The impetus for this argument came a few weeks ago as I was walking through the downtown area where I live. I was approached by a male, who appeared to be a college student on break, who asked me to sign a petition for him. Not being someone who willy-nilly signs off on anything without at least getting some information on what it is that I'm signing for. He got all perky, real quick, but he motormouthed what he was saying, so I had to ask him to repeat himself.
What it came down to was he was collecting signatures so that women could be provided with "free" birth control. My initial reply was to laugh at him, which seemed to frustrate him, but he managed to regain his composure and asked whether I thought that women had the right to contraception, especially poor women who are unable to afford it on their own.
Again, I laughed, but this time I spoke with him, too. I stated that if a woman is too poor to afford contraception on her own (or with her partner), then perhaps she was too poor to engage in sexual relations. I said this in all dead seriousness. He was not amused. I looked across the street, and I saw an attractive female, approximately his same age, holding the same paraphernalia that he had, and it suddenly clicked. He likely couldn't care one way or the other about the issue, except for the fact that it allowed him to get closer to her, with an eye on using some of that "free" birth control. That's fine. Men the world over have done far more nefarious thing while pursuing the fairer sex. He just happens to be wrong, though I don't blame him exclusively. In my limited time following the topic, I would say it goes back to the Sandra Fluke affair of 2012, but it could be older than that, too.
We live in a world (in the U.S., at least) where most people expect every single want and desire they have to be taken care of, whether or not they can afford it. I spoke about this a little in my health care diatribe yesterday, but it holds true here, too. People do not want to accept that there are costs and risks involved with every decision made. There simply is. Further, as I went on to explain to my deluded new friend, sex is a risk-reward proposition. It is something desired, but it is not a "right". It's a choice. People either get together and decide to have relations, or they don't, but it's a choice, nothing more, nothing less. Expecting others to pay for your choices seems a bit selfish to me. I then reiterated my stance that those that are too poor to afford birth control are perhaps too poor to have sexual relations. He was not amused, but I chuckled all the way down the road.
