By Elizabeth Valentin
In Trump’s newest assault on health care, he provides employers with the right to deny employers to provide insurance for contraception for women. This comes in the form of reducing the woman’s ability to obtain birth control.
This bill is absurd, especially because this comes only days after the Trump administration announced a bill that would make it a crime, punishable with a fine or up to five years in prison, to have an abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy.
The health benefits to birth control are not something that the Trump administration takes into consideration when enacting these sorts of bills. While birth control is used to prevent pregnancy, there are also women that use it for a variety of reasons. Some women use it because their menstrual cycle is irregular and causes further health implications. Others use it because they feel sick and have fevers, vomit, or faint while they have their period. Some other use the pill to prevent cramps that keep them bedridden.
These symptoms that come along with having a uterus can cause a girl or woman to miss school or work because they are physically ill. No girl or woman should have to lose out on an education or job opportunity because of a problem that could be easily remedied by birth control.
If this administration does not want women to have an abortion, a simple solution that would drastically lower the rate of abortions is to make birth control readily available for any woman that wishes to take it. This is a simple correlation to understand. Another simple solution to this is comprehensive sex education, which the Trump administration is not in favor of, despite the fact that it has been proven that comprehensive sex education makes people wait until later in life to have sex. This would result in fewer teen pregnancies; thus fewer abortions.
These bills provide further concern in regards to lower-class women. The people that vote for these bills are men and upper or middle class women. This means that lower class women have little to no say in these situations.
If a woman knows that she is unable to financially provide for a child, she can make the responsible decision to take birth control in order to ensure that she does not get pregnant with a child that she cannot afford. If she cannot get birth control because her insurance doesn’t cover it and she doesn’t have the money to purchase it herself, she is more likely to get pregnant. She then is unable to have an abortion because she could be sent to prison. This means she will have to give birth to this child that she cannot provide for. The same people that vote for these bills are then the same people who condemn her for not providing financial stability for the child.
The main point to keep in mind is that no one should tell women what they can or cannot do with their own body. Especially if the majority of the people who are making these decisions are men who do not understand all of the factors that go into a woman making these decisions for herself.
