Juno News - February 24, 2020


The push for free birth control in BC

Mentioned
John Horgan
Canada needs a real leader Canada is Closed for Business

Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

159.07

Word count

963

Sentence count

45

Harmful content

Misogyny

4

sentences flagged

Hate speech

3

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I discuss a recent piece written by two members of the UBC Medicine Political Advocacy Committee arguing for free birth control for all women and persons with uteruses in British Columbia, Canada. I discuss the arguments they make, and why I don't think they have a case to make.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Hi all. I was scanning the CBC opinions page the other day, as I sometimes do, and I saw an opinion
00:00:11.680 piece that was written by two members of the UBC Medicine Political Advocacy Committee. So they're
00:00:17.960 a committee currently lobbying the provincial government in British Columbia for free birth
00:00:22.300 control for all women and persons with uteruses. And so their piece in the CBC was laying out their
00:00:28.880 case for provincially funded contraception. They are not the only people doing this. There is a
00:00:34.660 handful of organizations and individuals in the province of BC who are advocating for free birth
00:00:40.340 control. Access BC is one of the main ones, and Access BC has been endorsed by the city of Victoria,
00:00:46.960 as well as numerous unions and university student societies. So these activists, they were hoping to
00:00:53.340 get free contraception in BC's 2020 budget, but the budget was released earlier this week and
00:01:00.140 ultimately did not include any such plan, though Premier John Horgan did previously indicate that
00:01:07.180 he was open to the idea. And so this CBC opinion piece that I read, I started looking more into this
00:01:13.280 movement in my province, British Columbia, and I was initially kind of convinced by what they were
00:01:19.500 saying. But then I read the article again, I looked into this a little more closely, and their arguments
00:01:26.000 really start to fall apart once you examine them. So one example, the CBC opinion piece starts with the
00:01:32.200 story of a 15-year-old girl at a clinic who is crestfallen upon learning that the IUD that she wanted
00:01:39.120 would cost her $385 because she can't afford it and she doesn't want to ask her parents for the money. 0.96
00:01:46.100 So apparently no one explained to her that, yeah, that kind of IUD might cost $385, but another
00:01:53.800 kind might cost you $75, $80. So I don't know why we're acting as if this particular form of birth
00:02:00.220 control costs hundreds of dollars. Also, why did no one explain to this girl that there is a youth
00:02:06.520 clinic near her that could offer her other methods of contraception for free or at a lower cost? We'll go
00:02:12.660 into that a little bit more after. But this piece goes on to say, currently in our province, about 40%
00:02:19.380 of pregnancies are unintended. Nationally, unplanned pregnancies cost our collective healthcare systems
00:02:26.120 $320 million annually based on medical costs associated with pregnancy, labor, delivery, and abortion. So the
00:02:34.200 main financial economic argument they're making here is nationwide free birth control will cost
00:02:40.620 $157 million annually, which is far less costly than the $320 million associated with unplanned
00:02:49.560 pregnancies. But wait a second, because unplanned pregnancy is not synonymous with unwanted child.
00:02:57.620 It does not seem to me methodologically sound to be lumping together the costs of abortion with the
00:03:04.680 costs of labor and delivery for parents who I'm sure the vast majority of them are loving parents,
00:03:10.760 right? You know, I'd be fine with comparing maybe the cost of free contraception versus the costs of
00:03:18.200 abortions. But if a woman actually went through carrying the child and giving birth to it, I don't 0.99
00:03:23.720 know why we're comparing that cost with the cost of preventing that birth in the first place.
00:03:29.620 That seems very strange. Perhaps they're willing to overlook that kind of thing. Because the
00:03:34.180 organizations and individuals behind this push for universal contraception are ultimately kind of
00:03:40.300 anti-family and anti-reproduction. And I know they, I'm sure they would refute that, I'm sure they would,
00:03:46.360 but you have to ask yourself, they're acting as if 40% of children are a cost burden that should have
00:03:54.120 been avoided. And so 40% is, is the number of unplanned pregnancies in BC, but nationally that
00:04:00.480 figure is 60, 61%. So let's say a couple found out they were pregnant a little earlier than they
00:04:06.500 wanted to. So before the father got a promotion, before they moved into an apartment, or at a very
00:04:12.360 inconvenient time when a woman had just started up a business or a blog or something. Does this mean
00:04:18.060 that the unplanned pregnancy is now just a societal cost burden that should have never happened? That
00:04:24.620 just seems not right to me. That seems antinatalist. And again, let's look at some facts. The province of
00:04:32.140 British Columbia already provides free contraception to low-income and indigenous people. And there are 0.99
00:04:39.680 youth clinics around the province offering free services, generally for those between ages 12 and 24.
00:04:45.780 You know, some of these groups are urgently claiming that the province is just not doing enough for
00:04:50.820 women. It's not doing enough for people with uteruses. You know, it's really not as bad as they're trying 1.00
00:04:57.540 to make it seem. Especially the members of Access BC, they keep repeating, they want to remove financial
00:05:02.940 barriers. They want to ensure that no one has to choose between their rent or paying for birth control. 0.98
00:05:08.500 But considering that low-income people already receive free birth control, it's hard not to kind
00:05:15.640 of see this antinatalist strain within the free birth control movement. You know, they want to
00:05:21.240 stigmatize pregnancy. They treat children like they're just a financial blotch on the province.
00:05:27.100 We could save so much money if they didn't exist. And you know, they're pushing for this progressive
00:05:33.360 idea that the only way to achieve, you know, what they would call gender equality is for women to 0.81
00:05:39.880 abstain from child rearing. So I would say for now, it's probably a good thing that their free birth
00:05:47.400 control, their desire for everyone to get free birth control was not included in the budget. But I'm sure
00:05:54.360 we have not seen the last of this initiative as young people love free stuff from the government.
00:06:01.680 Thanks so much for watching.