This week Melanie our acting hostess has a very simple question for us to discuss.
Birth control? Pro or con. Please explain.
I am in favour of birth control. I think that people should be able to decide when they have a child and how many children they want.
Recently in the USA there has been the controversy over the repeal of Roe vs Wade. It seems very strange to me that the same people who are so concerned about the right to life of unborn babies don’t seem too worried about what happens to them after they are born; whether or not they are healthy, have a good home and enough to eat.
Do we really want to go back to a time when married women had a baby almost every year of their childbearing years? Isn’t it better to have fewer children and be able to give them everything they need than for a family to live in poverty because there are so many mouths to feed. In a country like the USA where medical care is not free isn’t this going to lead to many more infant deaths anyway? “Just say no.” is not going to work in that situation and it shouldn’t have to.
Isn’t birth control one of the things that aid organisations have tried to bring to developing countries in order to reduce poverty? I don’t mean like China’s mandatory one child policy that was in force for many years. That was a badly thought out plan and lead to the deaths of many baby girls and probably to a generation of spoiled only children.
I wanted to highlight the poverty issue as others have raised the issue of teen pregnancy and the right of a woman to choose. Those too are very good reasons why birth control is necessary.
My final take on it is that governments should not have the right to tell people how many children they can or can’t have. Their role is to educate and provide access to medication, facilities etc. If a family can afford to raise fourteen children that is up to them. If they can’t or don’t want to, they shouldn’t have to.
I am very glad, firstly that I am no longer of child bearing age and secondly that I live in Australia which may not be perfect but is not starting to look like something out of “The Handmaid’s Tale”.
Our Other Blog: Two Sisters and Two Points of View 
Yeah. The land of the free and the home of the brave is beginning to look more than a little like Stalinist Russia or Adolf’s Germany. Not a real cozy feeling. ALL of the achievement of my lifetime have been turned inside out and upside down. It’s a living nightmare.
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What a wonderful post Vanda! Very logical and concise way of stating your point of view! Living in the land of “The Handmaid’s Tale” is as awful as you might imagine. You ARE lucky and very fortunate to live in a country where common sense hasn’t been outlawed. Where the rich (entitled) don’t take whatever they want without considering any consequences. Many of us who live here are horrified and wonder “What happened?!” Surely this can’t be America. The answer is (IMO) that we got lazy and allowed the villains’ over the wall and now they won’t leave. It’s our own fault and now nobody has really good ethics or standards anyway (IMO). At least we might serve as a good example for other countries’ leaders of what NOT to do, and the citizens of those countries as well.
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I think you are right and I’m not complacent because if it can happen to you it could happen to us if we let it.
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