If you’ve never watched the show Jersey Shore,
good for you. Yet if you’re not a viewer, then you are probably
unaware that its petite, 24-year-old star, Nicole Elizabeth
“Snooki” Polizzi, is pregnant. The father is believed to be one
Jionni LaValle. And if you took that last sentence to mean that it
is an out-of-wedlock pregnancy, good for you again.
If you’ve paid attention to the politics of recent weeks,
you know that there can only be one reason why Snooki was unable to
avoid pregnancy: She had a health insurance plan that denied her
access to contraception.
At one time or another, one could still get access to care
not covered by insurance by paying out of pocket for it. Indeed, it
was reasonable to assume that if the care wasn’t too pricey, one
should pay for it out of pocket.
Not anymore. Now, it is axiomatic that if it is not
covered by insurance then it is the same as being denied access.
Last week the Senate voted down an amendment by Senator Roy Blunt,
R-Missouri, that would allow any employer who had an objection to
providing contraception through the insurance policy he or she
offers his or her employees to opt out of the Obamacare regulation
that forces them to offer such coverage.
In response, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada,
said:
Republicans are trying to deny women access to health care
services like contraception…. Republicans’ proposal to let any
employer deny women access to contraceptives would not create a
single job. Under Republicans’ proposal, over 170,000 women could
lose access to contraception coverage and other health services in
Nevada alone.
Since it is now clear that women are denied access to
contraception unless they have insurance that covers it, it
therefore follows that Snooki must have had deficient health
coverage. Too bad for her that the Obamacare mandate hadn’t taken
affect a few months earlier.
On a more serious note, we have another case of a
celebrity glamorizing out-of-wedlock pregnancy. Plenty of
research shows that young women who are poor are likely to
remain poor if they get pregnant before they are married. Of
course, out-of-wedlock pregnancy won’t impose much of a financial
burden for someone who is as wealthy as Snooki. But for the many
poor young women who might be inclined to follow her example, well,
it’s probably a safe bet they won’t be signing multi-million dollar
contracts for their own reality shows.
In the early 1990s the rate of out-of-wedlock births began
to decline after rising precipitously for about three decades,
eventually stabilizing at about one-third of all births by the end
of the decade. Unfortunately, in the subsequent decade the rate was
on the rise again such that by 2010 nearly 41 percent of all births
were out-of-wedlock.
Wouldn’t it be great if someday we had loads of
celebrities giving interviews about how they decided to wait until
they were married before having children? It couldn’t
hurt.
