Above: Freedom.
One useful way to measure fundamentalism is to look at what price someone is willing to pay for his or her desire. Can they recognize when they’re doing more harm than good? Is there any can of worms their dream isn’t worth opening?
For the Cult of Contraception, the answer is a resounding no. The latest example is a new project bankrolled by Bill Gates:
A single smart capsule could release drugs into a patient’s body over the span of years, and respond to remote wireless signals if doctors want to alter or halt the treatment […]
The Gates Foundation project looks to develop a pill that would automatically release a contraceptive hormone into the bloodstream, lasting for 16 years or until it’s disabled by a wireless signal. The project is planning to start preclinical testing in 2015 and reach the market in 2018, but there are still many questions to be answered, including security issues. Earlier this year, the FDA issued a warning that most medical devices were vulnerable to hacking, and remote-control drug delivery could present a dangerous new line of attack if manufacturers do not take proper precautions.
Gee, sixteen years’ worth of dosage in your body at once, managed electronically. What could go wrong? Answer: enough that even an RH Reality Check blogger thinks it’s a “really bad idea.”
Yes, there are risks with every new drug and every technological innovation, and ironing them out before release is theoretically why we have an FDA. But that’s less than reassuring, considering the agency under Bill Clinton sidestepped its own safety standards when rushing approval for RU-486. And under President Punished-With-a-Baby, there’s no reason to expect the abortifacient capacity of levonogestrel, the hormone these hi-tech pills would release, would be rigorously vetted, either.
Aside from the potential danger, this is yet another sad chapter in the Cult of Contraception’s infantilization of women. The Left’s ideal woman can’t be expected to weigh the potential outcomes before deciding to sleep with someone. She can’t be expected to factor her unborn son or daughter’s welfare into her decision-making.
She needs webcam abortions because leaving the house is too much to ask. She needs federally forced, no-copay contraception coverage because paying for birth control is too much to ask.
And now, apparently just taking the birth control is also too much to ask, to the point where women must be freed from the burden of remembering to do so for a decade and a half at a time.
In what alternate universe is “empowerment” synonymous with “treated like an invalid?” How is it sexist to say, “actions have consequences,” but not to base an entire policy agenda on the premise that women can’t thrive in America unless someone facilitates every step of their choices for them?
And perhaps the most maddening thing is that all of it is undertaken in the name of battling something that, sorry, is not difficult to avoid. The medical risks, the lives destroyed, the government coercion, the financial cost, all the sweat and tears and media tantrums and smear campaigns — a little knowledge and a little self-control make it all unnecessary.
Even as they reload the “War on Women” narrative, the abortion lobby is waging something far more insidious: a war on any concept of womanhood that has anything to do with autonomous adulthood, keeping their aggrieved disciples in a state of perpetual adolescence.
