and policymakers have chosen to micromanage women’s reproductive choices. More than 400 proposals have been endorsed or created in the first quarter of 2012 that deny insurance coverage or deplete funding for exams and clinics.
One of the most egregious measures yet — Arizona House Bill 2625 — would allow employers to deny contraceptive coverage for religious reasons unless women prove that they’re taking it for nonreproductive purposes, such as hormone control or acne treatment: “A corporation may require the subscriber to first pay for the prescription and then submit a claim to the corporation along with evidence that the prescription is for a non-contraceptive purpose.”
Excuse me?
Wasn’t this battle fought and won already by my mother’s generation? The right of a woman and her doctor to manage her chosen path of fertility? Why has our prerogative to procreate suddenly come back under attack, and what does this mean for my daughters, their cousins and their peers?
Nia and Layla should have the freedom to parent — or not — when the time is right, not simply because sperm met egg. Parenting is more than just carrying a baby, and women in their childbearing years, or suffering from maladies that birth control can prevent, shouldn’t be forced into the role, or to endure physical agony, just because a self-serving governor, senator or congressperson says so.
Many excuses have been used to support these tactics, but the main one argues that the intended purpose of intercourse is baby-making, and hey, if women didn’t have their skirts up, they wouldn’t need it anyway. Isn’t abstinence free of charge?
Wow.
First off, women cannot, without medical intervention, impregnate themselves. Usually when we conceive, men are active participants.
And secondly, pregnancy prevention isn’t the sole reason women take birth control. Many are prescribed the pill to regulate hormone levels and manage conditions such as endometriosis and ovarian cysts.
Furthermore, as miraculous and wonderful pregnancy (and the resulting children) can be, not every woman has the physical ability or desire to parent babies back-to-back. And even if they could, some elect not to parent at all.
So lawmakers endorsing the restriction of affordable birth control not only jeopardize our health, but they also impede our ability to work, educate ourselves and nurture any existing children in the caring and conscientious manner that they deserve.
There was once a patriarchal system in place in which adult women were treated no better than livestock, preventing them from having the right to vote, own property or even file charges against their husbands for abusing their bodies, minds and souls.
And when men who’ve been elected to represent the best interests of their constituents find it so easy to deprive our daughters and their future children of the hard-won ability to manage their own reproductive health, it reinforces the gender gap and renders more than half the population as voiceless and vulnerable as the children these politicians claim to protect.
And if our bodies and choices can be controlled by strangers, where is the morality or “family value” in that?
Lorrie Irby Jackson is a Briefing columnist.
