Quoting Quiverfull: Pay For Your Own Birth Control?

Yeah, okay. Except he misses / ignores the fact that plenty of women take “birth control” (i.e. hormone therapy) for medical conditions completely unrelated to contraception. And currently, with the cost structure surrounding insurance / prescriptions, it really does impose an undue burden on women to specifically carve hormone therapy out of their insurance coverage.

Until such time as health insurance is completely decoupled from employment, the Hobby Lobby employee that needs hormone therapy is essentially being denied a benefit that her employer agreed to provide when it hired her. The company is forcing her to take a pay cut. It would be the same as if I said to my employer, “I’m only going to work 35 hours a week because of my religious beliefs, even though when you hired me I agreed to work 40 hours a week.” Of course, my employer could fire me, but the Hobby Lobby employee doesn’t have the same option. There’s a huge power disparity between employer and employee. That’s why we have something called “labor law.”

Also, Hobby Lobby isn’t just fighting not to pay for hormone therapy. They also don’t want to pay for a doctor visit in which the doctor prescribes hormone therapy. So if the company prevails, the Hobby Lobby employee goes to her annual gyno visit (which should be covered according to the health plan (*), gets her annual checkup as well as a prescription for hormone therapy, pays for the hormone therapy herself, and then ALSO has to pay for the doctor visit out-of-pocket because she got a prescription for hormone therapy during the visit.

(*) again, the health plan that the company AGREED TO PROVIDE

Matt Walsh occasionally makes sense. In this column, he sounds like what he really is: a 29-year-old kid with a high school education who got lucky. And thinks that entitles him to tell the rest of the world what to do. Hopefully, he’ll grow up some day.

Hmm, or maybe find a partner that is responsible and perhaps provides condoms? After all, if they want sex, perhaps some of the responsibility should land on their…uh…laps?

No shit. It makes me want to slap this guy’s teeth out with a shovel.

Heaven forbid I get my insurance (that I pay $300/month for) to pay for treatment for a medical need I have! No, thank you. I’d prefer to live with PCOS and other issues that come from having too many androgens…let’s deny me things that I need just because you’re afraid some “tart” is going to elect not to get pregnant. I love how fair these people are!

So, it’s clear he doesn’t understand how health insurance works. You’re provided a package which includes all sorts of things – emergency hospital care, preventative care, prescription benefits, etc. You’re provided that because that’s part of your compensation – it’s yours, you earn it. So we are already paying for it ourselves – what these cases are about are adding an additional cost and burden for female employees. It’s a stupid, stupid argument that only works because of people’s fear of sex, replace “birth control” with “chemo” and the stupidity is apparent.

I think our insurance pays for hormonal contraception and covers the cost of tubal ligations if the woman is over 35. I’m assuming it also covers vasectomies.
If you need contraception for a medical reason, it only makes sense that your policy would pay for it! PCOS is a chronic illness. You don’t deny treatment to a person with a chronic illness! It’s like making a type 1 diabetic person pay for their insulin.

replace “birth control” with “chemo” and the stupidity is apparent

You’d think, but I’ve had the “sluts should keep their knees together” conversation… with a smoker. And yes, I did point out that if she ended up with cancer, nobody would maker her think for 48 hours about removing it or make her walk through shouting protesters to get to her appointments.

Get your insurance to pay for it or pay for it yourself? Rookie. I can beat that. Next time you or one of your kids needs an antibiotic Mr. Walsh…just go ahead and ~culture~ it yourself. Take responsibility. No agar, that’s cheating. Let’s all play underdeveloped country together.

I meant an alternative would be to find a partner that takes on some responsibility for birth control, instead of making it solely the woman’s responsibility. If the guy wants sex, then he can do something about birth control too. It should not be just the woman’s responsibility.

Nitpicky, but I can’t ignore any more…’ poured’ through mounds of research? What liquid were you pouring, Mr. Walsh? Did it make the research illegible? That would explain a lot…

It is according to the douchebag that was quoted.

And they always accuse the feminists of belittling men and emasculating them. How stupid of them.

I should add that the above comment is borrowed from a conversation I was having with pro-Hobby Lobby conservative Catholic friends, so I didn’t even get into the contraception aspect.

Wrt consensual sex, of course I completely agree that a woman should not be the gatekeeper/only person responsible for the sex they are both having. However, that argument flips around pretty easily to a woman needing cooperation from sexual partners (consensual or not) to protect her own body…wackiness ensues.

That was my point. The guy doesn’t even consider that birth control can be used for something other than preventing pregnancies. And yet he judges everyone who wants it from his vantage point. It makes me angry.

You know the impact birth control has made on most couples? They have 2-3 kids.

Your average couple who has not spent the early marriage planning for a huge family is not going to be financially ready for six kids going on seven. Unexpected expenses occur with kids, and the expected expenses add up. If either parent gets sick, they’re now in deeper risk of sliding into poverty. And if the average couple raises all those kids to adulthood, they’re at risk of not being financially ready for retirement.

The whole “responsibility” argument is blinkered to the reality, which is that most couples don’t want to find a child in every single room while walking through their house.

If someone has health care through their job, they’ll usually be able to purchase coverage for their wife and kids. If one has a chronic illness, the insurance company can’t really single them out because they’re covered in a package deal with the employer. Of course, if the job has really good benefits, the person might be stuck in it because they have too much at risk to seek another employer with different insurance.

Meanwhile, if there’s a chronic illness or a major illness requiring several hospitalizations and a variety of followup treatments, the insurance company will require the family to spend up to a dollar amount before they take over. The better the plan and the smaller the amount, the more the employee has to pay per month for each person on the plan. Some things specifically aren’t covered in the plan, either.

