Rush Limburger calls Student 'Slut', Backlash

[Ghostbear]

They are preventing them from getting birth control through their insurance plan, which is hardly the only way it can be obtained.

Through the insurance plan that is part of their compensation for work done. So they're saying "this part of your compensation, but we won't let you use it for contraceptives". That the employees have another means of getting the birth control is immaterial: they're still having the institution's religious beliefs imposed on them for that part of their compensation.

[Griffin]

The key here is...

In what way is denying someone birth control an expression of religion?

I mean, it honestly and seriously doesn't seem covered by the term. They can still express their religion all they want while doing so. They can even condemn it. They just had to do it.

[CorruptUser]

But I tell you what. Reform the health care system so that the expectation of employer-provided health insurance is no longer ingrained at every level of that system, and the very minute you're done, we can entertain the bishops' feelings on whether they want to touch evil sluts indirectly-through-their-money-three-times-removed as though it was a moral decision being made in a vacuum.

The disadvantage is the lack of choice; your employer has chosen the policy for you, and it may not be what you want. I just want the CAT-only insurance, but my employer may not have that available. The advantage of buying through your employer is that there are fewer costs and lower risk involved; the health insurance has to get 1 customer with 100 employees instead of 100 customers, and employees are healthier than the unemployed. That second part? That's huge. Because health insurance companies can't directly discriminate. Never mind that discrimination is how insurance is supposed to exist. They have ways around it, increasing the costs for everyone of course, but one of the ways is separating risks by the employed/unemployed criteria.

[aeki]

They are preventing them from getting birth control through their insurance plan, which is hardly the only way it can be obtained.

Did you read Sandra Fluke's testimony? Birth control is expensive enough that for a not-insignificant amount of people getting it through their insurance plan - which they have already paid for, by the way - is the only way it can be obtained.

[mike-l]

Never mind that discrimination is how insurance is supposed to exist

What? No, insurance is supposed to exist by spreading out (and thus reducing) risk (read: variance).

[omgryebread]

Never mind that discrimination is how insurance is supposed to exist.

This is kind of off topic, and talked about before, but while I agree with you from an economics standpoint, from a practical standpoint, taking this approach leads to either government subsiding health care for the most expensive people (leading to higher costs to everyone through taxes) or people dying.

[pizzazz]

Health insurance is in a weird spot, because most people get it through their employer. This makes it a little cheaper (for most people--some would definitely prefer the cash) (but it's still a poor way of doing things), but means that the employer is paying some of the cost (typically). So in the end it would probably be better if people just bought their own health insurance, like they do with every other kind.

Churches (that are given an exemption from the mandate) aren't repressing their employees religious freedom either; they're just not paying for it directly, which is a fine balance of interests.

What you're saying is both true in a technical sense and a complete malicious lie in a practical real world sense.

Perhaps you could explain how it is that not paying for something, constitutes repressing one's freedom to obtain it? "Freedom" to obtain or do something does not in any way mean that someone else has to pay for it. It means no one will stop you.

There was also the problem of her friend who was refused contraception because they thought she was lying about having ovarian cysts even though she gave a doctor's note. In this case, contraception was a necessary treatment, for a medical condition, that the health insurance technically should be covering, but they wiggled out of it by saying she was lying.

I'm quite happy that birth control is available to everyone for no other reason than it stops this sort of thing. There are many conditions which necessitate being on the pill, including extreme pms (the lecturer giving the lecture about this sort of thing said she had a friend who couldn't drive due to mental effects from her hormones - I bet an insurance company wouldn't believe that either), having to be on other medications (there's one medication where a woman can't have a baby until 2 years after stopping taking it, because it's that teratogenic).

Who's "they?" The insurance company? Because that's not an issue limited to any type of medicine, though government stepping in and running private companies like this is a totally ridiculous solution.

Also, pregnancy isn't a walk in the park, and there are numerous things that can go wrong, even in the developed world (post partum psychosis seems particularly nasty).

