There’s plenty of data to show that prescription availability of the pill has had serious negative side effects on the country. It is the chief factor in the sexual revolution and the rise of casual sex. This is a moral blight on the society that the Church rightly concerns herself with. It was predicted exactly by Paul VI and everyone laughed at him. But time has proven him prescient.
Making the Pill OTC can only exacerbate this problem.
Those on FR who use this opportunity to drive a wedge between Catholics and non-Catholics do a disservice to all of us who care about the health of marriage and sexuality in our society.
The “ho-hum,” it’s just contraception, who cares, doesn’t hurt anyone as long as it’s freely chosen” attitude you and others offer here will come back to bite you in the butt some day. But by then you’ll have some other explanation why it’s all the Catholic Church’s fault when she was just pointing out the facts of the matter: contraception destroys healthy attitudes toward sex. Period. Sex is about procreation. It’s also about other things but it is irreducibly about procreation. Deny that (which is what ho-humming contraception does) and pay a price for it down the road.
My point was that as a matter of policy, it would NOT increase the use of birth control, as the accessibility of birth control is pretty much universal, with no appreciable barriers to either availability or price, despite what Obama has argued.
Making some common pills OTC could increase the total use somewhat. It might even draw a few more individuals into use (these are separate issues). But when virtually every woman has used some sort of birth control at some point in their lives, there are few “new” women to be brought to use by such a rule.
My bigger point, given this is a religion thread, was that the morality of contraceptives does not lie in the manner by which they are obtained, but rather in their use. And sin is an individual act, where an individual decides whether to obey God, or disobey. Jindal might make it a bit easier for a woman to sin (again, I will adopt as a premise that contraception is a sin). But sin is not judged by the ease in which it can be engaged in.
We aren’t discussing making it legal where it once was illegal. We are talking about getting government regulations out of the process. Yes, government regulation can drive up costs and therefore discourage some use; but they also entangle all of us in the matter.