Editorial, Opinion

EDITORIAL: Birth control for female inmates an issue of education, not economics

The Nashville, Tennessee, news program WSMV 4 ran an investigative segment Monday that looked at “corruption, misuse of taxpayer dollars, criminal activities, scams and dangers to the Middle Tennessee region.” The scoop? The state’s effort to provide long-acting, reversible birth control to female inmates in state prisons is both an invasion of rights and a waste of taxpayer money.

According to Jezebel, however, the program is actually “an attempt to respond to the epidemic of drug-dependent infants born in the state” who suffer from Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome. The disease is caused from a mother’s exposure to opioids while the child is in the womb. While these babies don’t suffer long-term health effects, the majority do need advanced medical treatment and are more likely to end up in foster care.

“A study published in May in the Journal of Perinatalogy found that the highest incidents of NAS — 16.2 babies born with the condition in every 1,000 — happen in the southeastern United States, including Tennessee, Kentucky, Mississippi and Alabama,” the Jezebel article read. “The Centers for Disease Control [and Prevention] found that’s also where the highest rate of painkiller prescriptions are located. The math here isn’t hard.”

Judge Duane Slone of the Fourth Circuit Court, however, says these women are not forcibly given birth control as the WSMV article suggests — rather, they are sent to local health centers where they view presentations that “explain the dangers of NAS,” WSMV reported. Only then are they given the option to have an intrauterine device placed.

The issue lies in the fact that many in opposition don’t believe that these prisons can prove the IUDs are being inserted voluntarily — they worry that women are being forced into taking birth control.

That being said, it seems to be only beneficial in the long run that these women are offered such access to important methods of protection. Even if these women only have six-month sentences, these forms of birth control last long enough that they will still be protected when they leave their cells and head back into the real world.

What this news team and many other prominent Tennessee legislators fail to realize is that this access to birth control is important even beyond the prevention of pregnancy. By giving women access to sex education, we can inspire them to focus on it in ways that they most likely haven’t been before. And, contrary to popular conservative belief, there are other benefits to birth control besides pregnancy prevention.

Under the Affordable Care Act, birth control is free and available to all women, and these women should be no exception. In their everyday lives, though, it may be hard to receive access to the birth control that we can instead provide them during their time in prison.

With recent talk of defunding Planned Parenthood and taking away women’s rights to birth control and abortion, it’s understandable that people may feel outrage toward an issue such as this. The fact is, we should be focused on keeping women’s bodies as free from control as possible. But this might be the compromise — we are keeping options open while providing education and stability to women who may not have had access to it previously.

We are not only helping these women, but we are also helping their children. Perhaps this will help us to prevent unwanted pregnancies in general for women whose babies may not be born with NAS, but who still remain unwanted by their parents. This implementation of IUDs and birth control in general serves a much greater purpose than we are realizing — this isn’t about these women, it’s about their children and what we can do as a society to ensure fewer children are forced to suffer through circumstances they have no intention of entering.

Slone told WSMV, “The feedback I’m hearing is great gratitude that they know there’s this type of long-acting contraceptive … available to them at no cost.”

We must understand, as WSMV implied, that we should never force anyone to go on birth control. But we don’t see that happening here — it seems that Slone and others like him are confident that this program is beneficial to women and to the world they live in.

People are always going to argue that we shouldn’t be giving people in prison fantastic lives with our tax dollars. But that’s a larger issue, for which the solution lies in placing less people in prison initially. In reality, it would be inhumane to deprive prison inmates of healthcare in any capacity.

According to the same WSMV article, the Tennessee Department of Health estimates the price of the implants is approximately $632, while an IUD costs about $681. The cost to treat a baby with NAS? $44,000.

In essence, we should be treating this as an education and health issue, rather than an economics. Providing birth control for these women is a small step we can take to make a much bigger impact on society, improving women’s rights and family health in the process.

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