Family Planning
In 2008, after two years of failing to make a child organically, we learned the doom Kathy had already been feeling for more than a year was justified: I was diagnosed with male-factor infertility. Our only real chance to move forward would be in vitro fertilization. We couldn’t afford it; we couldn’t afford not to do it. One way we tried to work through that diagnosis, our anger, and our options was to start a secret infertility blog, “Less Than a Million.” This post and what comments from 2008 that are attached to it come from that blog.—gb
Christie Vilsack, Iowa’s former first lady, announced today that she is beginning a program to encourage family planning in Iowa. The program aims to reduce unwanted pregnancies by educating women and advocating for increased contraceptive use. At the same time, the program will work to make contraceptives more easily available for low-income women and thereby aim to improve Iowa’s rather poor family-planning services. I imagine someone might object to the program by arguing that the state needs more children, no matter their state of wantedness, in order to increase Iowa’s slow growth rate; however, that runs the risk of shortsightedness, of burdening the state with long term costs by overburdening its social services. The program sounds like good policy because it aims to enable Iowans to take care of the children they do have by preparing for them.
I say that first because I know it is true. However, when I read about the program, I honestly felt more than a little disgusted. The disgust is completely unfair, I know. To advocate ways of keeping teenagers (and others) from getting knocked up when they don’t want to be is not to cast any judgment or sleight upon those who want to get knocked up but can’t. Yet, because Iowa has no laws to mandate fertility coverage, and because at the moment no problem seems more insurmountable than my own, the fact that someone as powerful as Christie Vilsack is thinking about pregnancy and policy and not thinking about me is extraordinarily frustrating.
Moreover, in spite of the fact that I know it is completely unfair, because of my own situation I end up entertaining the very argument that I reject above. Much ink has been spilled lately to describe and lament a “brain drain” in Iowa (for example). Too many educated people are leaving the state for warmer and wealthier places, and that fact has diminished Iowa’s prosperity. And because of the fact that K and I neither have infertility coverage nor can afford to pay 3/5 of our yearly income for the cost of the infertility treatments we will need, we, too, are looking to leave the state, to move somewhere that mandates infertility coverage such as Illinois, Massachusetts, or Maryland. Indeed, just as Vilsack observes, Iowa’s law is not conducive to family planning. (God forbid that our insurance company be conducive to the same.) We are considering leaving because Iowa does not offer us a reasonable chance to plan our own.