I know I'm going to get lots of flak for this, but I feel obligated to point out that there's a free way to prevent pregnancy with 100% success rate (other than rape).

Related to the hypocrisy tangent: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/03/04/rush-limbaugh-s-apology-liberal-men-need-to-follow-suit.html

[Belial]

Perhaps you could explain how it is that not paying for something, constitutes repressing one's freedom to obtain it? "Freedom" to obtain or do something does not in any way mean that someone else has to pay for it. It means no one will stop you.

Because it's not how the system is set up to operate. Eschewing your employer's health plan and buying your own is prohibitively expensive. Buying medications off-plan is prohibitively expensive. It's why the law had to be passed in the first place. Refusing to comply is preventing people from getting birth control, and pretending that's not the effect is stupid.

I know I'm going to get lots of flak for this, but I feel obligated to point out that there's a free way to prevent pregnancy with 100% success rate (other than rape).

So what you're saying is that all you have to do is give up a basic component of the human experience, in order to get what is, in a perfect use scenario, a 75% effectiveness rate. (Actual-use statistics for abstinence are much, much lower).

Yeah, genius plan.

[omgryebread]

I know I'm going to get lots of flak for this, but I feel obligated to point out that there's a free way to prevent pregnancy with 100% success rate (other than rape).

Man, if people never walked across streets they wouldn't get hit by cars. My tax money is going to all these damn crosswalks, and I'm tired of subsidizing those people walking across streets without consequences!!!!

[Griffin]

I know I'm going to get lots of flak for this, but I feel obligated to point out that there's a free way to prevent pregnancy with 100% success rate (other than rape).

Well, that's still only the [i]perfect[/u] use rate, which isn't super useful as a metric, and rape isn't exactly uncommon, so by what virtue do you dismiss it out of hand?

Also, I feel obligated to point out that abstinence isn't actually free - opportunity costs are still costs, after all. And since we're apparently in the middle of arguments were we can include and dismiss things at will with little justification, I think we need to include that in the cost of abstinence.

[Xeio]

Who's "they?" The insurance company? Because that's not an issue limited to any type of medicine, though government stepping in and running private companies like this is a totally ridiculous solution.

The ridiculous situation is that we have a system where even the most basic standards of care have to be regulated into our health insurance or we won't get them.

[Dauric]

I know I'm going to get lots of flak for this, but I feel obligated to point out that there's a free way to prevent pregnancy with 100% success rate (other than rape).

Well, that's still only the [i]perfect[/u] use rate, which isn't super useful as a metric, and rape isn't exactly uncommon, so by what virtue do you dismiss it out of hand?

Also, I feel obligated to point out that abstinence isn't actually free - opportunity costs are still costs, after all. And since we're apparently in the middle of arguments were we can include and dismiss things at will with little justification, I think we need to include that in the cost of abstinence.

Some of those costs of abstinence are missing out on the various benefits of a healthy sex life.

[Malice]

I think what I come back to is the idea that, in our current system, the position of "employer" carries with it a lot of power. The health insurance that an employer provides directly affects the ability of the employees to obtain certain health care; regardless of whether or not that health care is technically available outside of insurance plans, the fact remains that employees have finite resources and going outside their insurance can be prohibitively expensive.

With that power comes significant responsibility. As an employer it is my responsibility to make sure that my employees are safe, fairly treated and compensated, and, as long as health insurance is tied to employment, healthy. That's a responsibility that anyone knowingly takes on when they choose to become an employer; it's at that point that people need to ask themselves whether their religious beliefs will interfere with fulfilling those responsibilities. It's no different from the person who becomes a pharmacist and then tries to avoid handing over Plan B; once you willingly put yourself in the position where you stand between a lot of people and the health care they need, you no longer have the freedom to let your conscience outweigh your duty.

[aeki]

I know I'm going to get lots of flak for this, but I feel obligated to point out that there's a free way to prevent pregnancy with 100% success rate (other than rape).

