The National Women's Law Center, in commenting on a ruling in North Carolina that would force Belmont Abbey College which is run by Benedictine monks, to provide contraceptive drug coverage to female employees, said that pregnancy prevention "is central to good health care for women".
The statement provides an opportunity for an easy but rarely mentioned observation.
Health care, preventative or otherwise, is aimed at warding off disease or some other malady foreign to the body.
A woman's body is designed for child bearing. In that sense it can be said that pregnancy is a natural condition. It's what a woman's body is "supposed" to do. And when it doesn't do that, when a woman doesn't conceive naturally, then something is usually considered medically wrong.
Health care is about stopping or preventing something that is wrong or could go wrong with the body. Contraception is about stopping or preventing something that is right with the body.
Only the intellectual dishonest can deny this. We don't even have to get into the moral discussion.
There is always the exception where pregnancy can be life threatening, but it's the exception. And in today's medically advanced society, it is a very rare exception.
The problem here is that the exception has been elevated to the status of the norm. Whenever that happens, there are consequences.
I'm not going to quote studies that show the link between female cancers and contraceptives. Supporters of contraceptives could quote just as many studies back to me to support their perspective.
I would ask you though to consider the possibility of an ill effect on a woman's body after prolonged, sometimes decades long, ingestion of a chemical, designed to force her body to do the very opposite of what it is naturally designed to do.
This isn't like taking an aspirin for a headache. All drugs, except for contraceptive drugs, are designed to counteract something that is wrong with the body. Contraceptive drugs are designed to counteract something that is right with the body.
All drugs have side effects, negative consequences of one kind or another. One may take an aspirin for pain, but to ingest them regularly could be dangerous. What of the woman who ingests a synthetic hormone (The Pill) in doses high enough to trick her body into making it "think" that it's pregnant, year after year?
Think about it. How many women do you know who have died in their 40's from female related cancers (breast, uterine)? It's a disturbingly high number.
This little entry makes no attempt to judge those individuals since I would have no way of knowing whether they used contraceptive drugs or not. But given general contraceptive use, the odds are that they did.
There's a saying that says: "God forgives, others can forgive, I can forgive...but nature never forgives."
While there is a moral component to the argument, the only point I want to make here is the biological one, an appeal to examine nature's design...and hopefully, to intellectual honesty.
