Conservative politicians once again inserted their politics into women's health:

National Politics & Policy | U.S. Senate Rejects Budget Amendment That Would Have Increased Funding for Teen Pregnancy Prevention, Family Planning

[Mar 18, 2005]

The U.S. Senate on Thursday defeated 53-47 a proposed amendment to the fiscal year 2006 budget resolution (S Con Res 18) that would have increased funding for family planning programs, teen pregnancy programs and emergency contraception education and expanded health insurance coverage of prescription contraceptives, Reuters reports (Kenen, Reuters, 3/17). The amendment, sponsored by Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), would have increased by $100 million funding for Title X programs -- which include family planning, teen pregnancy and emergency contraception -- and required private health insurance plans that provide prescription drug coverage to also cover FDA-approved prescription contraceptives, according to CQ Today (Swindell, CQ Today, 3/17). According to Reid, the $100 million would have come from closing "corporate loopholes" in the federal tax code (Struglinski, Las Vegas Sun, 3/17). Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.), who chairs the Senate Budget Committee, said the amendment would have blocked funding to abstinence-only sex education programs. He added that requiring more insurance coverage of contraceptives "would increase the cost of insurance and create more uninsured individuals in this country today" (Reuters, 3/17).

Similar Stand-Alone Legislation

Although the amendment failed, Reid and Rodham Clinton have sponsored similar stand-alone legislation (S 20), according to CQ Today (CQ Today, 3/17). Rodham Clinton said the legislation is part of Senate Democrats' "effort to find common ground" on the issue of abortion, adding that about half of the six million pregnancies that occur each year in the United States are unintended, resulting in about 1.3 million abortions, Reuters reports (Reuters, 3/17). "[W]e think contraception should be available to women who need it so that abortion will become safe, legal and rare," Rodham Clinton said (CQ Today, 3/17). Reid added, "I think there is little we can do to take away the emotion of that issue (abortion), but what we can do is find common ground" (Las Vegas Sun, 3/17).

What I fear Clinton and Reid are missing (or ignoring) is that for these conservatives the issue really isn't about abortion but about controlling women. Jesse at Pandagon wrote about these abstinence programs yesterday:

Abstinence promoters tend to declare that their preferred ideas have proactively reduced pregnancy rates, although a major part of the problem is that abstinence programs are attracting a not-insignificant number of people who would otherwise be abstinent anyway. Most of this ground has been tread, but I do have another point here - it's about the abstinence programs themselves, and another piece of the puzzle of why these things don't work.

There are the obvious reasons - you lie to kids about how contraceptives work, or don't mention their existence, and kids somehow end up having unprotected sex with each other once they decide that waiting is for TEH LOSERZ~!

But, if you ever sit down and read abstinence materials, most of them describe sex as a product of monogamous love - almost always within marriage, but as an act symbolizing love between two people. It provides the biggest out in the world for teenagers and young adults - because if you think that a 16-year-old will show bad judgement about sex, you haven't seen a 16-year-old's judgement about love.

Read any abstinence-only program. It valories love, attachment, devotion; almost always within the confines of marriage. But you'd be surprised how much you can convince yourself that you're in love when you're starting to bust the zipper on your pants. It creates a sort of contraceptive barrier of emotion, wherein you're convinced that you will be protected from disease and pregnancy because it's true love - casual sex between contraceptive users virtually gurantees a baby (and probably a crack-addicted one, at that), while true love somehow produces a natural spiritual spermicide. Yes, you're told that abstinence is the only 100% effective method of having sex. But you're given a perverse incentive to "wait" until you're sure someone is "the one", even if that "one" is no more than whoever gets you hot enough to think you're never going to want to have someone else long enough to have them.

The simple fact is that if conservatives were really interested in reducing the number of abortions, then they would acknowledge that the best way to do that is to prevent unwanted pregnancies in the first place, and they would put on their thinking caps and understand that to do this we should use and support realistic and effective policies and programs. Instead, they cling to quaint notions that things like the sexual urge -- the biological imperative -- are really just socially-created behaviors and all we need to do is waggle our fingers at teenagers, while keeping them in the dark about how they can be smart and take charge of their own lives. Talk about strange notions of "personal responsiblity"! How are kids supposed to take personal responsibility when we won't even let them?

Maybe they're not supposed to. These righteous conservatives don't really want women to take personal responsibility for their own bodies. No, these men like to reserve that power for themselves.

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