I don't think it's helpful to say that poor people just shouldn't have relationships until they have pulled themselves up by their bootstraps enough to afford the unnecessarily high costs of healthcare. It certainly isn't effective, at any rate.

[Belial]

I think what I come back to is the idea that, in our current system, the position of "employer" carries with it a lot of power.

I think that's definitely one of the assumptions here. There's this libertarian fantasy that the employer/employee relationship is a 100% free, consensual, equal relationship. And that's a great thing to aspire to. But, as always, pretending you already live in the perfect world you want to create doesn't make you gandhi, it makes you delusional. Often hurtfully so.

[sardia]

Don't you get it? You're suppose to repress your sexuality. Then when nobody is watching, you take a hike on the Appalachian trail, or head into the bathroom for some foot tapping. Or pull a Newt, and trade in your wife every 10 years.

[Dauric]

Or pull a Newt, and trade in your wife every 10 years.

Well of course you do this, that's when the warranty expires on your spouse and the manufacturer expects you to buy the latest model. A few people take really good care of their spouses and have them for the rest of their lives, and a few people ride them hard and have to replace them sooner.

Then there's rentals, public options, borrowing one from a friend (with or without permission...)

(I played too much ME3 last night, I'm tired and I think this thought is amusing.)

[gmalivuk]

Never mind that discrimination is how insurance is supposed to exist.

You've made this claim before, as though it's some kind of mathematical necessity for how insurance functions.

It isn't.

Sure, it's how insurance *does* in fact exist, and I think most people agree that certain types of this discrimination (like making smokers pay more for health insurance) are mostly justified. But it would still be in fact possible to insure against individual risk by pooling it together and then charging everyone exactly the same amount across the board. It's just that in reality this system competes poorly for the mostly healthy non-risk-taking majority, when compared to a policy that charges them less and other people more.

[pizzazz]

Perhaps you could explain how it is that not paying for something, constitutes repressing one's freedom to obtain it? "Freedom" to obtain or do something does not in any way mean that someone else has to pay for it. It means no one will stop you.

Because it's not how the system is set up to operate. Eschewing your employer's health plan and buying your own is prohibitively expensive. Buying medications off-plan is prohibitively expensive. It's why the law had to be passed in the first place. Refusing to comply is preventing people from getting birth control, and pretending that's not the effect is stupid.

Yes, the system is set up stupidly. I said that. The solution is not a vast increase in government control over private businesses. Pretending that's a reasonable reaction is just as stupid.

I know I'm going to get lots of flak for this, but I feel obligated to point out that there's a free way to prevent pregnancy with 100% success rate (other than rape).

So what you're saying is that all you have to do is give up a basic component of the human experience, in order to get what is, in a perfect use scenario, a 75% effectiveness rate. (Actual-use statistics for abstinence are much, much lower).

Yeah, genius plan.

What I'm saying is that you don't get to force other people to pay so that you can have sex without getting pregnant (in my opinion, the last five words can be replaced by most things, and it would still be right). Calling sex "a basic component of the human experience" doesn't mean anything, that's just a subjective judgment on your part whether sex is more important than other things. It would be just as ridiculous as if said that everyone had a right to strong rope so they can climb safely because climbing mountains and seeing the view from the top is a basic component of the human experience.

I fail to see how it the current low use of abstinence makes it less of an option. That would be like if someone thought that the chance of dying while driving was too high, ignored the possibility of other forms of transportation, and went straight to government forcing car manufacturers to add stuff to cars to make them "safer" (ie more expensive).

And where do you get 75% from? Are you saying 25% of women are impregnated by rapists?

edit:

Never mind that discrimination is how insurance is supposed to exist.

You've made this claim before, as though it's some kind of mathematical necessity for how insurance functions.

It isn't.

Sure, it's how insurance *does* in fact exist, and I think most people agree that certain types of this discrimination (like making smokers pay more for health insurance) are mostly justified. But it would still be in fact possible to insure against individual risk by pooling it together and then charging everyone exactly the same amount across the board. It's just that in reality this system competes poorly for the mostly healthy non-risk-taking majority, when compared to a policy that charges them less and other people more.

