Women and narcomanes

In what sense would you suppose requiring insurance providers to buy women health insurance that covers preventive care including birth control is the same as Denmark giving away free heroin to drug addicts "so they won't commit crimes to get the money"? No, I can't figure it out either.

That was the venturesome analogy offered by Bill O'Reilly, reacting yesterday to the testimony before Congressional Democrats of Georgetown University law student Sandra Fluke, [jump]
who talked about the difficulties caused by the fact that

Georgetown Law, a Jesuit institution, does not provide contraception coverage in its student health plan and... contraception can cost a woman more than $3,000 during law school. She spoke of a friend who had an ovary removed because the insurance company wouldn't cover the prescription birth control she needed to stop the growth of cysts.

I was staying away from this story when it was just a matter of Rush Limbaugh calling Fluke a "slut" who was having "$3000 worth of birth control pills worth of sex," displaying interesting misconceptions as to how birth control pills are in fact used. But the stuff about Denmark sounded like one of those wonderful right-wing fantasies, and nobody was checking it out, so I thought I should.

It turns out that the Danish government really does supply free heroin to some addicts, at five county clinics throughout the country, though not really as a crime-prevention measure, but within a larger program of "substitution treatment" with drugs like methadone:

As part of the treatment provided to the most seriously affected heroin abusers, in January 2010, the Danish Government initiated scheme of treatment with medically prescribed heroin, and about 30 drug users were on heroin treatment by July 2010.

What's really interesting about it is that it seems to be a failure, as in the Politiken headline above—"Addicts say no to free heroin"—according to which nearly a year after the program was inaugurated it still had only 80 participants.

Addicts are required to come to the centre once or twice a day, and each dose is administered under medical supervision. “If the junkies say no to state-paid heroin, the state has obviously got to revise the programme” – and listen more closely to the addicts, adds Politiken.

Anyway, the terms of the O'Reilly analogy are as follows: health insurance providers are like the Danish government, women who wish to separate the question of whether to have sex from the question of whether to conceive a child are like heroin addicts, and filling your birth control prescription without making a copayment is like registering and getting a fix twice a day at a county clinic.

Well, they can't be exactly alike, in that, putting it crudely, birth control pills never gave anybody an orgasm. Unlike the Danish clinic, the insurance policy cannot supply a person with the pleasure itself, which she has to find by the same means whether she is using the pill or not, and which unlike the pleasure of opiates practically never, for women, involves paying for it.

But wait: there is a real parallel, in the negative consequences: if you get your heroin from the clinic, you won't get busted, and if you get your sex while using birth control, you won't get pregnant (and the fact that both will be for free is secondary, but not unimportant). Now we may be getting a little closer to the way O'Reilly thinks.

O'Reilly thinks women, many, or most, or virtually all of them, are addicted to sex; that is, he doesn't actually believe in addiction as a disease, but more a weakness of the will, a getting "out of control"; he thinks women are what liberals would call addicted to sex, but he would call hysterically self-indulgent, and that only severe regulation and the threat of punishment can hold them back, and that the punishment is pregnancy and the regulation is by men. Which is a pretty familiar concept after all:

I will greatly increase your pangs in childbearing:
in pain you shall bring forth children,
yet your desire shall be for your husband,
and he shall rule over you.

They'll tell you that's not what they mean, but if you unpack the analogies, there it is. You shouldn't have talked to that serpent, it's your own damned fault.

From Francis Quarles, Emblems Divine and Moral, 1866.