18th
An Attack on Women, or not?
I just read a blog post about how religious institutions not wanting to cover birth control as part of their health care is an attack against women. I’ll refrain from sourcing the blog post to try and avoid the cyber-bullying that goes on for anyone that doesn’t goose-step nicely for the twitterverse.
In an effort to combat your tunnel vision, let me start by saying that I have no problem with insurance covering birth control. It doesn’t offend me in any way or bother me really. However, it’s a choice of whether or not to cover medically unnecessary services that I believe they are within their right to make.
I would like to examine some of the statements she made. Let’s start with this:
If the institution has female employees they should not be able to say which ailments/conditions/medications/etc. they are willing to pay for. That is discrimination.
Heres’ the thing: every employer and/or insurance company picks and chooses what ailments/conditions/medications/etc. they want to cover to some degree, or at least they can. My insurance doesn’t cover Tamiflu, or at least our last plan didn’t; I’m not sure about our current plan/carrier. My daughter was diagnosed with swine flu a couple years ago when we all seemed to think it was going to strike down the human race. So were told it pretty serious and she needed this to combat this potentially life threatening illness. Again, my insurance didn’t cover it. I paid for it out of pocket. Was it not medically necessary? I asked my insurance that. That wasn’t the problem. It didn’t matter if it was medically necessary, it wasn’t included in my plan they said. People have some serious illusions about how insurance actually works. Most people seem to think, “I’m sick, my doctor said I need something, I’ve got insurance, I’m covered.” Oh, and don’t’ get me started on the difference between covered and paid. Trust me, there can be a big difference.
She follows that with:
Believe me, if this was about paying for erectile dysfunction meds or prostate exams, the guys would be allllll over that.
Here’s the thing, you just named a dysfunction and an exam that is checking for cancer. For most women, birth control is not medically necessary. You don’t need it, and yet most insurance pays for it anyways. There may be some rare exceptions, but you’re generally not going to DIE without it. You don’t have to have sex, believe it or not. It’s a choice. You want to preach about pro-choice, I’m all for supporting your right to make choices, but I’m not going to support the rest of us sharing in the consequences of your choices.
Here’s another choice snippet:
Why do we as women sit there and allow men to tell us what to do with our own bodies???
Nobody is telling you what to do with your body, they’re just saying they’re not going to support your choices. You can go fuck the whole town for all they care, but there are consequences to that. Now I completely understand that it is probably in society’s best interest to help you avoid an unwanted kid because it’s going to cost us a lot more to support that consequence since it’s not one that decent people are willing to ignore. We don’t care so much if you die in a ditch, but we’re not going to let you do that to an innocent child just because you couldn’t keep your pants on. Unless that is, you’re saying that you can’t keep your pants on. If that’s the case, should we start giving pedophiles and such a pass? I mean, whether you believe it or not, the argument has been made that such things are a sickness, a compulsion that cannot be controlled.
This is just another example of people tossing around their opinion of what they seemingly believe to be their God-given rights. The Ten Commandments is short as is the Bill of Rights. In my opinion, any list of rights or rules that applies to everyone period should be short lest you infringe upon those of others. People don’t have a right to much in this world. They sure do think they’re entitle to a lot of shit though.