I'm not sure it is possible to do insurance that way, except by force. If you don't discriminate, then people with healthy habits are paying for those with unhealthy habits. This will probably cause some of the healthiest to drop out, which is going to increase average price and decrease average health of the people in the pool. This could easily cause a vicious cycle, depending on how the risk aversion numbers work out. If you force everyone into one insurance company (ie government), then this is just a wealth transfer, not even from rich to poor, but from healthy people to sick. It would also encourage everyone to be less healthy, increasing costs.

[gmalivuk]

Calling sex "a basic component of the human experience" doesn't mean anything, that's just a subjective judgment on your part whether sex is more important than other things. It would be just as ridiculous as if said that everyone had a right to strong rope so they can climb safely because climbing mountains and seeing the view from the top is a basic component of the human experience.

Except that every single ancestor of every single human being (and other sexually reproducing organisms) that has ever lived in the history of the universe had sex at some point, probably dozens or hundreds of times in the case of our closest ancestors, along with probably the majority of sexually mature individuals even if they don't have any currently living descendants.

The same can obviously not be said for climbing mountains.

And where do you get 75% from? Are you saying 25% of women are impregnated by rapists?

"Perfect-use" abstinence is only 75% effective at actually being abstinence, on average, since 25% of women (or so) are rape survivors.

[Belial]

Yes, the system is set up stupidly. I said that. The solution is not a vast increase in government control over private businesses. Pretending that's a reasonable reaction is just as stupid.

Overhauling the entire system will take a long-ass time, a whole lot of effort, and butt-ton of finagling. Mandating birth control takes one order.

One of these seems like a practical solution. But you try it your way. We'll wait. When you're done, we can ditch the birth control mandate! And everyone will be happy! Hooray!

In other words: Nirvana Fallacy harder, why don't you?

I'm not sure it is possible to do insurance that way, except by force.

If by "force" you mean "law" then yes. You are aware of what the healthcare bill did, right?

then this is just a wealth transfer, not even from rich to poor, but from healthy people to sick. It would also encourage everyone to be less healthy, increasing costs.

Yes, because the only benefit to being healthy is monetary...

[mike-l]

I'm not sure it is possible to do insurance that way, except by force. If you don't discriminate, then people with healthy habits are paying for those with unhealthy habits. This will probably cause some of the healthiest to drop out, which is going to increase average price and decrease average health of the people in the pool. This could easily cause a vicious cycle, depending on how the risk aversion numbers work out. If you force everyone into one insurance company (ie government), then this is just a wealth transfer, not even from rich to poor, but from healthy people to sick. It would also encourage everyone to be less healthy, increasing costs.

Except that's how every other first world nation does it, and the US still spends the most money and is the least healthy.

[pizzazz]

Calling sex "a basic component of the human experience" doesn't mean anything, that's just a subjective judgment on your part whether sex is more important than other things. It would be just as ridiculous as if said that everyone had a right to strong rope so they can climb safely because climbing mountains and seeing the view from the top is a basic component of the human experience.

Except that every single ancestor of every single human being (and other sexually reproducing organisms) that has ever lived in the history of the universe had sex at some point, probably dozens or hundreds of times in the case of our closest ancestors, along with probably the majority of sexually mature individuals even if they don't have any currently living descendants.

The same can obviously not be said for climbing mountains.

You forgot a key phrase that should go after "had sex:" "for procreation."
Some animals do have sex for pleasure, as far as we can tell, but hardly to the scale you described.

And where do you get 75% from? Are you saying 25% of women are impregnated by rapists?

"Perfect-use" abstinence is only 75% effective at actually being abstinence, on average, since 25% of women (or so) are rape survivors.[/quote]
Ok, thanks. Is there a citation for that number? According to The FBI, the rape rate, even multiplying by 100(!) to account for underreporting, is just over 5% of women, and I assume it's similar in other developed countries (I'm excluding less-developed nations because the rest of the discussion doesn't seem centered on them).

