No Birth Control For You, part 6
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March 24th, 2012

No Birth Control For You, part 6

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Discussion (19)¬

  1. Casey says:

    Before my wife was on birth control we used condoms and that's how I now have two beautiful daughters…the condoms broke and my wife got pregnant.

    Jeff has blinders on and isn't even trying to see any point of view but his own.

  2. Jeff says:

    There are many drugs that companies do not cover in their normal formulary due to cost and other factors unless one can show a true medical need and sometimes evenwhen you can show a medical need if that drug is not normally prescribed for your affliction even when there is medical evidence that it can help your condition even though that was not the original intention of the drug.
    My wife has MS and there are drugs out there that my insurance will not cover because they are not considered 'MS' drugs even though medical evidenxe shows they help MS patients. So get over it ladies and stop all the whining about birth comtrol pills, they are much cheaper than MS meds, I can assure you of that.

    • Darrin Bell says:

      In that case, it's not much of a hardship to the insurance companies to cover it. For that matter, covering contraceptives is cheaper than covering a pregnancy or an abortion.

      As for your wife, I presume (I hope) there are also medicines out there that your insurance WILL cover that do treat MS. Just as there is nothing other than anti-ED pills that will prevent ED (and Viagra generally is covered), there is nothing aside from contraceptives that will prevent pregnancy, so those too should be covered. It's only fair to either stop covering the methods men use to control our reproductive systems, or start covering the methods women use to control theirs.

      • Jeff says:

        "there is nothing aside from contraceptives that will prevent pregnancy"
        How about condoms or better yet…Abstinance?!

        • Darrin Bell says:

          How about a 10-15% failure rate? How about not a chance in hell of abstinence ever happening? It never has, that's why there are seven billion of us on this planet.

          By the way, I don't hear you saying "how about abstinence" as a cure for erectile dysfunction. If men would just stop trying to screw when nature tells us to stop, we wouldn't need erections and therefore we wouldn't need Viagra.

        • Condoms help when men remember and choose to use them, but birth control pills are under control of the woman and prevent pregnancy even in the case of rape where the rapist has neither condoms or abstinence in mind.

        • bcmayes says:

          Does insurance cover abstinence? I should file a claim. My condition is chronic!

  3. Jeff says:

    I still feel like this was an over exagerrated look at a woman's "right" to birth control. I have not heard of any company or organization (religious or otherwise) that will not cover birth control pills when they are prescribed for a 'true medical reason other than to simply not get pregnant'. It may require a few extra steps to get the authorization for such a prescription to be covered at the normal prescriptiona formulary price but there is not a group of old perverted men sitting around a table confronting the woman directly and 'salivating over her woman parts'.

    • Darrin Bell says:

      This is a cautionary tale. You apparently haven't heard of Arizona's contraceptive bill (HB 2625) that, if it becomes law, will force women to tell their bosses – in detail, with written support from their doctor – exactly why they need contraceptives, before the employer will decide whether to cover it (and they can still decline to cover it if their objection is based on morality or religion).

      As for the "true medical reasons" argument: we didn't consider erectile dysfunction to be a "medical problem" until we invented treatments that cured it. Until then, it was considered a normal part of aging that most men had to eventually face. Yet even though we've invented birth control pills, we still don't consider pregnancy to be a "medical problem," we consider it to be a normal outcome of sex. That's because men make the rules, men make the laws, men define reality, and women don't get much of a say. But to women who don't want to get pregnant (with all the pain and changes that inflicts on their bodies), it certainly can feel like a medical problem.

      It comes down to this: Either our bodies control us, or we control our bodies, and we have to decide whether we want insurance to cover the decision to control our bodies. The fact that men and women exert control differently, with different pills, should be irrelevant.

  4. Darrin Bell says:

    Thanks, everyone! I wish I hadn't had to create these last several strips (I really wish I had less material to work with), but I'm glad you liked them. This issue's personal to me. I was raised by a single mom, and I saw first hand some of the indignities she had to face as a woman. People asking to speak to her husband instead of her, people sneering "Lady" at her as if it was her name, and far worse. I don't understand how any man with a mother, a sister, a wife or even just a conscience can say the things I've heard people say in defense of Rush Limbaugh, the Blunt Amendment, and the Arizona bill mandating exactly what I illustrated in panel two (above).

  5. S_z says:

    42-yr old woman of color who *wishes* she still needed birth control. kudos on this series. love especially the scene across the boardroom table — you use your medium very well.

  6. Chaz says:

    No idea why I'd sent you 25 bucks except you're the motivating reason for the quarter-mile walk to the newspaper box every day. Brilliant stuff !

  7. muriel says:

    thank you and thank you (repeat as often as necessary). I am an Old Person (in my eighties), and I applaud you—for all your cartoons and especially for this too-true series with about those dirty old men salivating over women's "lady parts." Wonderful!

  8. Zirconia Wolf says:

    Kudos on another terrific series!

  9. Marlene says:

    Your series of cartoons about women and their right to birth control being available to them have been outstanding!! Thanks a bunch and that comes from a 60 year old woman.

  10. Dave says:

    Out freeking standing!