Maybe the War on Women is really a class struggle, and the wealthy are trying to make sure the proletariat doesn’t get to make whoopee. Or so suggests one Washington Post opinion columnist.
The Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell asked on Oct. 16, “Is sex only for rich people?” Rampell argued for more access to “family planning” (aka birth control and abortion) for low-incomers. “America has decided: Sex is for rich people,” she wrote. “Non-procreative sex in particular.”
America, of course, has decided nothing of the kind. Catherine Rampell has decided that reluctance to subsidize the romantic lives of strangers is tantamount to saying, “No sex for you!”
Rampell described “the trap we’re laying for poor people who deign to get it on.” America, she argued, “doesn’t want low-income Americans to have free access to birth control,” refuses to teach schoolchildren about contraception – and then rejects “easy access to abortions” when they “inevitably get pregnant.”
Because of these tragedies, Rampell lamented, “the solution for low-income people is to never, ever have sex.” She continued:
“So seems the logic behind many of these policies: If only we make it harder for people to have access to family planning services, and financially painful to raise children who predictably result from sex in the absence of those services, people who cannot afford to raise children will choose celibacy.”
But celibacy is, in Rampell’s other words, “magical thinking.” “The belief that we can get entire classes of Americans to practice abstinence” she continued, “is a right-wing delusion on par with the left-wing delusions that go into socialism: Both rely on a fundamental miscalculation about human nature.”
Human nature being unchanging, you have to wonder how the poor managed to get along in the bedroom for all those centuries without government help. Yet somehow they did – so well that Rampell’s progressive forbears founded Planned Parenthood to hold back “the constantly growing stream of the unfit.” The unfit included the “feeble-minded,” “idiots” and “morons.” And blacks.
And in the end, that’s still the point. Rampell just couches it in the “sex uber alles” language of modern feminists. Since the poor can't control their feral urges (and it's unfashionable to suggest they should), make sure children don't result from their inevitable rutting.
“Subsidies for family planning services make a good deal of sense,” Rampell argued, and “government spending on family planning offers a huge return on investment. Citing the Guttmacher Institute, she wrote, “In 2010, every $1 invested in helping women avoid pregnancies they didn’t want saved $5.68 in Medicaid expenditures that otherwise would have been needed.”
“Today,” she whined, “federal programs that democratize family planning (including the Affordable Care Act) are subject to constant gutting and mockery.”
“Improving access to family planning services and reversible contraceptives,” Rampell concluded, “is about giving low-income women the same control over when, and with whom, they have children, as is afforded to their higher-income sisters.” And it’s about keeping a lid on the population of undesirables.
Rampell’s op-ed is of a piece with the Post’s past coverage of reproductive issues, from calling a closed abortion clinic a “victim” of new regulations and profiling an abortionist helping “meet need” in South Dakota to arguing abortion advocates should insist abortion is never immoral or “difficult.”
