Will Affordable Birth Control Be Part Of The Next Bailout Bill?

Nancy Pelosi has proposed including birth control funding in the $85bn bailout-sub-two package that is currently wending its way through the legislative process; the every sperm is sacred crowd wrings their hands.

Most of the coverage on this has painted this as a lunatic partisan suggestion. But providing access to affordable birth control for those women who want it is not some wacky earmark, it's a legitimate component of houshold economic security. We've seen time and time again that women who cannot control their own fertility are economically vulnerable, and that poverty and forced pregnancy (which is, after all, what limiting access to birth control and abortion aims to bring about) go hand in hand.

In a country with a broken health care system, where the costs of labor and delivery are no walk in the park, just the having of a kid can break a family's finances. And that's leaving completely aside the costs of raising a kid, the the economic impact of unpaid post-partum leave or the physiological impact of not taking leave because you can't afford to, the cost of day care or of cutting back on work hours because you can't afford daycare... And that's just in the first couple of months of parenthood.

Let's stop pretending that an unexpected pregnancy = unmitigated joy, and let's stop vilifying women who acknowledge that having a child, if you're not digging the idea of being a parent and are not relatively solvent to begin with, can be scary or even downright dangerous. The last thing a family on the brink needs is another mouth they know they're not prepared to feed, and people who refuse to admit that are frankly too myopic to listen to.

There are a lot of crap suggestions on the table right now as far as what this new bailout bill will fund. Subsidized birth control for women who want it is not one of those crap suggestions. If the federal government is going to continue to pretend that it is concerned with stabilizing US households with this bailout bill, rather than just propping up big business, this is a perfect way to show it.

While certainly not a perfect system, clinics serving college students and low-income women used to be able to offer substantially subsidized birth control. When I was in school, my student health center offered birth control for $5 or $10 for a month's supply, depending on what type you used. Enter the Deficit Reduction Act, which took effect in January 2007. It was intended to keep pharmaceutical companies from abusing Medicaid reimbursements, but it had an unforseen consequence of prohibiting longstanding arrangements between drug companies and clinics that allowed clinics to buy and distribute contraceptives at extremely discounted rates. In the wake of the Deficit Reduction Act, birth control costs for the women who use these clinics has gone up by as much as 1000%.

So it's not as though this subsidizing birth control access is a zany, untested idea. We know it's important. We've done it in the past. Let's dial back the flipping out, or at least refocus it in other directions. Peronally, this irritation has been keeping me warm at night.