The uproar over “procreation politics” has been interesting, not least because it’s based by the liberal establishment on the fact that pregnancy is a disease and that birth control vehicles form the vaccine against it. This makes pregnancy a health issue, though births do not usually mean dire disease or death for mothers in probably 99% of cases. The cynicism of the left is pointed up by Lexington Herald-Leader editorial-writer Jamie Lucke (15 February).
In her final paragraph, Lucke writes (actually states the obvious) that “contraception is cheaper than paying for a pregnancy and birth.” Prior to that, she rails against the Catholic bishops for attempting to impose their will on the public…or at least the women of the public, comparing their position to Sharia Law, which is a tad more sanguinary in its treatment of women, just stoning or beheading them for whatever is the crime du jour, adultery, fornication and abortion being certain winners.
Well…Lucke has a point with regard to contraceptives and the government, the subject of her piece, though not about pregnancy as a disease but about pregnancy as an inconvenience, the termination of which can save billions of government dollars. In 2007, last available year for figures, there were 231 abortions for every 1,000 live births. The vast majority were to unmarried women (74% of whites, 82% of blacks), meaning (the poverty-stricken single-mom thing) that a huge number of both babies and single moms would be on the dole if not for the abortions.
This has been the case since especially 1973, the year of Roe/Wade, meaning that these folks have been living off the fruits of the labors of other people (taxes) for some 40 years now. The current numbers, however, don’t even approach the banner year of 1984, when there were 364 abortions per 1,000 live births. Just think of the savings since then. In 1970, there were only 52 cost-saving abortions per 1,000 live births, hardly worth thinking about. The dear little expendable fetuses might just as well have lived for all the good their demise would have done the government.
Abortions since 1973 number about 50 million or so, give or take a few thousand fetuses here or there but there’s more to it, as Lucke certainly knows with respect to savings. Just those abortions amount to a great deal but then the procedures have been in place for two generations, meaning that those aborted in the first 20 years would have been having their own families now at about the average U.S. rate of 2.1 children per family. So, add a huge mostly poverty-stricken- single-moms-and-babies percentage of another 40 million or so and…well, the savings have simply been astronomical.
The president may be emulating China in attempting to determine the proper family-size, albeit in a more sanguine way, i.e., not by throwing couples in jail for having more than one child. He’s attempting to give the taxpayers that option through mandated contraception – brilliant, as Lucke would probably agree. Deficit-reduction would be a cakewalk if he could do this, thereby disarming those mean-spirited republicans who are not in either his intellectual or morality league.
This is vintage Lucke regarding employer plans: “Because only women use prescription contraceptives [the vaccine], denying this coverage is gender discrimination.” Since men do not use prescription contraceptives but are forced to pay for the women’s use of same (insurance premiums or taxes), that sort of seems like gender-discrimination, too, but who’s counting?
As in the case of most liberal editorial-writers, Lucke misses the actual point, to wit, that any freedom, whether religious or otherwise and which does not harm another citizen, that is taken from a citizen is done in violation of the Constitution. A woman’s right to privacy was the big argument in Roe/Wade, but how does that play out with regard to the privacy of others? Abortion involved the physical aspect (freedom of privacy); however, mandates directly contravening doctrinal beliefs that have no adverse impact on others involves freedom of religion. This is more than dollars and cents, but editorial-writers may not have noticed.
Mandating healthcare gave the government direct control over the citizen’s right to life, let alone liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Mandating contraception-acquisition is in the same league. This is meddling with citizen freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution, but that is precisely the agenda of Obama and the left, people like Lucke – getting rid of the Constitution as a governing document because it militates against centralized, federal control of every facet of a citizen’s existence.
It has been obvious from the beginning of his presidency that Obama intends to destroy Constitutional government, the thing that has made this country the envy of the world. The elections this year for both the presidency and the Congress will comprise a watershed development. Four more years to destroy the American way of life is unthinkable.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
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