Theoretically, democratic politics has a purpose. In theory, the whole reason society goes through the torture of elections, scandals, and incompetent infrastructure projects is that the whole business is fundamentally necessary to secure a safe and prosperous society. Somebody must organise policing and maintain sensible laws. Somebody must ensure that there are roads and railways to transport people and goods. Somebody must organise a national kitty for collective projects and make decisions about how that money is spent. And somebody – in this case, Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly – must ensure that 16-year-old girls have free-of-charge access to the contraceptive pill.
One of those things, you might observe, is not quite like the other.
Webdoctor.ie tells me that the cost of the contraceptive pill in Ireland is in the range of €10 to €30 per month, depending on the specific drug and the needs of the specific patient. The census tells us that there are about 371,000 people in Ireland aged between 13 and 18. Using very rough maths – dividing the total number of teenagers by six to approximate the number of 16 year olds, and dividing that number by two to approximate the number of 16 year old girls – that would mean there are about 31,000 16-year-old girls in Ireland at any one time. At €30 per month each, that would mean, if every single girl took the offer up at the highest price, the state would end up spending about €1m per month, or €12m per year, on the provision of the pill to 16 year old girls.
In terms of the Government’s finances, that’s not very significant. It is certainly affordable.
The issues with this proposal therefore are not financial, but cultural.
In the first instance, the age of consent in Ireland is 17, but the state intends to provide free contraceptives – intended primarily for the prevention of pregnancy as the result of sexual intercourse – to 16-year-olds who cannot legally consent to sexual intercourse in the first place. One might ask, then, why not also prescribe it free of charge to 14- or 15-year-olds?
The realist view of this issue is, of course, that regardless of the law, some 16-year-olds will be sexually active and that the state should, therefore, offer them every chance to be safe from pregnancy. But of course, pregnancy is not the only risk of sexual activity, especially at that age: There are also questions of exploitation, emotional vulnerability, self-worth, and various sexually transmitted ailments that the pill is not designed to prevent. There is I think a strong argument that the state is undermining its own laws around the age of consent by soft-signaling to people that sex with, or sex involving, 16 year olds is fine.
Indeed, is there not a case that by providing free hormonal contraception to 16-year-olds, the state is putting them at an emotional and argumentative disadvantage? Consider the case of the 16-year-old feeling pressure to engage in sexual activity from a boyfriend, who perhaps takes refuge behind the pregnancy fear argument: Why is the state putting into that boyfriend’s hands the notion that his partner can just get the pill, free of charge? Are we naïve enough to think that no young (or otherwise) male on the island will be using this development as another means of cajoling a young girl into sex before she is ready? If so, then you have a higher opinion of young males than this ex-young-male, who grew up amongst other ex-young-males, does.
It is of course true, as Ivana Bacik piously observed yesterday in response to Peadar Toibin, that not all of those who take the hormonal contraceptive pill do so for purposes that are primarily contraceptive. Some will take it to regulate periods or even to alleviate period pain, or other ailments. But those are medical complaints and 16-year-olds are still legally in the charge of their parents. There are other medical complaints that regularly afflict Irish teenagers – acne for example. There is no rush to make acne medication free of charge for teenagers or their parents. Just the hormonal contraceptive pill. Those, like Bacik, who pretend that this is related to a drive to end period poverty amongst children are, and there’s no other word that fits here, bullshitting.
The broader question here, as alluded to above, is why the state is in the free contraceptives business at all. Observing Irish society, one often gets the feeling that there are only two kinds of choices available to the public: Those that are banned, or those that are subsidised. Thus we live in a society where the state is at once going to strenuous efforts as we speak to ensure that a 16 year old child cannot access flavoured disposable vapes, but simultaneously seeking to subsidise that child’s illegal choice to have sexual intercourse underage. These efforts are being organised, in both instances, by Minister Donnelly’s department.
Nobody – least of all me – is arguing that a doctor should not, if necessary, have the freedom to prescribe hormonal contraceptives to a 16-year-old girl that the doctor feels would benefit from them. But the idea of the state creating a right to these medications, free of charge, is clearly also a soft-signal to doctors that they should park any welfare concerns they might have about a 16-year-old who enters their surgery and asks to be put on the pill. This is becoming no longer a matter of responsibility – of the individual, the doctor, and the parent – but a matter of right. The Government is essentially signaling that a 16-year old’s sexual affairs are for her alone, and not either of the other two parties that might have concerns.
All of this, for what? To distract from the fact that the Minister for Health, despite his Harvard degrees and his once-touted administrative mind, cannot solve scoliosis, or waiting lists, or fix Limerick hospital. So he’s going to give your kids the pill, and call himself a progressive while doing so. Fall for it if you wish.