May 24, 2023 11:41 AM UTC

A Self-Own Only Lauren Boebert Could Achieve

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• by: Colorado Pols

One of several filters we apply before deciding to post on a news item involving Colorado’s perpetual controversy machine Rep. Lauren Boebert is trying to ensure that the subject has an intersection with political issues that Boebert has taken a position on. When Boebert announced publicly that her 17-year-old son was about to be a teen father, for example, her attempt to spin the situation as “choosing life” was fundamentally compromised by Boebert’s vitriolic opposition to sex ed courses that might have helped her son avoid the serious negative consequences of teenage parenting.

Well, as The New Republic’s Tori Otten reports, yesterday Boebert bested herself in the unintentional self-owning life’s story department, conceding guilelessly that unaffordable birth control led directly to the birth of one of her four children:

“I left a prescription at a pharmacy once. I went to get birth control,” Boebert said, explaining that the price was so high she thought the medicine was for three or even six months. But it turns out she was only getting one month’s worth of birth control.

“I said, ‘It’s cheaper to have a kid.’ And I left it there, and now I have my third son,” Boebert said. [Pols emphasis]

Boebert then said that not being able to afford her medication “turned out to be a really great thing” because it resulted in her son. But instead of making birth control easier to access for people, Boebert has decided to force everyone into the same predicament she was in.

Of course, if you have now or have ever had kids, you’ve already done the math in your head to know that Boebert’s claim that birth control costs more than having a child is totally absurd. But Newsweek dutifully went through the motions of contacting someone qualified to explain that yes, Boebert’s suggestion is totally absurd:

“The congresswoman’s statement is not factual and misleading,” Kristen Batstone, a policy expert for the National Women’s Health Network (NWHN), told Newsweek. “The average cost of the birth control pill can range from 0 to $50 depending on a person’s insurance status. LARCs [Long-Acting Reversible Contraception], such as the implant or IUD [intrauterine device] can be more expensive, but nothing that compares to the cost of giving birth in the United States.”

The average cost of childbirth is about $18,865 and includes pregnancy, delivery and postpartum care, according to the Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker, a nonprofit focused on health issues, according to data collected in 2022…

“Even with insurance, out-of-pockets costs average around $3,000,” Batstone said. “These costs do not include extra bills, insurance premiums or ambulance costs….Further, research suggests postpartum women are more likely to experience medical debt than other women.

And that’s just the cost of giving birth, to say nothing of the cost of raising a baby to adulthood. The cost of contraception for most Americans was stabilized years ago by the Affordable Care Act, which we shouldn’t have to explain Boebert hates with the fury of a thousand proverbial suns. But if that’s not enough hypocrisy, Boebert voted just last year against the Right to Contraception Act to protect access to birth control following Justice Clarence Thomas’ not-so-veiled threats as Roe was repealed–and then sponsored legislation to defund Planned Parenthood in the new GOP-majority House.

Rep. Boebert has worked throughout her short career to make birth control harder to get and more expensive. Boebert would vote in a minute to repeal the laws on the books that make contraception affordable or even free for the majority of Americans, and wants to defund the largest provider of reproductive health services in the United States. It’s with this agenda in mind that Boebert unwittingly told her fictional story about how birth control cost more than having one of her kids.

No one forces Boebert to make such a perfect fool of herself. She does this to herself. Every time.