As a society, we've been greatly concerned about women and the lives we are capable of housing. We have beautifully dodged how the lives got there in the first place. Many legislators who voted for laws requiring vaginal ultrasounds and targeted Planned Parenthood because it provides abortion but spends much more of its resources on contraception, failed to recognize how important contraception was to us. Regulating when we bare children has enabled us to take on remarkably different things in our lives.
But with legislation perculating in the states protecting sperm, we have a window to look at how these pregnancies occurred in the first place. A sperm fertilized an egg! The egg did not fertilize itself. Further, it was sexual contact with a male (generally, I understand the logistics surrounding artificial insemination and in vitro fertilization) that caused the sperm to get there to fertilize the egg in the first place. So now, through legislation setting up conditions under which men may purchase viagra, cialis, and other related laws, we have to confront male (mis)behavior.
When men have all of this indiscriminate sex enabled by these medications, with no intention of bearing children, they are hampering the ability to create life, an unacceptable by-product of such drugs. Surely the Catholic Church (of which I am a member) will closely evaluate this situation! Further, men don't really grapple with the potential of spreading sexually transmitted diseases among many partners. I think this legislation should mandate monthly STD testing for every month they take the medication in addition to the affidavits of prior sex partners vouching for the man's impotence. (I'm serious!) This allows us to keep tabs on who men are sleeping with. Finally men, by law, would have to be responsible for their own behavior.
Also central to this debate is the way legislators discussed this issue. It sounds like taxpayers are paying for birth control, and therefore, are paying for drugs treating impotence. In these laws, I think that we should make it clear that taxpayers are not required to pay for this. Indeed, the government is setting conditions that health insurance companies must follow in selling their products, such as covering people with pre-existing conditions, but they are still private health insurance companies bought by employers or individuals. So this would be no more of a burden than insurance companies covering birth control! Any insistence that tax payer dollars are involved is simply a political bastardization of the health care law. At least make sure you're critiquing the problem that exists, don't make up a new problem. If taxpayers were paying for this, it would be a single payer plan! And that's socialism.
Finally, I have to note that the woman working on this legislation in Ohio, Nina Turner, is Black.
I find this fascinating because Black women are often in the cross hairs of birth control/sterilization disputes. During the 1990s, increasing focus was paid to the women on public assistance who were having "all of these children" and taking care of them with money from the state. Not only did the new government programs require women to work for their benefits, but some states required that while they were taking welfare, they would have to take injectable hormonal forms of birth control that prevented women from becoming pregnant for over a year at times. Once again, these women were not allowed to agree to this, it was simply a requirement. Ever since the Reagan administration, welfare moms have taken on a Black face and it is hard not to notice the backdrop of race in this debate. Latina and Black women went through periods in this country went through periods where we were forcefully sterilized - ask the states of North Carolina, Carolina, and ask Puerto Rican women. A woman's autonomy over her body is not merely about abortion and birth control, it is also about the ability to refuse these services as well.
But now that we will regulate the use of erectile disfunction drugs, perhaps every pregnancy will be planned and wanted. No more unplanned pregnancies in our lives, no more unnecessary spreading of STDs. Finally more male personal responsibility for their sexual behavior! Or hopefully, it will start this dialogue. Just sayin'.
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