I suppose it's good that my opinions related to this topic for women impregnated by rapists were already different then for others. Whew, dodged a bullet there!

Gah, too many responses to respond too. I have finals. If I can I'll get around to it.

[Bubbles McCoy]

Never mind that discrimination is how insurance is supposed to exist.

You've made this claim before, as though it's some kind of mathematical necessity for how insurance functions.

It isn't.

Sure, it's how insurance *does* in fact exist, and I think most people agree that certain types of this discrimination (like making smokers pay more for health insurance) are mostly justified. But it would still be in fact possible to insure against individual risk by pooling it together and then charging everyone exactly the same amount across the board. It's just that in reality this system competes poorly for the mostly healthy non-risk-taking majority, when compared to a policy that charges them less and other people more.

I gotta go with gmal on this one CU. Discrimination is important if you're trying to incentivize less risky behavior to prevent moral hazard. With health insurance though, risk undertaken by individuals doesn't necessarily dominate costs. Sure, some life decisions do increase near-term health costs, but a very large portion of health expenditures just comes down to bad luck. I think many people would agree that having insurance rates triple after getting cancer is part of what you buy insurance to hedge against, I'm not so sure setting laws to reflect this is quite so wrong.

[Dauric]

Perhaps you could explain how it is that not paying for something, constitutes repressing one's freedom to obtain it? "Freedom" to obtain or do something does not in any way mean that someone else has to pay for it. It means no one will stop you.

Because it's not how the system is set up to operate. Eschewing your employer's health plan and buying your own is prohibitively expensive. Buying medications off-plan is prohibitively expensive. It's why the law had to be passed in the first place. Refusing to comply is preventing people from getting birth control, and pretending that's not the effect is stupid.

Yes, the system is set up stupidly. I said that. The solution is not a vast increase in government control over private businesses. Pretending that's a reasonable reaction is just as stupid.

What the hell do you mean "Vast increase". It's been the same rules for the last 30+ years. If you don't like that level of government influence fine, but the hyperbole that the government has suddenly started doing this in recent administrations is bullshit.

Secondly, reasonable responses in Washington DC...

A reasonable response would have included reforming the tax code to eliminate some of the insanity. It would have included some addressing of costs for procedures and drugs that are higher in the U.S. than most other developed nations. A reasonable response would have tweaked a lot of very powerful people and corporations greatly changing the rules of doing business and how a business in their industry makes profits.

And the last one is why the debate started with a broader examination of healthcare, but ended up being a single-topic cludge built on top of the existing system to attempt to achieve stated goals without actually 'reforming' the underlying system.

Like Belial said, get the underlying shit taken care of so we can have a system where individuals buying health insurance is economically on par with employee provided health insurance and we can deal with social outrages without having to worry about whether someone's social outrages are going to create an economic circumstance that physically harms people. Until that happens people still need equal -economic- access to health care regardless who their employers or insurance providers are.

Finally: "Expression" of religion. Nobody's saying the Catholic church can't complain about the law while preaching their religion, which last I checked their freedom to speak was in no way limited by any medical insurance laws. What they don't get to do is use the first amendment to skirt a law on the books that they disagree with. omgryebread has -repeatedly- brought up the point that the freedom of speech does not automatically trump every other law out there, and that -multiple- administrations have defended the position that the U.S. Government has an overriding interest in seeing that health insurance is available regardless of employer.

[gmalivuk]

You forgot a key phrase that should go after "had sex:" "for procreation."
Some animals do have sex for pleasure, as far as we can tell, but hardly to the scale you described.

Okay, fine. Sex for pleasure might only go back a handful of millions of years. It still pretty neatly encompasses everything we're likely to call "human", which makes it no less a central part of the human experience than if we also happened to include more non-humans.

Is there a citation for that number?

