For starters- to all those people who are against insurance coverage for birth control I say, do you even know all of the many reasons women take it? I've only ever heard a few arguments against it, so please make me aware if I am missing some, that go like this:
Birth control is against my religion, so having insurances cover it violates my religious freedom. This is a lazy argument. It doesn't violate your religious freedom, you aren't being forced to take it! As my friend put it, if we feel that insurances covering birth control is a violation of the freedom of someone to practice their religion then so is selling pork in the stores. That's against the Muslim religion. It's the same principal people!
I don't want to pay for someone else to have sex. This is a failure to understand how insurances work. People are personally paying for insurance; it is taken out of a paycheck, personally purchased, or in the case of Medicare and Medicade it is something that everyone has paid into while they work. The only way you are going to be paying for it is if you buy it. You could argue about the Medicare/Medicaide thing, and insurance premiums but here is a response for that. You already are paying for someone else's sex. Insurance covers Viagra and Cialis and other erectile dysfunction meds whose sole purpose is to enable men to have sex. At least birth control has other, medical, benefits.
Women shouldn't be having sex so much and then they could afford birth control. This one stems from a basic misunderstanding about birth control entirely. Women's birth control is not like an erectile dysfunction medicine. It is not taken every time a woman wants to have sex. It is taken everyday. It doesn't matter if the woman is having sex or not. It functions by changing the hormone balance within the woman's body which takes time to work, thus, the pill is taken everyday.
The other issue with this argument is that it implies that women only need birth control to prevent themselves from having babies. This is not true. Women take birth control for a variety of reasons: To prevent cysts from developing on the ovaries such as in poly cystic ovarian disease, to help prevent certain cancers from growing such as cervical cancer, it also helps women whose periods are so severe that they cannot function. Sorry, cramps are painful and can be debilitating, some women lose too much blood during their period and become anemic, others end up having vomiting and violent mood swings which the birth control helps regulate. Lastly, women take birth control to prevent having babies.
I take it because, with all the other medications I am on, if I were to have a baby right now it would more than likely have some fairly significant disabilities and I tend to have very painful, heavy periods (tmi, I know). So, if you don't want to cover birth control, fine, but don't complain when you have to help support my potential children who are disabled.
(note, I am not trying to be offensive, but it is true. I would love my children no matter what.)
The next thing I wanted to talk about is that I was turned down for my own SSDI. I have appealed. I just thought the reasons that they gave me were hilarious, though. 1. I'm too young to be disabled (apparently, people under the age of 40 are impervious to becoming disabled. That's good to know!) 2. I hadn't been diagnosed for a year (okay, I'll give them this one- I hadn't officially been diagnosed a year at the time I applied, but my first ANCA positive blood test was two years ago when I had the sinus scars.) and 3. I have too much education (I like to think that this is because they feel I will find my own cure. I'm sorry that my attempts to better myself before I knew I had some terrible disease would count against me in the long run. If I'd known then what I know now I maybe wouldn't have bothered racking up $40,000 in student loans!)
Next up- I've received many a letter and phone call from the government peoples of my state about Rare Disease Day. I am persistent when I want to be. These have inspired me to now write a letter to President Obama. Not for anything special, but to let him know that May is Vasculitis Awareness Month and that I plan on holding an ice cream fundraiser. He is invited if he wants to come.
I guess I spoke about the last thing I wanted to talk about when I wrote about my letter, so, for now I guess that's it!
Oh! and here is the VF's new slogan since Susan G. Komen sued the old one away from us.
