Planned Parenthood, EMILY’s List, Physicians for Reproductive Health, and a litany of other pro-choice organizations condemned the draft as-written.
As we noted last week, once the Office of Budget Management approves the final version of the rule and posts it to the Federal Register, the regulation will go into effect.
What’s next for women in the US affected by this change of policy? Kitty Kolbert, a former reproductive rights attorney, thinks government, business and citizens each have a role to play.
“There is, perhaps, one invention that historians a thousand years in the future will look back on and say: that defined the 20th century,” The Economist wrote in 1999. “That invention is the contraceptive pill.”
If sex is to be punished, why should it be only the women? Don’t men have something to do with sexual intercourse? Should they not also bear the economic and other consequences? And, if so, why is Viagra covered by medical insurance, including federal funding, while women’s contraceptives are in dispute? No one would argue that providing our veterans, who have suffered physical and emotional trauma, should be given the means to recover their ability to function sexually. But, for most others, isn’t Viagra about enabling men to have more and better sex? The vast majority of men who take Viagra are 56 years and older. Given that it’s mostly older men who need it, they’re certainly not taking it for the reproductive purposes that some religions mandate. So, why should women be denied the means to have more and better sex? Why should they disproportionately pay the price of lost economic and educational opportunities as well as suffering greater health risks? In the interest of parity, let’s discontinue coverage of Viagra if we discontinue coverage for female contraception. Are women’s reproductive health and life opportunities less important than men’s?
As a “second wave” feminist, I’m amazed that we’re relitigating the rights for which we successfully fought in the 1960s through the 1980s. Especially over an issue as basic as insurance coverage and federal funding for reproductive health. I was never a man-hater or a bra burner. I simply felt, along with all my sisters-in-arms, that women should have the same choices as men. Conversely, I believed that men were entitled to the same freedom from enforced gender roles as feminists demanded.
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