There are tons, actually, and I really can't be bothered to dig up all of them for you. Suffice to say that not all rapes are reported to the FBI, even among those that are reported to police in the first place, and furthermore that the FBI has a different definition of rape than many non-Federal jurisdictions. (For example that page only talks about "forcible" rape, which doesn't include all rape by a long shot.)

Edit: Also, the statistic in that report you linked was for one year, whereas the higher numbers are for total lifetime incidence. Try to read better next time.

If I can I'll get around to it.

Don't worry. No one will mind terribly if you don't.

[omgryebread]

It would also encourage everyone to be less healthy, increasing costs.

Man, like all the time in France people are like "yo, I'm going to exercise and eat some broccoli instead of this steak" but then they're all "woah government totally pays for my health care, time to sit on the couch and eat some ice cream, bro."

Why just the other day, I heard a parent tell their kid "No need to brush your teeth, the government will pay for your dental work!" and this dude was like "nah I'm totally going to smoke a lot, because duh the government will pay for treating my lung cancer."





Fine, I don't actually live in France. And oh, yeah, none of those happened.

[Belial]

Fine, I don't actually live in France. And oh, yeah, none of those happened.

And let's put a time metric on that: "Ever".

[gmalivuk]

It's like how soup kitchens and shelters encourage people to be homeless. Because I don't know about anyone else, but I only live in a pricey apartment on account of the local shelter being full at the moment.

[Griffin]

That would be like if someone thought that the chance of dying while driving was too high, ignored the possibility of other forms of transportation, and went straight to government forcing car manufacturers to add stuff to cars to make them "safer" (ie more expensive).

Like seatbelts?

You do realize that this is exactly what we did, right?

[Belial]

Yeah, I honestly couldn't tell if that was just some sort of bizarre joke. We have hell of safety regulations for cars.

[Dauric]

That would be like if someone thought that the chance of dying while driving was too high, ignored the possibility of other forms of transportation, and went straight to government forcing car manufacturers to add stuff to cars to make them "safer" (ie more expensive).

Like seatbelts?

You do realize that this is exactly what we did, right?

And then deciding that seatbelts aren't safe enough and mandating the installation of an explosive air-cushion device. That would be horrifying if that ever... Oh, wait...

[Radical_Initiator]

Edit: Also, the statistic in that report you linked was for one year, whereas the higher numbers are for total lifetime incidence. Try to read better next time.

Everyone knows women past the age of 40 don't get raped because they're just not hot enough anymore. *ducks, then runs a serpentine pattern to the nearest door*

OT: Seriously? I don't doubt your number for the sake of the argument, but 1 in 4 women will be raped at some point in their lives? Fuck, that's disturbing as shit.

[aeki]

What I'm saying is that you don't get to force other people to pay so that you can have sex without getting pregnant (in my opinion, the last five words can be replaced by most things, and it would still be right).

Are you saying you're also against forcing other people to pay for maternity and pediatric care?

I fail to see how it the current low use of abstinence makes it less of an option.

"Current" low use? When in the history of mankind have we ever been having less sex than we do now?

[Choboman]

It seems to me that it's almost impossible to separate the issue of birth control/abortions in healthcare from the essential nature of healthcare itself. If healthcare is an inherent right, then it's a reasonable argument that providers of healthcare shouldn't be able to impose arbitrary restrictions on that right due to their own restrictive view of morality. On the other hand, if healthcare is not a right, but just a perk, then providers could argue that they're within their rights to limit that perk however they want, or even to discard it entirely. If my company gives me a company vehicle and allows me to drive it for personal use in my off time except for personal trips that they find morally objectionable (like say, trips to the strip club), I don't have much room to complain. Hell, I'm lucky they let me drive the car for personal use at all. The fact that I can't afford to buy a car of my own doesn't provide any moral imperative that the company loosen restrictions on this perk.

