The Times on free access to birth control

(Note: the below is an e-mail I sent out this morning. It is not the article on the free contraceptives issue I promised for today, but it’s in the same neighborhood.)

Here is the first sentence of the New York Times Orwellian titled February 10th editorial, “The Freedom to Choose Birth Control”:

In response to a phony crisis over “religious liberty” engendered by the right, President Obama seems to have stood his ground on an essential principle—free access to birth control for any woman. That access, along with the ability to receive family planning and preventive health services, was at the foundation of health care reform.

First, when did free access to birth control for any woman become an essential principle? I have no memory of hearing about the idea of free access to birth control for any woman before, let alone that it was an essential principle.

Second, was anyone aware that free access to birth control for any woman was at the foundation of health care reform? I thought the driving reason for health care reform was to provide health care for people who can’t afford it. That was the argument endlessly made by the supporters, that many people in America were in desperate straits because they had serious health problems for which they could not afford to pay medical care.

Third, since when is taking birth control pills health care?

Fourth, since, as Ann Coulter recently wrote, birth control pills cost about $20 per month, or $240 per year, an amount that a large number of women obviously can afford, why would they need “free access” to birth control pills, paid for by the taxpayers?

The way this issue has emerged out of nowhere shows what is in store for us under Obamacare. The health care law passed two years ago is a monster onto which the liberals will load everything they ever wanted and dreamed about. Obamacare with its unlimited powers (such as the power of the Secretary of HHS to fill in the blanks in the law and thus write the law as she wants, as though she were the Congress) creates a nightmare of government by dictat. Thus, as in this case, an idea we never heard of before, free access to birth control for any woman, suddenly becomes an “essential principle” of the United States, from which no deviation is allowed.

This is the opening scene of our nightmare future under Obamacare.

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Kristor writes:

What about my freedom to be taller and stronger, and more attractive and athletic? Shouldn’t that be covered, too? I mean, the way I am right now, I’m suffering. So, shouldn’t the taxpayer be picking up my gym fees, the cost of my vitamins, supplements and human growth hormone, and providing free training, physical therapy, deep tissue massages, and spa treatments to keep my skin and hair healthy? I mean, in the final analysis, that’s all health care too, right? Likewise also the plastic surgery I will need to prevent me from suffering emotional pain because I am not perfectly proportioned. Then, to be sure, there is my mental and emotional health, the costs of therapy, psychoactive drugs, etc., of course; but let’s not forget my spiritual health, for heaven’s sake. Shouldn’t the government be subsidizing the costs of my New Age sweat lodge retreats and meditation center expenses, my yoga classes and the cost of my books on the Gnostic Gospels?

And, for that matter, shouldn’t the government be paying my tithes? I mean, what’s with these totally unregulated churches? How can that be allowed? I mean, they could preach anything in those churches. They might even preach that artificial birth control and abortions are bad for women’s health (because they cause breast cancer, or some such nonsense), or even that they are somehow wrong! And that could harm women’s health! It’s all about the children, really. We have to protect children from these churches, with their nasty priests and unhealthy teachings.

Some of the parents are pretty questionable, too. In fact, any parent who would expose his children to churches like that is probably abusive; after all, aren’t such churches nothing but a form of child abuse, and the abuse of women, when you get right down to it? Parents who take their children to a place like that are capable of anything. Imagine: you have to have a license to cut someone’s hair, but anyone who wants to can have a baby! That ought to be illegal. People should have to get permits in order to have babies. And child care: that should be provided by the state, just as schooling is, if only to keep the children healthy. It’s inefficient and costly to have mothers at home caring for children; much better to put all the children in a central facility where they can be monitored by a few state employees, so that the mothers can all go to work.

LA replies:

Many years ago, in a debate with leftist acquaintances about the Clinton health care plan, I asked (thinking of the first chapter of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four with the two-way telescreen in Winston Smith’s flat in which a harsh young woman barks out orders for him to exercise), “Should the federal government have the power to command us to exercise?”, and one of them said yes.

I also asked, “Since people need a positive self-image to be successful in contemporary life, should the government subsidize exercise classes and cosmetic surgery for overweight women?” I don’t remember how or whether my interlocutors answered that question.

Sage McLaughlin writes:

Probably the most execrable claim in that editorial is that the present crisis is a “phony” one that was “engendered by the right.” This is Stalinist-level lying by the Times. The notion that it is “the right” who is to be blamed for somehow picking this fight, is nothing short of breathtaking. There is no conceivable way anyone at the Times believes it. They have ceased even pretending to be anything other than a propaganda sheet for the Democrats.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 17, 2012 04:53 PM | Send