The Left’s Dishonesty Regarding “No-Cost” Birth Control

In her dissenting opinion to the Supreme Court’s recent decision that Hobby Lobby and other businesses may decline on religious grounds to offer insurance covering certain types of birth control, Ruth Bader Ginsburg claims that the ObamaCare insurance mandate regarding birth control ensures “that women employees receive” birth control “at no cost to them.”

Ginsburg’s remark is simply bizarre. Birth control doesn’t fall from the sky like manna from heaven; it must be produced, and it costs money. Women who get birth control via insurance either pay for it via higher premiums, or, if their insurance is legislatively subsidized, get it for “free” only in the sense that others are forced to pay higher premiums (or higher taxes) than they would otherwise pay. In that latter case, the birth control is still not free to those who allegedly receive it for free; it comes at the expense of fidelity to the principle of rights, which is bad for everyone.

The fundamental reason that no one has a right to a particular good or service (unless he produces it himself or trades a value for it by mutual consent with a party offering it) is that goods and services must be produced by someone or they simply don’t exist. If one person has a “right” to birth control or to any other good, that means he has a “right” to force someone else to provide that good. But a “right” to the productive effort of others is a contradiction in terms.

Leftists seek to defend such nonsense as a “right” to birth control (and other goods and services) by pretending that the good in question comes at “no cost.” But pretending that goods are “free” doesn’t make them so; it just exposes the dishonesty of the left.

Related:

• The Assault on Abortion Rights Undermines All Our Liberties
• Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby Decision: Good Outcome, Mixed Reasoning

About Ari Armstrong

Ari Armstrong blogs at AriArmstrong.com, and he has written for publications including the Denver Post and Complete Colorado. He is the author of Values of Harry Potter: Lessons for Muggles, a book exploring the heroic fight for life-promoting values in the Potter novels.

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