{"id":46180,"date":"2023-05-30T06:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-05-30T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thehub.ca\/?p=46180"},"modified":"2023-05-30T14:18:48","modified_gmt":"2023-05-30T18:18:48","slug":"christopher-snook-canadian-women-say-they-want-more-children-so-why-is-b-c-publicly-funding-birth-control","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thehub.ca\/2023-05-30\/christopher-snook-canadian-women-say-they-want-more-children-so-why-is-b-c-publicly-funding-birth-control\/","title":{"rendered":"Christopher Snook: Canadian women say they want more children. So why is B.C. publicly funding birth control?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
The pursuit of autonomy and ever-increasing equity between the sexes has long stumbled on the apparent obstacle of children\u2014particularly that the burden of bearing and rearing them falls unduly upon women. Increasing, then, the ways in which women can unshackle themselves from this responsibility has been a preoccupation of progressive policymakers for decades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
From this vantage point, the government funding of birth control for women in British Columbia appears to be a victory for self-determination. As B.C. Finance Minister Katrine Conroy<\/a> noted, the new initiative will not only save money for those who access the provision, but it is also a gain for equity between the sexes, ensuring (within the limits of the technologies employed) that women can determine when and if they become pregnant. It appears to be winners all around.1<\/a><\/sup>Focused interventions in lowering fertility rates have a precedent in Canada, with teenage birth rates having fallen drastically in Canada<\/a> and B.C.<\/a><\/span>\n\n\n\n And yet for all the reasons that many Canadians may celebrate this legislation, including its likely foreshadowing of comparable developments across the country, there are at least three features of the new funding worth pondering. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In the first instance, it is prudent to ask whether a $119 million investment over three years in an intervention that does not address a medical illness is the best use of health-care dollars at a time when the fragility of health care coast-to-coast is generating a constant, and increasingly apocalyptic<\/a>, conversation. (And this is to say nothing about the remarkably counterintuitive plan of spending $40 million dollars annually to address what the finance minister herself describes as a $27 million issue.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n The Fraser Institute<\/a>, for example, notes in a recent report that medical wait times in Canada more than doubled between 1993 and 2019. Even Jagmeet Singh<\/a> declared a national crisis at the end of last year, alongside his earlier claims in 2022 that the current system is unsustainable<\/a> for family medicine. B.C. itself is now having to fly<\/a> some cancer patients to the U.S. for treatments it cannot provide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n More importantly, perhaps, we might also note that the government is investing significantly less in what is a significantly more persistent health-care cost for women: menstruation. The campaign to end period poverty<\/a> in B.C. has only just begun. Its aim is to provide menstrual products to the economically precarious through collaboration with, among others, the United Way. That comparable partnerships for the targeted distribution of contraceptives were not the go-to model for a government interested in investing itself in the bedrooms of the province is peculiar. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Second, the minister\u2019s celebration of funded contraceptives as a victory for gender equity looks a little like smiling through clenched teeth. Though the new coverage is expansive, it only includes hormonal or physical contraceptive interventions for women. If, as is obvious, the physical effects of carrying a child are borne by women, then surely demanding that women also bear sole responsibility for pregnancy prevention is hardly part and parcel of the years-long feminist fight.2<\/a><\/sup>Neither is the failure to distinguish between birth control and medical interventions to end pregnancy helpful. Whatever one\u2019s thoughts about abortifacients, to speak as if they are a form of birth control is to engage in a willful obfuscation.<\/span>\n\n\n\n In the third instance, beneath the current celebration of publicly funded pills, there is a much deeper issue that makes this funding feel more like a concession to a particular view of women\u2019s rights than a necessary development of provincial health coverage. Indeed, medical interventions intended to prevent the conception of children may in fact not be the support most urgently needed in B.C. (or, arguably, in any major urban centre across the country).<\/p>\n\n\n\n The strangeness of this government spending only increases when we recall that B.C. had the lowest birth rate<\/a> in the country in 2022, at 1.17 children per woman. Though access to contraceptives is no doubt prohibitively expensive for some, this statistic does not suggest that they are all that hard to come by or that there is an epidemic of individuals unaware of the finer points of modern family planning. <\/p>\n\n\n\n There is a residual sense in our culture that women writ large are anxious for cheap and plentifully-available means to prevent or end unwanted pregnancies, and that policy programs must be tailored towards the goal of liberating women from these problems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But does this reflect the reality of women’s desires?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Far from having too many children, a growing number<\/a> of families in B.C. have indicated that the cost of living has made children an impossible dream. For these people, the use of contraception is not a victory. It is, rather, a determination made in the midst of B.C.’s daunting material demands on its residents. <\/p>\n\n\n\n