In Texas, the feminist Left is freaking out over a ban on abortions after six weeks of gestation taking effect. Despite the fact that pregnancies can be ascertained with home tests before a missed period, and even though that six-week embryo has a detectable heartbeat and functional brain stem, Woko Haram would have you believe that this is oppression tantamount to the Taliban. (Speaking of which, the Taliban are literally in charge of hundreds of Americans left in Afghanistan, but I digress.)
So here’s a piece of advice for all of them: If you plan to have sex and you wish not to become pregnant, get some birth control. For most women in the United States, it is free.
Prior to Obamacare, many states had already imposed their own contraception mandates on insurers. Contraception mandates had the negative effect of driving up the list price of the pill for the millions of women remaining uninsured. But the contraception mandates brought an even more effective birth control mechanism into mainstream use: the hormonal IUD, which has a near-zero failure rate in actual use and no lasting side effects for most women.
If you’re not insured, you can either leverage the increased price transparency of online services, such as GoodRx, or, if you’re eligible, receive free contraceptive coverage from Title X-funded services, which remained the same annually from the end of the Obama administration through the Trump administration. Title X is believed to save taxpayers $7 for every $1 it spends because, in addition to helping women plan their pregnancies, it provides cancer and sexually transmitted disease screenings that prevent illness and death.
Even if you refuse the pill, the patch, the shot, the IUD, an over-the-counter condom, or any other pregnancy prophylactic, most pharmacies, and even some delivery apps, sell emergency contraceptives without a prescription.
All of this is to say, the U.S. is not Tudor England, where women relied on beeswax and mandrake to avoid decades of permanent pregnancy. It’s not even the developing world, where the basic ability to plan prior to conception is either inaccessible or barred by the state.
Women in America seeking family planning resources have it better than any of their counterparts on the planet today or in human history. The state either funds or mandates dozens of varieties of free contraception. Even if those fail, hospitals provide Plan B for free.
You’re free to marry or sleep with whatever consenting adult of either gender you choose, and motherhood has never been a more public and approved affair, even for the most career-minded of women. You are not oppressed, and Texas’s new law is not an excuse to start pretending you are.
