There are times that the stupid in the mainstream media has gone too far.
This is one of them.
Sandra Fluke is an activist who is enrolled at Georgetown University Law Center. Her resume includes graduation from Cornell in 2003 and various feminist activism positions and activities since, many of them facially worthy of recognition. (Note: Wikipedia has been asked to remove her page, so don't be surprised if the top link above dies.)
She was going to "testify" before Darryl Issa's committee on the reproductive provisions in the Health Care law, but Issa killed her testimony because he smelled a rat.
He was right.
Let's start with Sandra herself. It is claimed she was born in 1981. By my math that makes her 30ish. Rather a bit older than an ordinary student at Georgetown, yes?
Second, what's the tuition at Georgetown? For a full-time student, $23,432. Per semester. So we're talking about someone who can afford $47,000 a year in tuition and fees, exclusive of living expenses.
Sandra has maintained that birth control has a roughly $3,000 cost and this is an argument for "mandatory" coverage in health care policies. Really? Birthcontrolbuzz shows that most birth control pills (they have something like a dozen different brands listed!) run about $20/month, or $250/year. (Planned Parenthood concurs, incidentally.) A single IUD (good for up to five years!) sells for about $200, or $50/year. One "Implanon" (Norplant-style stick, which is good for up to three years) and the most-effective female contraception available short of sterilization with a less than 1% failure rate is $233.20, or $77/year.
By the very math you're supposed to learn in third grade or thereabouts this means that better than 99% effective female birth control costs less than half a can of coke a day, or about 21 cents.
How much did Sandra pay for her Latte at Starbucks on the way to "testify" and what is the penalty for perjury before Congress, if I may inquire?
I might also add that none of these female birth control methods do a damn thing toward preventing disease transmission, and having your vagina rot out is far worse than getting pregnant. Some of the forms of rot could actually kill you, give you cervical cancer or otherwise do serious and permanent harm. To attempt to prevent that you will need rubbers, and it is a time-honored practice to expect the man you sleep with to provide them. Every boy learns where they are in the store and goes through the embarrassing motions of buying his first package, usually somewhere around his 16th birthday (whether he actually uses them "as intended" or just buys them to have them -- "just in case.") Any man who claims he doesn't or didn't is either (1) too broke to **** in the first place, (2) unworthy of placing anything in a woman's vagina, or (most likely) both.
Note carefully in the above paragraph that it is expected of men (young and otherwise) to buy their own rubbers. You don't see us whining about the cost of a pack of Trojans and demanding that our "health insurance" pay for them.
Finally, when it comes to colleges, every college I've ever been at has all the rubbers you want for free at the student health center, usually in "fishbowl" sort of thing. Walk in, grab a handful, walk out -- no questions asked.
Never mind that insurance is intended to pay for unintentional circumstances that are not ordinary, expected and intentional.
The last time I checked sex was rather ordinary, expected, and when consensual not an accident at all. In fact, it's exactly what women in general look toward as one of their sacraments. The proclamation that a woman owns her own vagina and may use it (or not) as she wishes is one of those fundamental liberty things, and I not only have no quarrel with it, I agree with that point of view (it's that Libertarian thing about owning oneself, you see.)
But intentional costs are not insurable, any more than you can buy insurance against intentionally setting your own house on fire. They're also not something you get to shift off onto other people via government mandates in a free society. We're not even talking about "unfortunate and thus not-real accidents" here (e.g. someone who eats themselves up to 500lbs and winds up with perfectly-foreseeable diabetes and heart disease) -- no, this is demanding that others pay for intentional and premeditated acts in advance, along with the means to commit them.
This is, more or less, like demanding your health insurance company supply you with cigarettes at zero cost!
Pick your female contraception from the above -- they're all in the range of $50-250/year, and the most-effective form available, the "norplant" style, is under $100/year.
$3,600? That was a bald-faced lie that was intended to run in front of Issa. And what's worse, Sandra appears to be a professional agitator and since she can afford nearly $50,000 a year to go to "school" (at age 30) she can sure as hell pay $100 for her own intentional and premeditated acts, exactly as every single man from 15 years old forward has been expected to do for the last 50 years.
Oh, and before I finish up, does Sandra have an iPhone with a $100/month service contract? If so, and if her "friend" does so as well, may I inquire why that $100/month service contract is something she should pay for with her own money while her contraception is not?
Sandra may not be a slut or a prostitute, as Limbaugh appeared to claim, but she sure as hell is a mendacious *******.
