As medical experts begin advising lawmakers this month on what forms of preventive care should be covered under new health care legislation, many politicians will have to decide if birth control is a form of preventive medicine.
Many doctors view contraception as a kind of temporary immunization. Not only does it reduce the tremendous cost of a pregnancy, but it also eliminates the cost of health care needed to cover the resulting child.
However, many fundamentalist Christians leaders, who hold just as much sway as doctors when it comes to health care policies, consider pregnancy to be a healthy condition. For them, birth control is not preventative care, but a life choice. Although pregnancy may well be a natural state, it's far from a healthy condition. In the 1800s, the maternal mortality rate, the number of women who died as a direct result of giving birth, reached as high as
This article appears in Oct 28 – Nov 3, 2010.