If the employee loses their job, we have a system in place that lets them continue to purchase their former plan for a time, but that’s when the costs start going up because they’re now an individual not an employee. You could easily jump from paying 200 a month to paying 500-600 a month.

Edit: uh, wasn’t paying attention while using math.

Dear Men:

Okay, but in return, I ask (nay, I require) that you pay, out of your own pocket and under your own steam, for each and every bodily malfunction you may suffer which might be connected with your genitourinary system, which is both cruder and more complicated than mine, and which is at least as, if not more, prone to break down. And by “each and every”, what I mean is: every last one. Oh, and I’m going to throw in dysfunctions connected with your hormones and your neurology too, just for added thrills and spills. So, that would include: 1) severe acne in youth, 2) hyperactivity in youth, 3) attention deficit disorder in youth, 4) reading disabilities in youth and afterwards, 5) violence and acting out in youth, which is a disturbance to society even in cases where nobody is harmed — we can’t run a polity in which disruptions are tolerated, 6) (this is a good one) testicular cancer in later youth, 7) urinary blockages and indeed urinary difficulties of any degree, 8) all that stuff that happens when the talcum powder isn’t enough, 9) prostatitis, 10) the kidney problems connected therewith, 10) prostate cancer, 11) the kidney problems connected therewith, 12) the heart conditions connected with a paucity of estrogen, 13) the energy deficit connected with the drop-off, in later middle age, of testosterone, plus 14) the slackening of affect connected therewith, plus 15) the middle-aged spread connected therewith. And that’s just for starters; this is by no means an exhaustive list.

Just to show you how mad this idiocy makes me, I’m even willing to throw in baldness. Judging by the fuss men make over baldness, it’s a medical disaster. Throw that one in and, by gum, we’ll see whose medical care ends up costing more.

Or, alternatively, we might act like reasonable people who aren’t eager to shanghai each other by means of our biology. That sounds like a plan, but the choice is in your hands.

My daughter has severe PCOS and horrible pain with ovarian cysts. She even missed her high school graduation because — capped and gowned and about to walk the stage — we had to take her to the ER with pain so bad we thought her appendix had burst! She takes birth control pills for this condition. Does she sometimes have sex? Yes, but the main reason she takes the Pill is to alleviate her chronic medical condition. P.S., she inherited it from me — I suffered for 40 years with the same thing. And I took the Pill, too!

Oh, some of them play “blame the patient” with cancer, too. I had uterine cancer. Nancy Campbell of Above Rubies infamy has made pronouncements about uterine cancer about it being punishment for an underappreciated womb. I married late and had no babies because of the medical risks of a pregnancy at that point in life. I guess cancer is my own fault according to her reasoning (if I can even use the word “reasoning” in the same paragraph as the name “Nancy Campbell”).

Yeah, but some companies have benefit packages that are just straight-up better, and some insurance companies offer different plans and benefits.

So they might not refuse to cover the condition, but they cover it as their policy says, which could be different than the old job’s policy.

Heck, for some women with PCOS it can be the best way to help them get pregnant (something about keeping the hormones balanced, I think).

Not good Christian women. They are functional all the time, because they can cook, clean, give sex, and raise/teach kids.
We should all aspire to be so functional.

I read in an article by Guttmacher that a certain percentage of women who got abortions hadn’t used contraception that month because they “hadn’t intended to have sex”.

Now, these cases may all represent women getting “carried away” by sudden passion, but I find myself wondering what percentage of this “unintended sex” meets the standard of enthusiastic consent– and what percentage represents unreported rapes, or survivors of childhood sexual abuse who were targeted by “pick up artists” whose high-pressure tactics triggered their “grooming”.

Unfortunately, I can’t find that URL right now. (I really need to organize my bookmarks better.) However, I did find this article showing that the two-thirds of American women who used contraception “consistently and correctly” only accounted for 5% of abortions– and that poor women are disproportionately represented among women who get pregnant unintentionally.

http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/FB-Unintended-Pregnancy-US.html

Putting these facts together, the cost of contraception IS a barrier to many women, and directly contributes to the number of abortions every year. Ergo, the HHS Mandate WOULD lower the abortion rate.

Better yet, pay for your “Adoption Ministry” adoptions yourself! No crowdfunding (especially for domestic adoptions of healthy newborns), no Adoption Tax Credits, and no using government programs to pay for services for your internationally-adopted special needs kids.

Pay for it all on your own nickel, instead of demanding the “nanny state”– which you despise when it’s helping other people– pick up the tab.Take responsibility for your own life decision to expand your family through adoption.

You’re welcome.

(Sarcasm aside, I think a lot of the furor about the HHS Mandate/ACA is that it’ll seriously cut into the number of healthy newborns that are so profitable for adoption agencies to sell to infertile yuppies and True Christians™ who want to participate in the “Rescue Adoption” craze in the easiest way possible. Cutting government benefits which enable poor women to parent their own children fits right into that.)

Agreed. I also think a good amount of it really does fall into the “guilty of poverty” social stigma. Lots of people sniff disdainfully about someone who might actually find 30 dollars a month a problem but you know…it’s not that unrealistic especially given the requirement for consistency down to the hour for the pill (which is usually what they are talking about). If someone had to delay their pill purchase by even one day or two or if they had an unexpected expense clearly the pill is going to be trumped by needing things like food, electricity, gas to get to and from work. People are very out of touch with the real experience of poverty even while complaining that they have refrigerators and phones (eye roll). Someone whose margins are this small super extra needs access to top tier contraception but somehow the finger pointers can’t seem to connect the dots.