Birth control has health benefits

The argument

The argument's first move is to widen what birth control is understood to be for. Besides its intended purpose, it can have countless health benefits for women: it can regulate the menstrual cycle, treat acne, help with polycystic ovary syndrome, and prevent overly heavy menstrual bleeding. The combination birth control pill can even reduce the risk of ovarian cancers. Taken together these are not incidental side effects but recognised therapeutic uses, and many people are prescribed contraception primarily for them rather than for contraception at all. That reframing changes the terms of the funding question. Debates about free birth control are usually conducted as debates about sex, in which the objection is that the public should not subsidise a private choice. If the same medication also regulates a cycle, manages a hormonal disorder and lowers cancer risk, then it belongs in the same category as other treatments, and the case for making it freely available rests on the ordinary principle that cost should not stand between a patient and effective medicine. Proponents put the question directly: why should these not be free? The final consideration is about who is excluded when they are not. The benefits described would keep women healthy and well, and a healthier population benefits society rather than only the individual. But they also create an ease of life that cannot exist for some people if they cannot afford birth control, which means the medication's advantages end up distributed by income rather than by need. Someone with heavy bleeding or polycystic ovary syndrome who cannot pay simply goes untreated for a condition that is straightforwardly treatable. On this account the health benefits alone provide enough reason to make it free, without the contraceptive question having to be settled at all.

Premises

Counter-arguments

If birth control becomes free, why shouldn't every form of medication with positive side effects be free? The medical industry would collapse, and money would be lost. There is also no guarantee that free birth control won't be taken advantage of, taking away from those who would actually benefit from this.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P3] It is not fair to make birth control free.