Jackson Free Press

Dr. Beverly McMillan is against birth control. Or at least any kind of hormonal birth control, from the regular pill to the morning-after pill, all of which she considers to be a form of abortion. The head of Pro-Life Mississippi, McMillan wants your employer to be able to tell you what kind of birth control your health insurance can pay for. Never mind that you pay for your insurance with your own labor, and often partly with your money.

She, and other opponents of the federal "contraceptive rule," are claiming that the government trying to force employers to offer birth control that leads to abortion for their employees. You'd think the president was telling business owners to drive women to abortion clinics themselves in order to keep their jobs.

What the Obama administration has actually said is that health insurers cannot deny their insured access to preventive contraception or charge them a co-pay or deductible for it (affirming what a majority of states already do). That is, neither employer, the government, a priest or a Jackson OB-GYN herself has the right to tell individuals and families what birth-control choices we can make for ourselves—or to pressure insurance companies into denying access or making it too expensive for many women. These political and religious institutions do not belong in our bedroom, or in our pharmacies. These are personal choices.

The contraceptive rule says nothing about what most people consider to be abortion, although the very important morning-after pill—imagine a condom breaking or your teen being raped—is included in the birth-control options that insurance companies, or employers (except for exempt religious organizations) cannot deny employees because they don't believe a woman should make her own reproductive decisions, even down to whether or not to take the pill.

While her husband, Roy McMillan, spends much of his time dragging huge fetus blowups across North State Street to his perch in front of the state's only abortion clinic, Dr. McMillan crusades on the meme that birth-control pills cause—and are—abortions, rather than acknowledging the very basic truth that birth control prevents abortion, not to mention poverty and other problems.

Meantime, many of her followers blame single mothers for all of society's ills, as well as "broken homes," even as many of the fathers never lived in those homes in the first place. She preaches this in one of the nation's poorest states where women have a minimal voice and rights. Dr. McMillan is as welcome to those views as her husband is to sit in front of a clinic when he could be out helping children that are already born, hungry and unwanted. But it is not her place to tell hard-working American women that their health insurance should not pay for their health-care needs because she'd prefer that they get pregnant. Whether Dr. McMillan also prefers them barefoot is still an open question.

Previous Comments

ID

167937

Comment

Why doesn't Roy McMillan display his signs in front of Dr. Millian's house on State Street. This would be more appropirate since she ran an abortion clinic here in Jackson. As a matter of fact, it was Jackson's first clinic. The McMillians at best are hypocrtts. Beverly Smith McMillan made a fortune doing abortions. Until all profits from this practice are given back, she and spouse should just SHUT UP!

Author

justjess

Date

2012-06-18T17:25:53-06:00