In Politics, the Poor are Expendable

It's a truism that politicians talk a lot about their concern for children and the poor, especially when they are in front of cameras. But when it comes to voting, too many politicians pay the most attention to their donors and to the constituents they believe are most likely to participate in the next election.

Unfortunately, the most recent compromise on the President's economic subsidy proposals proves this truism correct once again. With Republicans going on and on in front of TV news cameras about the inclusion of “millions of dollars for contraceptives,” President Obama caved in and jettisoned an important subsidy for poor women to gain access to contraception. Thus conservative hypocrisy won over common sense, and good public policy lost out to political expediency.

Hypocrisy is a strong term for describing conservative objections to this subsidy, but I cannot think of anything less accurate. With their emphasis on self-sufficiency, Republicans surely can not be said to be in favor of the poor having more children they cannot afford, and they are even more adamantly opposed to terminating an unintended pregnancy. Can you imagine the outrage they could have generated by showing up on Fox News and shouting, “This stimulus plan includes millions for publicly funded abortions”??

Yet what logical reason can they put forward for objecting to helping poor women control their family size and prevent the spread of sexually transmitted diseases? Is money spent helping pharmaceuticals offer contraceptives any better or worse than subsidizing an expensive drug plan for the elderly? According to most economists, it doesn't matter where you spend the money, as long as the government is pumping cash into the economy. So why are contraceptives any worse a product to subsidize than corn or wheat or any other commodity?

Do conservatives want poor women to stop having sex? Perhaps so. But given that poor women are disproportionately young and less educated, many of them may not have the power, real or perceived, of just saying “no” to a sexual partner. Moreover, since many conservatives are also libertarian in their thinking, they surely cannot favor the government either explicitly or implicitly getting into the business of dictating such choices.

And since Republicans always want the government to spend less, why wouldn't they want to spend a little on contraception in order to avoid spending a lot more subsidizing health care, education, and Aid to Dependent Children as well as the public spending on AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases that could be avoided by more women using contraceptives?

So why do poor women have to lose again? By courting conservative votes (which he didn't get), and avoiding any kind of controversy (especially around sex), President Obama chose to cede this issue to the conservative right. But that doesn't mean that voters have to go along with such political expediency. If those of us who take our ability to access contraceptives for granted don't speak up on behalf of poor women who don't enjoy that privilege, no one will.