On August 1 the Department of Health and Human Services unveiled another layer of the Obama Administration’s wide-ranging and much-debated health care reform. The Affordable Care Act will require, beginning in August of 2012, all new insurance plans to include a range of cost-free “preventive health services” for women including benefits such as breastfeeding support, HPV and HIV testing, and birth control.
That last preventive measure produced a range of emotional reactions. Particularly from the religious community, which finds this “culture of death” especially alarming, anything falling under the “family planning” umbrella is anathema.
“Pregnancy is not a disease, and fertility is not a pathological condition to be suppressed by any means technically possible," said a genuine but confused Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, chairman of the Committee on Pro-Life Activities of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.
Not a disease? Given a little rational thought (a willful rarity in the religious community), pregnancy is quickly revealed to be the oldest sexually transmitted disease there is. The inevitable and unenviable result nine months after infection is child birth. According to the World Health Organization, more than half a million women die every year attempting to suffer through this culmination of the disorder.
Not a disease?! What label could possibly be more appropriate? Of those lucky enough not to die from it, it is estimated that nearly a million new mothers, in the United States alone, suffer from post partum depression each year as a result of the fetal parasite.
Of course, most infected patients survive the ordeal only to face a host of new and surprisingly costly concerns. Worries which have always made birth control look comparably, if not remarkably, cheap for a vaccine that saves not only a small monetary fortune but additional decades of aggravation and emotional turmoil, as well.
Few syndromes also incorporate such diversity as pregnancy. The illness might be impressive in its reach were it not also so tragic. Even forgetting the massive psychological baggage, and ignoring the emotional toll it takes on a woman, the disorder also wreaks physical havoc. The typical pregnancy includes a weight gain of 25-35 pounds. And that doesn’t all come off, necessarily. There is a serious risk that this pregnancy ailment, when all is said and done, is going to leave our new mother’s body something of a heftier shell of her former self. Cellulite isn’t a myth, and it frequently happens to women suffering from pregnant.
In related news, stretch marks are probably also going to be par for this course. Is that something little girls dream of? That after being infected in this epidemic, for the rest of their lives, anybody seeing them naked (or otherwise scantily clad) is looking directly at an awkward reminder of their illness?
Ladies, let’s talk about what actually happens when you try to squeeze a watermelon through a hole the size of a lemon. Are you familiar with a “fourth degree vaginal tear”? Resulting in “complications such as fecal incontinence.” Truly, the ultimate reproductive malady is the horror of pregnancy.
And we all know this. How many hundreds of dollars are annually invested, by how many millions of American men and women, in various methods of birth control? From condoms to the Pill and everything in between. Including injections and diaphragms, sponges and rosary beads (because “Jesus is my birth control”), the threat of pregnancy is so acute it cannot be considered anything but a sickness. Let’s not get lost in medical semantics. The people have spoken and they know pregnancy is a disease they do not want to catch.