Responses help 2!

Imagine a world without seatbelts, helmets, boat fenders, or kneepads. Imagine people trying to argue that providing these items only encourages people to be reckless without consequences. Sounds ridiculous, right? These items don’t encourage reckless behavior; instead they protect and prevent people from enduring the worst-case scenario in activities that they participate in everyday. In the Room for Debate article written by Grace-Marie Turner called “Women Need Dignity More Than Sex Without Consequence”, she argues that providing birth control for females across the country would encourage them to have sexual intercourse with multiple partners without having any fear of consequence. However, this argument is parallel to the one stated above: small-minded and presumptuous. Providing birth control to young women has many benefits like saving the states money from welfare, keeping girls in school, and allowing women to have a planned pregnancy while they maintain their ideal life paths. Government funded birth control is not about promoting sex, it is about preventing accidental pregnancies that cause more damage than good.

Taxpayers’ dollars going towards something as controversial as a contraception pill, calls for a debate without question. As Turner says, “Issues of ethics and religious liberty must be respected, especially when government funding is involved”. As a Christian, this is completely understandable. Why pay for a pill that prevents the reproductive organs from doing what God intended them to do? Then there are those without the religious backbone for their argument, who frankly, do not want to drop another extra dime on taxes. Yet both of these types of people fail to see the bigger picture. The reality of the situation is that providing women with a contraceptive prevents a pregnancy that can consequently lead them to depending on welfare in order to support not only themselves, but also another human being. I can personally attest for this, as for when my sister reached the age of 26, she was terminated from our parents’ health insurance. Still in school and having a low paying job, she could not afford insurance of her own, which resulted in her no longer being able to purchase birth control pills. After her unplanned pregnancy, she had no choice but to rely on welfare for a year and a half, until she had graduated and was financially stable. These people that Turner mentions, who feel like they should not be responsible for young women to have access to free birth control, fail to take into account that much more of their tax dollars are being spent on the welfare that these women are forced to turn to. Welfare provides utility assistance, childcare, food stamps, and medical assistance. Kinsey Hasstedt, an associate at the Guttmacher Institute, brings great research to the table. In 2010, publicly funded family planning services resulted in a net savings to the federal and state governments of $13.6 billion (Hassdedt). Thirteen billion six hundred million dollars being saved! That is an inconceivable amount of money, and that is just the savings of one year. Yet, this is no surprise, how could a pill cost more than paying for women and children’s medical bills, utility bills, groceries, and child care. The argument that Turner makes when she says that taxpayers should not fund a pill to allow sex without consequence falls short and becomes trivial when those taxpayers are actually being forced to pay more for the consequence of sex.

Jeanne F. Mancini, president of the March for Life Education and Defense Fund, says that implanting contraceptives into adolescent females in the name of pregnancy prevention is a disservice to young women (Mancini). Yet, the bigger disservice is allowing young girls whose decision-making skills are not developed, to get pregnant because they had unprotected sex with a boy who made it feet right at the time. Things like this happen so often. Young girls are captivated by the idea of love, leading them to take thoughtless action to please a boy that they think they’ll be with forever. Not providing adolescent girls in our society with a contraceptive allows for mistakes that could ruin their futures. Having a child means making huge sacrifices, and when you’re not ready for that child, the sacrifices are even bigger. Girls every day are forced to give up their government-funded education in order to care for a child. Bianca Brooks, a student at Columbia University, writes an article in Room for Debate called, “Access to Birth Control is About Life Control”. She mentions how when she was fifteen years of age, she got her first prescription to birth control at her high school clinic, courtesy of the state of California. Later that school year, she witnessed two of her classmates who became pregnant drop out. That is the horrifying consequence of not having a resource to prevent accidents. Two young women with potentially bright futures had to give up their education, their future, and their hope in order to raise a child, that’s fair to say, they were not ready for.

The women in today’s society play a much different role than they once did. They are not expected to stay home to tend to the children, cook for their families, and provide a clean home. In fact, the roles women play is quite the opposite. Girls everywhere are working with all their might to get a job and to make something of themselves. Our society has women on Wall Street, women surgeons, and even women who are professional athletes. Not having the option of birth control can hinder these paths that women choose to take or force these women to make incredibly hard choices to stay on that path. Abortion is something that is largely debated on in the United States due to its questionable morality. Is ending a potential life worth getting that dream job? That’s the question that women are forced to ask themselves when they are not provided with a prevention to unplanned pregnancy. Then if they decide that it is worth it, they then go through the nearly unbearable emotional repercussions of feeling like they committed murder. Bringing up the research done by Guttmacher Institute, it was found that “In 2010 publicly funded family planning services helped women to avoid 2.2 million pregnancies. These unplanned pregnancies in turn would have resulted in 1.1 million unintended births and 760,000 abortions… Without these services provided in 2012, the number of unintended pregnancies and abortions in the United States would be 32 percent higher ” (Hasstedt). As made clear by the studies done, by giving women a cost free contraceptive, it allows women to not have to make the choice of giving up their careers and goals, nor does it force them to make the decision on whether their goals are more important then the child that they have conceived. Choices like these are not something that any women should have to make.

By the government funding birth control to women across the United States, they are preventing women from depending on welfare, dropping out of school, and giving up their ambitions. Grace-Marie Turner not only fails to look at the bigger picture in her article, “Women Need Dignity More Than Sex Without Consequence”, she also has this idea that having the power to choose when one is ready for a child, means that women are going to have a absurd amount of sexual relations with different partners, spreading numerous STDs. Being prepared for an unwanted scenario isn’t encouragement for other bad things. Just like driving a car while wearing a seatbelt doesn’t promote reckless driving; it prevents getting flung out of the window in case of an accident. Riding a bike with a helmet on doesn’t promote people to do flips and wheelies; it prevents them from injuring their skull if they fall. Using a fender on a boat doesn’t promote the driver to ram into the dock; it prevents damage to their boat if an accident occurs. This is why it is so obvious that birth control is about prevention of unplanned pregnancies, not the promotion of consequence free sex and should be available to every woman who wants it.

Works Cited

Brooks, Bianca. “Access to Birth Control is About Life Control.” Room for Debate- Nytimes.com. The New York Times, 28, Aug, 2015. Web. 15, Feb, 2016.

Hasstedt, Kinsey. “Publicly Funded Birth Control is Crucial.” Room for Debate- Nytimes.com. The New York Times, 13, July, 2015. Web. 15, Feb, 2016.

Mancini, Jeanne F. “We Need More Honesty About Risks and Effects.” Room for Debate- Nytimes.com. The New York Times, 14, July, 2015. Web. 15, Feb, 2016.

Turner, Grace-Marie. “Women Need Dignity More Than Sex Without Conesequence.” Room for Debate- Nytimes.com. The New York Times, 13, July, 2015. Web. 15, Feb, 2016.