ghost-plot:

Things birth control is used for: Contraception, ovarian cysts, mood swings, PMDD, painful menstruation, severe acne, migraines, Peri-menopausal symptoms, regulate irregular menstrual cycles, and many other health concerns.

You’re exactly right, what happens in the bedroom is none of your business. That doesn’t mean you can opt out of supporting it. Your taxes will still be used to support the unwanted children that result from women not having access to birth control. Your taxes will still be used to support hysterectomies for women who can’t afford them on their own but need them.

Ok, so even if birth control is only used as a contraceptive, limiting access by way of limiting funding for it will cost you more money. People won’t stop having sex. They’ll just have more unwanted children. Those children will be supported by you and your tax money (schooling, after school programs, welfare, food stamps, the foster care system.)

We do not get to pick and choose where our taxes go. That’s not how it works.

To anyone supporting not funding birth control, I would especially love to know your answer to the first paragraph. For some of those conditions, particularly cysts, painful menstruation, PMDD, and related issues (polycystic ovarian syndrome can be added to that list off the top of my head) birth control is the only medication to treat those symptoms.

(For some migraineurs, hormonal birth control can also be the only effective drug, so if you answer this question “They should go take a triptan” this, my response will not be kind. If your response is “Go take Aleve because that always works for me, my response will be akin to that Alan Rickman overturning tables .gif. And this is a valid medical treatment for every condition listed above.) 

I have already had the discussion with someone who said “Well, they should just invent new drugs that only treat that stuff.” To those people: that’s not very cost-effective (no drug company would ever do it), and it’s also not possible: the efficacy lies in the hormones themselves - that you need the estrogen-progesterone structures to alleviate symptoms, and that a side effect of the drugs that treat these conditions is going to be temporary infertility. 

But anyway, I always think these people are missing the point. What if you had a life-threatening condition that required regular blood transfusions (or even a majorly painful condition that required regular surgery and therefore major blood availability) but we lived in a nation that was majority Jehovah’s Witness and therefore had a contingent saying “We shouldn’t insure poor people who have these conditions, because they require blood transfusion and that’s against our religion.” 

Or what if we lived in a nation where organ donation was prohibited (as it is in some orthodox strains of various faiths) and you desperately needed an organ - maybe not even for life, as in a liver, but to see, as in a cornea. Would you be okay with people saying that the government shouldn’t fund the restoration of your sight (or of your life) because it goes against the dominant religion?

Individual human beings do not get to pick what is insured and what isn’t insured, even if that insurance program is Medicare/Medicaid. 

(On a slightly different note, health care is a case where a government mandate is needed, since an insurance company would drop everyone and anyone who ever got sick as fast as it could: that’s basically how insurance companies make money. Anyone who developed a major childhood medical condition would become uninsurable by the time they reached 18.) 

Oh, and curious: Do you support the fact that Viagra is covered? (Yes, sildenafil has another valid medical usage, but it’s at a completely different dose, unlike hormonal birth control.) 

Seriously, there are a lot of things, medically, that don’t affect you, and your tax dollars go towards those things too. It’s what’s known as the common good.