Possibly the most terrible idea to be espoused in the Hobby Lobby furor

Crossposted from DemocraticDiva.com

There are, of course, a plethora of terrible arguments, bad faith assertions, and vile statements by anti-choicers in the past week to choose from but I have to give the top honor to one Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry for this:

In the wake of the Hobby Lobby decision, there was a lot of chatter about how the court had ruled about what healthcare employers should or shouldn’t provide, which leads me to make a small but important terminological point: contraception is not “healthcare”.

I made this point in passing on Twitter and had, I think, the most violent and unhinged response that I can recall, and I’ve gotten into a lot of arguments on Twitter and elsewhere on the internet.

Not the first time I’ve encountered this belief, but not with quite this much self-righteous certainly. Also, too, could you shrieking harridans please stop yelling at poor Mr. Gobry, as he patiently explains your default broodmare status to you?

“Healthcare” means, roughly, a direct, medical intervention to improve your health. The main purpose of contraception is not to improve anybody’s health, it is to prevent fertility. That’s a different thing. It’s not healthcare. It doesn’t mean that’s a bad thing, it doesn’t mean it’s a good thing. But it’s not healthcare….

…Other people have said that contraception prevents pregnancy, which is “a medical condition”, and therefore contraception is healthcare. Except that it isn’t. The term “medical condition” obscures more than it highlights. For some women, pregnancy will be medically problematic, and they will need to receive healthcare as a result, yes. And pregnancy is a thing that happens to your body which changes it, yes. (And if you’ve watched e.g. the documentary The Business of Being Born, you’ll know that it’s probably best for everyone involved that doctors be as little involved as possible. But that’s another discussion.) In other words, contraception is a thing that aims to prevent another thing which carries health risks. That doesn’t make it healthcare.

Does that clear things up? Preventing a medical condition that can cause nausea, excruciating pain, hemorrhoids, varicose veins, swelling, weight gain, diabetes, uterine prolapse, and fistulas, among other things, is not health care because shut up that’s why. And thanks for the helpful maternity advice, Pascal-Emmanuel! By Gobry’s reasoning the smallpox vaccine is not health care either, but he anticipates that argument with a scolding:

Unless… Unless you think that pregnancy, or fertility, are diseases, or at least unnatural states, and that to be “healthy” is to be infertile, or at least infertile-by-default.

Unseemly!

Yeah, young Master Gobry can go ahead and sit the entire fuck down.