Free Sex: A New Right?

Please welcome my husband Manuel P. Santos, M.D., as he pens his first Can We Cana? guest post on the Supreme Court's Hobby Lobby decision. :cue applause:

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Perhaps it is only a matter of time until the Supreme Court weighs in on the question of whether access to free contraceptives is a fundamental right guaranteed to us as Americans, tucked away in the penumbra of the constitution, much like the right to abortion, which was found hiding there in 1973 in the now infamous Roe v. Wade decision.

The recent Hobby Lobby decision seems to have emboldened conservatives and outraged liberals, unmasking a deep divide in our country. How did we get here? Surely, the Affordable Care Act along with the HHS mandate on contraceptives didn’t just happen out of the blue. Or did it? Few would argue that Obamacare was bipartisan given that it was passed on party lines. The words “rammed through Congress” come to mind, despite assurances by our President that he would bring the nation together by ushering in a new era of non-partisan politics. Somewhere along the line the word healthcare was hijacked and redefined to include condoms, Viagra, and “the pill”. Over time, some women objected that if men can have Viagra covered by their health insurance, then as if channeling Saint Peter in a perverse turnaround, why not only the pill but also RU-486? And what about Plan-B? The stage is set, the savior arrives! Obama hands down the edict. Insurance companies must cover contraceptives for women. As if on cue, Sandra Fluke comes on the scene. The ersatz damsel in distress, deprived by a villainous Georgetown University Law School Health Insurance plan of her “god given right” to free contraceptives.      

Rarely do I have the opportunity to use the word Orwellian, but it seems appropriate given the way this administration has managed to impose its agenda. In the fourth chapter of his classic dystopian vision, Orwell describes the qualities of media entertainment for “Proles” (the 85% of the population that do not belong to The Party),

“Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime, and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs.” (1984)

The incorporation of recreation into healthcare had its origins, perhaps, in the idea that a happy and healthy individual will need fewer medical services in the long run. This is sound thinking insofar as it goes. And from an economics standpoint it makes perfect sense. Invest in a treadmill now and forego the agony of a triple bypass years later. From the perspective of the bottom line, a few thousand dollars now could save millions later. A charitable interpretation of the administration’s obsession with contraception, and I use the term loosely since those in the know are well aware that contraceptives are often abortifacients, would be that offering free condoms (at pennies each) or even a month’s worth of the pill (averaging $30/month) is a sound investment. After all, an unplanned pregnancy will bring an unwanted child into the world, doomed to suffer misery and the myriad indignities that of necessity come with being "unwanted".  And then there’s the financial burden that an unwanted child will impose on the rest of us.

It seems to flow naturally from such logic that it is not only unfair to deprive a person struggling with an unplanned pregnancy of their "child-free" future, but that it would also be unfair to the unplanned child to allow it to come into the world unwanted. Better to avoid all these messy problems with that panacea which the left assures us is harmless, and which Obama wants to provide for us out of the kindness of his heart. The fact that half of his subjects don’t want it is irrelevant. In fact, a recent Quinnipiac University poll released on Wednesday July 2nd 2014 reveals that 33% of voters think Obama is the worst President since WWII (George W. Bush came in second with 28% and Richard Nixon placed third with 13%). It is curious that a man who promised to unify the nation has distinguished himself as being the most divisive.  

Rousseau, in his Discourse on Inequality, comments that in a tyrannical government we "should see the magistrates fomenting everything that might weaken men united in society, by promoting dissension among them; everything that might sow in it the seeds of actual division, while it gave society the air of harmony; everything that might inspire the different ranks of people with mutual hatred and distrust, by setting the rights and interests of one against those of another…it is from the midst of that disorder and these revolutions, that despotism, gradually raising up its hideous head and devouring everything that remained sound and untainted in any part of the State, would at length trample on both the laws and the people, and establish itself on the ruins of the republic.”  

In the wake of the recent Supreme Court decision in Hobby Lobby, President Obama’s response via his official twitter feed is not only overly simplistic and misleading, but also seems tailor made to stoke the fires of partisan hostility, since he describes the ruling as a “throwback to last week when a woman-not her boss-made her own decisions about her healthcare.” I doubt that even the Norse god, Loki, could have contrived a more divisive Twitter post…were he to tweet.

It appears that our discourse has brought us full circle, to a fundamental question which we as the guardians of our great nation must ask ourselves. Do we choose to wade in waters polluted by the penumbral waste of free condoms, Viagra and Plan-B, or do we take a stand and prevent the defenders of free sex from dumping their toxic interpretation of our constitution into our rivers and streams? The decision is ours to make. The consequences will be our children’s to absorb.