A health-care package being planned by the University of Toronto’s Students’ Council is to include coverage for contraceptives. Some other universities already have student-sponsored health benefits but none include coverage for contraceptives.
If it goes into effect, the plan will be mandatory for all full time students. An executive of the Students Administrative Council, Kevin Perkins was reported by the Toronto Globe as having indicated that the addition of contraceptives to the plan might account for as much as half of the estimated $30.00 increase in student fees. Helen Humphrey, Women’s Commissioner for the Student Council thought the plan “easily justifiable” because the cost of birth control, she thought, “is a mutual responsibility.” Perkins offered the opinion that “a lot of people would benefit including the pro-lifers who don’t want to see abortions.”
Proponents of the plan seemed to have overlooked that health care should not include contraception because pregnancy is not a disease; that the contraceptive mentality, instead of reducing abortions, is directly responsible for the present popularity of abortion; and that the proposed mandatory character once more – and all too predictably – contradicts the original argument for legalization of the contraceptives twenty years ago, namely that contraceptives (and abortion) were matters of purely private concern.
AH
