Love (and legislation) conquers all

Monday, February 18, 2008

By Grace Hammond

Jackson Hole, Wyo.- Love ain’t easy in Teton County.

Judging by some responses to last week’s cover story, “Bankrupt for Baby,” passion is little more than a liability these days.

Like Cupid’s arrow, replies to the article were swift and sharp. Folks weighed in from Wyoming, Minneapolis, Los Angeles and New York. Readers tussled on our website, engaging one another in battles over big government, the rights of the people, universal health care, midwifery and sex.

Many readers were intrigued by Wyoming’s legislation of women’s reproductive options - watch for a follow-up story in The Planet on midwifery in Idaho (where it is legal) and Wyoming (where it is not). Others wanted a response from the Legislature - what’s being done about this crisis? Why is it so bad here?

The short answer is that there are only a few insurance companies in Wyoming and that they lack regulation. A dearth of insurance options means families have to take what they can get. Further, there aren’t enough state benefits to go around, and a statistically high number of employers opt out of providing benefits for their employees compared to in other states.

Local Libertarians, however, decried “handouts” and pregnant women “trying to live on government checks” in order to secure prenatal care. Pregnant women can’t be victims of the state or insurance companies, they said - they can only be victims of poor planning.

“Execute a plan for your birth that provides [for] your needs and don’t whine that you are in a position which is totally self-made,” said one commenter.

The gist of these arguments was this: when you have sex, you pay the price.

Our state doesn’t know what to make of sex. A 2006 Guttmacher Institute study published in Public Health Reports found that nearly all Americans have sex before marrying. In fact, it found that 97 percent of people who had ever had sex had premarital sex - and that this has been true since the 1940s.

Still, government entities play a game of peek-a-boo with women’s reproductive rights, denying access to birth control in one breath and decrying and criminalizing abortion in another; ignoring the dismal and proven ineffectiveness of abstinence-only sex education while puzzling over STD rates; outlawing midwifery while axing state benefits; and allowing insurance companies to hack away at prenatal and pregnancy care, as if sex doesn’t happen and, if we wanted, the people of Wyoming could just decide to quit having babies altogether.

People will keep having sex and women will keep having babies. These are good things. The state of Wyoming, employers and individuals should operate on the assumption that there will always be more babies and that they should work together to build healthy families. Families are inevitable; their health is not.

Some folks in Jackson Hole still believe love conquers all. “Shame on the old miser who told [the couple] they should have planned it out,” one reader responded. “Perhaps he has never experienced the passions of unbridled love, the stuff babies SHOULD be made of.”



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Love (and legislation) conquers all | Planet JH News Article: General News

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