The Republican Party is currently doing everything it can to inflict as many unplanned, unwanted children on the world as possible.
Liberals call this the “War on Women”. I don’t like this term, because the war is not just against women — males lose from this Republican strategy as well. Boys are the ones who get beat up in school by the street gangs that the unwanted children tend to join. Men as well as women get mugged by the juvenile offenders that unwanted children are more likely to become. The Republican efforts are better described as the “War on Common Sense”.
And the Republicans are not just going after abortion, they’re fighting against insurance covering birth control.
It takes a lot of discipline to use condoms consistently enough to avoid pregnancy. For people in a long, monogamous relationship where disease transmission isn’t a big concern, really reliable and convenient birth control is best achieved through more expensive methods. That money pays for itself a hundred fold in improved quality of life for everyone, male and female.
A common argument that is made is that since some people have a conscientious objection to abortion and birth control, they shouldn’t be required to pay taxes or insurance premiums that cover either one.
We tax people to fund actions that are against their individual consciences all the time. When this country was founded, we had a lot of pacifist Quakers, and we taxed them to fund our military. We tax vegetarians to pay for meat inspectors. We tax technophobic New Age hippies to fund the National Science Foundation. We taxed communists to pay for bombing Hanoi. We tax Jehovah’s Witnesses to fund blood transfusions.
I’ve got a proposal to settle this dispute. Everyone would have a choice of two taxes to pay — either they could pay $100 a year to fund birth control and abortion, or they could pay $10,000 which would fund welfare payments to single moms, and the social workers, cops, and prison guards we’re going to need for the unwanted children. That way we could pursue a sane public health strategy, and no one would have to fund activities they object to.
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