For the Sake of Science

Whenever I consider any ethical issue dealing with health care, I always refer back to my days in various philosophy courses, especially Bioethics. It helps to clarify a lot of issues, including ones that happen to be topical. For instance, some conservatives have said Sandra Fluke would have us all pay for her to have sex. This is a mischaracterization of the issue. Requiring insurance companies to cover contraceptive care for women is good public policy. Countries with poor birth control tend to do poorly in neonatal, infant, child, and maternal health indicators. Just look at the trends.

I recently did a little research on Nicaragua, the second poorest nation in the Western hemisphere. Some of the stats I found were much better than expected. They were still awful, especially as compared to Sweden, but I figured I would see worse. For instance, whereas Haiti and Tanzania have a maternal mortality rate of 652 and 497 per 100,000 live births respectively, Nicaragua ‘only’ has 103. That’s incredible. (Sweden has 4.6 and the U.S. has 17.) There are a number of factors which contribute to this, including a relatively high number of births attended by medical professionals, but one major factor is certainly high contraceptive use. The nation finds itself in league with developed nations at around 72% use. This lowers the birth rate (2.6 per woman in Nicaragua, 1.9 in Sweden), and makes medical care much more available. It is clearly good policy to lower birth rates. (Again, watch the video I posted.) The more population growth is controlled, the better off most nation’s will be.

So, to go back to Fluke, we aren’t paying for her or anyone else to have sex. What we’re doing is making a smart investment in the future. Such an investment will pay off especially well for minorities and poorer people – which, in turn, pays off well for everyone else because once a nation raises up its poor, it improves everyone’s lot in life. (Don’t you think employers would like to fill the 2 million job openings in the U.S. that Americans aren’t educated well enough to perform?)

Another argument in favor of requiring insurance companies to cover contraceptive care is that there are other health issues which birth control address. For instance, a woman may be given the pill for the control of cysts. Few people seem to have a problem with this, thus making this a much more popular argument than my first one (though I believe my first one is far stronger). Seeing the popularity of this argument, however, one conservative lawmaker from Arizona has a monumentally stupid idea:

The current law states that birth control is covered under health insurance plans for women in Arizona for contraceptive purposes as well as health concerns. However, the new birth control bill, House Bill 2625, states that women who want their birth control pill to be covered by their insurance plans must verify its purpose to be solely for medical reasons and not to prevent pregnancy. The bill would grant employers to deny female employees the right to be covered based on religious beliefs.

Our old friend Roxeanne (who is currently getting embarrassed in the comments) has thrown in her 2 cents:

The return volley is from [lawmaker] Debbie Lesko: woman, office-holder, Majority Whip, survivor of domestic violence, and totally against forcing Catholic institutions and small businesses to pay for the sex lives of their employees, but understanding that woman with PCOS shouldn’t be penalised because her disease is often treated with a pharmaceutical that is used for recreation, not medicine. The solution? Enable religious institutions to not pay for contraception qua contraception, but allow them to require proof of use for non-contraceptive purposes.

From the freak-out, you would have thought that she asked women to join brothels. The freak-out is all they have left.

It’s stuff like this from conservatives like Lesko and Roxeanne that inspire titles like the one I have for this post. Let’s examine this all just a little bit more.

First, these people are mischaracterizing the argument. It’s just good public policy to require insurance companies cover contraceptive care. Second, even if we only consider the argument that birth control has other uses, this just boils down to an invasion of privacy. Telling women that they must disclose their health issues to employers runs directly counter to the idea that one’s medical history is between one’s self and one’s doctor. Saying, “If you want this pill, you must tell a third, non-medical party why” is hardly in line with modern Western thinking.

If people like Roxeanne, Lesko, and other conservatives had any sense about them, they would have dug deeper into the arguments. Instead they have all just stopped at addressing one concern without paying any attention to the consequences of their ‘solution’. That’s like playing chess and not looking ahead to the next move because the immediate move puts your opponent in check.

Being a person who frequently gets into debates, I see this sort of thinking all the time. Time and again, people who aren’t familiar with philosophical thinking will get in over their heads and make bad arguments. “We should do X!” might seem to fly at first, but chances are there’s something wrong with it when Y and Z haven’t even been considered. If more high schools required students to become familiar with how philosophy works, that would translate into a smarter populace that would be able to debate intelligently.

This stuff just isn’t that hard.

Filed under: Philosophy, Politics and Social | Tagged: Arizona, Contraception, Debbie Lesko, Roxeanne de Luca, Sandra Fluke |