Apparently, all is fair in the war on women. That’s why one of Salon’s resident jokesters responded to video of a football player knocking his soon-to-be wife unconscious in an elevator by snarking, “If Ray Rice continues to treat women like that, he’ll end up running the Hobby Lobby.”
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Following in Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s footsteps, this progressive believes political disagreement is analogous to domestic violence. How droll.
But truth is often the first casualty of war, and the left’s metaphorical war on women is no exception.
While the much-maligned Hobby Lobby actually covered 16 out of 20 Obamacare-mandated contraceptives, Planned Parenthood—which bills itself as a battleground in the war on women—came out against Republican proposals to make birth control available over the counter.
The liberal group (and leading abortion provider) called this free-market solution to affordable contraceptive access an “empty gesture.”
This is no doubt because several Republican candidates for U.S. Senate this year have endorsed it.
Republicans like Cory Gardner in Colorado may be willing to let women buy oral contraceptives over the counter, the argument goes, but he also wants to repeal Obamacare.
“Planned Parenthood Action Fund supports any effort to expand access to birth control, including efforts to make some forms of birth control available over-the-counter (OTC),” they assure us.
Itself a beneficiary of taxpayer funding, Planned Parenthood nevertheless insists there is no substitute for mandates and subsidies.
Over-the-counter access, Planned Parenthood warns, “would once again force women to go back to the days when they paid out of pocket for birth control.”
That would be the anti-feminist theocracy that was Barack Obama’s first term.
Markets can also make products more affordable. They can allow women to access birth control without a permission slip from the government, their employers or even their doctors.
What over-the-counter access can do that subsidies and mandates cannot, however, is make contraception cheaper without implicating third parties with different moral values.
Because contra Planned Parenthood, birth control is never available “at no cost.” Obamacare just changes who pays and how.
It’s true that some birth control methods cannot be made available over the counter, including the most controversial ones, like IUDs. It’s also true that over-the-counter access isn’t a panacea in terms of making medically safe contraception affordable for people who want it.
Some women will still need insurance coverage; some drugs are best taken in consultation with a doctor.
Decoupling health insurance from employment would make it easier for women to buy the insurance policies that cover what they want and need without worrying about what their employers want to cover.
Health savings accounts can also help women access the contraceptive care they need without anyone else’s involvement.
But the objective should be to help make birth control available for people who want it without burdening those who for whatever reason don’t want to be associated with it.
Maximum personal freedom and maximum religious liberty—both coupled with personal responsibility.
Unfortunately, this controversy is only partly motivated by differences over how to best make birth control available. If that was all this was about, Planned Parenthood would welcome Republican support and emphasize common ground on over-the-counter access, while arguing it isn’t sufficient.
Instead Planned Parenthood dismisses these proposals as a “cynical political attempt,” a position that “masquerades as a solution, but is not one,” “an empty gesture” that’s “insulting to women,” an “effort to muddy the waters,” in stark contrast with the Democrats who are “women’s health champions.”
This is not the rhetoric of a group that is as interested in finding bipartisan solutions to women’s problems as it is in keeping the war on women alive, electing liberal Democrats and preserving its own access to taxpayer funding.
It is better for Planned Parenthood and its political allies to be able to claim, however dubiously, that their opponents want to ban birth control.
Polls find no significant partisan disagreement about birth control. There are significant disagreements about religious liberty.
Happy Christmas, the war on women is over.
But the conflict between contraceptive access and religious liberty is largely the creation of people who are less interested in either of those things than they are winning votes and wielding raw political power.
For some in Planned Parenthood, that’s just part of the plan.