Jagged Little Pill

I am thankful to be born when I was. Not only do women have so many opportunities coming from the shoulders of our fore-mothers (Thank you, Abigail Adams, E.C. Stanton, S.B. Anthony, suffragettes a plenty, Rosie the Riveter, Donna Reed, Betty Friedan...etc!!), but we also have the right and the opportunity to make reproductive choices for ourselves.

 Can you believe that The Pill has only been around for 50 years?! Can you believe that women have only been able to have a real, grasping control on reproduction for the past 50 years? My mother is only 52 years old. It's crazy to think that my grandmother is the only woman in my family besides my mother and me who was able to make such staunch decisions about her uterus and what and when something was carried inside of it.

Now it appears, or at least there are rumblings of a possible new birth control revolution for American women: free contraception via the proposed health care bills that are passing through the houses of Congress.

I understand that everyone has their own ideas about the health care bill, and everyone is entitled to their opinion, including me.  Rather than speak on the health care bill as a whole, I wish to look at this possible revolution that I might be part of. 

Make no mistake about it: the health care bill isn't just advocating free birth control pills, but rather its searching for support for women to receive more reliable and even more expensive birth control methods for free under the passage of the bill.  That means women would be able to have IUDs and implants, for free. I don't know if you have ever had either form, but they expensive and depending on your health coverage you could be paying quite a bit for this preventative measure.

Which in fact is how the bill is proposing they target the opportunity: preventative measure, preventative medicine.  Opponents don't believe it is preventative, but family planning advocates would disagree. So would I, but this is why:

There are commercials for Univera Health Insurance, among others, that offer a deduction in payments or free gym memberships for their members. Isn't contributing to a healthy lifestyle a preventative measure that some Americans are taking part of?? If they're getting a discount for going to the gym or taking so many steps in a day, why shouldn't women, who are consciously deciding not to have children until they are ready, etc. get a break in the best methods available to prevent such?!? 

All right, I'm stepping off my soap box now. Here's the full article, if you'd like to read what the AP had to say about it all. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101031/ap_on_he_me/us_birth_control