Last week, the Republicans rose up on their hind legs and stood, as one unanimous bloc, against affordable contraception for the nation's women. That's a sizeable group of potential voters for the GOP to permanently alienate, but far be it from me to offer any advice to a drowning party other than: toss it an anvil.
Specifically, Republicans objected to a provision in the federal stimulus bill that would have exempted states from the need to get time- and resource-consuming waivers for covering family planning under Medicaid. (The provision would not cover abortion, an entirely different issue.) Affordable contraception is a mainstream issue ignored during the dark years of GOP majority rule, and this sensible provision would have also saved taxpayers' money by preventing unwanted pregnancies and the burdens on dwindling social services that they portend. For every public dollar spent to provide family planning services, notes Planned Parenthood, states save $4.02 the following year in Medicaid funds—money that can be put to use on other pressing needs.
Women who need access to birth control but can't afford it out of pocket are, as it now stands, often out of luck. That's because the GOP has some warped notion about what constitutes proper sex protocol. Deep down, perhaps, they'd rather women not have sex at all or, if these "loose women" insist on having sex, they would force them to face the consequences on their own. However, in the real world where the rest of us live, support for affordable contraception is so overwhelming that opposing it is a "fringe" position.
Yet instead of tossing these fringe-huggers an anvil, the Democrats tossed them a lifeline by removing the provision from the bill. Presumably, Democrats hoped they could get some votes via John McCain's mythical "reaching across the aisle." Alas, when it was time to vote on the stimulus bill—minus the Medicaid provision—the Republicans voted unanimously against it. What did the Democrats gain by placating a fringe group while alienating the vast majority of Americans? Absolutely nothing.
Memo to Democrats: Bipartisanship is a Joe Lieberman pipe dream. Use the anvil next time.
As if on cue, another story unfolded last week that seemed to mirror the one above. That is, a California woman gave birth to octuplets. This was, at first, treated as a gee whiz, Ripley's-Believe-It-or-Not event. Eight kids. Wow. Who other than Aldous Huxley would have thought such assembly-line procreation was possible?
However, as the story gathered legs, a backlash ensued. The mother was unmarried and already had six children, all of whom were conceived by in vitro fertilization. Despite the fact that she had no husband and no means of support other than her extended family and the state's social services safety net, as tattered as it already is, fertility doctors implanted eight embryos inside her. This was, at best, a case of medical irresponsibility and, at worst, a blow to fertility medicine in general.
Why? Because the expensive and medically intensive birth of octuplets raises questions about the ethics of fertility medicine. It also calls into question the state's own laws. California law mandates that fertility treatments be covered by health insurance providers (Connecticut and Massachusetts have similar mandates). So the costs of the octuplets' care will ultimately be passed along to other health care consumers in the form of higher premiums. According to the woman's distraught mother, on whom the care of the eight children will largely fall, her daughter "has been obsessed with having children since she was a teenager."
Right, and I've been obsessed with Julie Christie since I was a teenager, but I still have to content myself with watching my DVD of McCabe and Mrs. Miller.