Many people on the board seem to think the right-vs-perk question is already settled, and that no one could possibly argue that health care was a perk instead of a right. But the impression I get is that this is not so. There are many social/fiscal conservatives (a significant percentage of the country) who will argue that there is NO inherent right to health care. It certainly wasn't one of the original rights envisioned by the framers. And as pendantic as some of you might think that point is, it appears to be crucially important to those conservatives who define their views by 'original intent' (including several on the Supreme Ct.)

Society has evolved quite a bit since the framers first drafted the Constitution, and not enough effort has been made to update/amend it to keep pace. Instead, we add these additional expectations through legislation or executive decree, which leads to discussions about whether those laws/decrees conflict with the original doc. This represents a fundamental expansion of what we define as our 'inalienable rights', so maybe it would be better if it were made official through constitutional amendment. Until we do, we're going to have a sizable portion of the country claiming that the whole Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional, and we risk conservatives repealing the act as soon as they get back a majority. (Of course, it's much harder to pass an amendment, and it probably wouldn't make it. But if that's so, doesn't that also tell us something about the 'will of the people'?)

[Falling]

"Current" low use? When in the history of mankind have we ever been having less sex than we do now?

Like

[Dauric]

OT: Seriously? I don't doubt your number for the sake of the argument, but 1 in 4 women will be raped at some point in their lives? Fuck, that's disturbing as shit.

Thread started December 15 "New Study Reveals Shocking High Incidences of Rape [Trigger] "

[Angua]

There was also the problem of her friend who was refused contraception because they thought she was lying about having ovarian cysts even though she gave a doctor's note. In this case, contraception was a necessary treatment, for a medical condition, that the health insurance technically should be covering, but they wiggled out of it by saying she was lying.

I'm quite happy that birth control is available to everyone for no other reason than it stops this sort of thing. There are many conditions which necessitate being on the pill, including extreme pms (the lecturer giving the lecture about this sort of thing said she had a friend who couldn't drive due to mental effects from her hormones - I bet an insurance company wouldn't believe that either), having to be on other medications (there's one medication where a woman can't have a baby until 2 years after stopping taking it, because it's that teratogenic).

Who's "they?" The insurance company? Because that's not an issue limited to any type of medicine, though government stepping in and running private companies like this is a totally ridiculous solution.

Yes, they is the insurance company. And I don't think insurance companies often disregard claims on the grounds that the patient is lying - they might not cover certain treatments, but they generally don't say the patient is making it up.

Also, pregnancy isn't a walk in the park, and there are numerous things that can go wrong, even in the developed world (post partum psychosis seems particularly nasty).

I know I'm going to get lots of flak for this, but I feel obligated to point out that there's a free way to prevent pregnancy with 100% success rate (other than rape).

[/quote] You show me a place that only teaches abstinence as a way to avoid being pregnant, and actually has lower unwanted pregnancy rates, and then maybe I'd believe it's a feasible strategy.

[Radical_Initiator]

OT: Seriously? I don't doubt your number for the sake of the argument, but 1 in 4 women will be raped at some point in their lives? Fuck, that's disturbing as shit.

Thread started December 15 "New Study Reveals Shocking High Incidences of Rape [Trigger] "

Must have missed that. Aaaaaaand now I'm back to hating humanity. Carry on with the insurance debate. You've all done very well!

[Soralin]

You forgot a key phrase that should go after "had sex:" "for procreation."
Some animals do have sex for pleasure, as far as we can tell, but hardly to the scale you described.

Actually, it would basically be all of them, or rather all of them either have sex for emotional reasons (pleasure), or for the ones that are too simple for that to apply, instinctual reasons or simple genetic programming.

In fact, humans are probably unique in being the only species on the planet that has ever had sex with the intention of producing offspring. If nothing else, for the simple reason that humans may be the only species to be aware of the whole "sex->baby" connection. I mean, sex doesn't always produce offspring, and even when it does, it's usually many months after. Not many species have the capability to realize causation between two events many months apart, very few are capable of putting much thought into the subject at all, rather than just going on instinct and emotion.