Forget everything you've heard - the apocalypse is very, very real. A conservative Republican congressman thinks birth control should be made available over-the-counter.
Republican Governor of Louisiana, Bobby Jindal, whose name is often mentioned as a potential 2016 presidential candidate, wrote an opinion piece for Thursday's Wall Street Journal making the case that contraception be made available over-the-counter. He argues the benefits of adopting such a stance are numerous, but chiefly that if women could legally purchase birth control without a prescription, employers wouldn't have to pay for it against their moral objections, and Democrats could no longer accuse Republicans of being anti-birth control.
"As a conservative Republican, I believe that we have been stupid to let the Democrats demagogue the contraceptives issue and pretend, during debates about health-care insurance, that Republicans are somehow against birth control. It's a disingenuous political argument they make," wrote Jindal in the Journal.
"As an unapologetic pro-life Republican, I also believe that every adult (18 years old and over) who wants contraception should be able to purchase it. But anyone who has a religious objection to contraception should not be forced by government health-care edicts to purchase it for others," he added.
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists feels the same way. The school recently announced that birth control is safe enough that it should not require a prescription.
Although, as the Huffington Post notes, "Making contraception available over the counter would require women to pay for it out of pocket, whereas the Affordable Care Act currently requires that it be covered under most insurance plans with no co-pay."
While Jindal says the idea Republicans are opposed to birth control is "hogwash" in the article, Republicans have made a number of legislative attempts in 2012 to give employers and insurers the right to refuse to cover birth control if they morally object to it. Republicans have also repeatedly tried to de-fund Planned Parenthood, which provides low-cost or free birth control to millions of women each year.
While Jindal's position is certainly surprising coming out of the mouth of someone who describes themselves as a "conservative Republican" - and will no doubt polarize the Republican conservative base - he had hinted recently following President Obama's re-election, that Republicans needed to transform their strategy to attract a broader collection of voters.
"If we want people to like us, we have to like them first," Jindal said on Fox News.
Jindal's stance becomes even less surprising when examining voter demographics from the 2012 presidential election.
According to the Voter Participation Center, nonwhites made up 28 percent of the electorate this year, compared with 20 percent in 2000, with Hispanics comprising much of that growth. Obama captured a commanding 80 percent of the growing ranks of nonwhite voters in 2012, just as he did in 2008.
Most interesting though, women - especially single women - overwhelmingly voted for Obama. Of the 55 million eligible female voters, the fastest-growing voting bloc in the U.S., a staggering 67 percent of single women chose to re-elect the president.
As the Los Angeles Times puts it, "In other words, if 'women hold up half the sky,' single women now hold up more than two-thirds of the Obama administration."
Jindal also notes in the piece that the Obama administration "and the pro-choice lobby" has ensured that emergency contraception, or the "morning after pill," can be sold over-the-counter. He says if we did the same for birth control it could end the partisan politics surrounding the issue.
"Democrats have wrongly accused Republicans of being against birth control and against allowing people to use it," he writes. "That's hogwash. But Republicans do want to protect those who have religious beliefs that are opposed to contraception. The latest opinion from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists is a common-sense call for reform that could yield a result everyone can embrace: the end of birth-control politics."
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