Original Editorial: The War on Birth Control

Birth control should be more accessible. It is constantly under attack from religious lobbying groups, people that don’t want their “tax dollars” to pay for things they don’t believe in, even legislators. The stigma that’s been created around birth control gives uninsured women little to no resources to access preventative healthcare. 

Many identify birth control with Planned Parenthood, defunding, abortion, high insurance, lack of abstinence. Almost none think of preventative care, opportunity for women, equality,

When you picture someone walking into a health service clinic who do you see?

If it’s Amanda, the girl you follow on Instagram, a sorority girl at Texas State, picking up her birth control prescription so she can hook up with Chad at the next AZD ATO mixer, think again. Chances are her parents have great private insurance anyway.

A study revealed that in 2006 black women had the highest unintended pregnancy rate among all racial and ethnic subgroups, more than double that of non-Hispanic white women. The women that need access to contraceptives such as birth control are low-income women, with either no college education or some high school education. It's difficult to argue that granting low-income women in rural areas the privilege of accessing birth control would lower that statistic and even allow these women to pursue higher education to eventually get higher paying jobs to positively contribute to the economy.

For the sake of argument,  let us move on from low-income women to the health benefits of birth control. Women should just be abstinent if they want to avoid unintended pregnancy anyway.

According to the American Cancer Society, "Women who used oral contraceptives for 5 or more years have about 50% lower risk of developing ovarian cancer compared with women who never used oral contraceptives". Cancer is expensive and sometimes inevitable (just like Erectile Dysfunction, but don't worry no one is trying to "defund" that cause) and if we can lower the risk in women, then why not? Especially when the cost of insurance lowers when the pool of people are healthy. I took a quick browse on the Planned Parenthood website and discovered that oral contraceptives also reduce cysts in the breast and ovaries, infections in the fallopian tubes and help prevent iron deficiencies.

If this isn't enough to make you wonder why the Trump Administration kicked off their tenure with a war against Planned Parenthood by threatening to "defund" them for providing women with abortions, instead of praising them for giving women access to birth control which prevents unintended pregnancies which in turn lower the abortion rate.