It’s common knowledge that South Carolina has a seemingly endless list of serious problems. Our public health issues are extremely problematic and costly not only in the fiscal sense but in the human damage inflicted.

According to the Guttmacher Institute a non-profit, non-partisan clearing house that provides fact based analysis of government and scientific research and study on sexual activity, contraception and childbearing statistics and information, South Carolina ranks 9^th nationally in the HIV/AIDS infection rate among teens and 10^th among adults per capita (for our population). The Palmetto state has the 3rd highest rate of gonorrhea and syphilis, the 5^th highest rate of chlamydia and 9^th highest teenage birth rate in the United States among 15 to 17 year olds. A 2003 study by the Centers for Disease Control found that more than 50% of South Carolina’s 10^th graders are already engaging in sexual intercourse. By 12^th grade that percentage rises to over 70% vs. a national average of 50%.

The Guttmacher Institute estimates that 466,810 women in South Carolina are in need of contraceptive services and supplies. Of these, 244,440 women-including 77,980 teenagers are in need of publicly supported contraceptive services. Our chronically under funded ($800,000 last fiscal year) public health clinics do a wonderful job of serving a large percentage of these women who aren’t covered by private health insurance. According to my calculations, more than 74,000 of these women in need of services are unserved, their need for gynecological exams and contraception education and supplies are unmet, resulting in potentially life threatening illness or unwanted and unplanned pregnancy. Considering that every public dollar spent on family planning services saves $3 in Medicaid costs for prenatal and new born care, I would say this is a very fiscally irresponsible position for our state to take.

Considering the very serious situation we find ourselves in one would think that our elected officials would be focused on meeting these needs and funding public health. You would be wrong. Our white male dominated legislature is fetus focused. Instead of introducing legislation to adequately fund our hard working public health clinics, expand contraception services throughout out our state and focus more educational efforts on teenagers in an concerted way to lower the rates of sexually transmitted diseases, lawmakers are fixated on punishing women who have unplanned pregnancies and are also substance abusers. South Carolina continues to choose a punitive approach to substance abuse rather than offer intervention and recovery. A new House bill H.3171 would enable prosecutors to charge a woman with homicide by child abuse if her fetus dies and she tests positive for certain drugs. Which will just make drug addicted women less apt to seek pre-natal care. I guess lawmakers would rather build more prisons and hire more prosecutors than hire drug counselors and try to re-build people’s lives because they feel that drug addicts are beyond redemption.

Instead of making birth control more easily available, Anderson County Senator Bryant has introduced S.126 which would protect pharmacists who refuse to fill prescriptions for a drug or class of drugs on the basis of ethical, moral or religious grounds. My friends at Tell Them think Senator Bryant may have an ulterior motive http://www.tellthemsc.org/newsletter/pharmacy_refusal/

and I think they are correct. The owners of Kroger grocery stores recently had to reiterate their corporate policies for their employees which state that none of their in-store pharmacists had the right to refuse to fill any prescription after a 42 year old mother of two in Georgia presented a prescription for the morning-after pill and the pharmacist at her local Kroger store refused to fill her medication and she had the good sense to protest. My own personal theory is that men like Senator Bryant want to control women’s bodies, they want to dictate when and under what circumstances women can have sex. And then if sexual activity results in an unplanned pregnancy Senator Bryant would also like to dicatate the end result of that pregnancy. I guess they feel that men know better then women about such matters. As a result of such restrictive policies, women have unsafe sex that results in sexually transmitted diseases and unplanned pregnancies. So…Senator Bryant gets to feel all Christian and morally correct and the woman gets stuck with a disease and or a baby she didn’t want or need and we get to pay for it.

Legislation like these two bills are unfairly punitive, detrimental to women’s health and outrageously hypocritical. Grown women in South Carolina should be the top priority over un born fetuses. Women who live and breathe and could potentially die because they lack access to adequate health care, education and devices like condoms that could save their lives should be at the top of the list when it comes to legislative priorities.

If you find the subject of contraception and sexual health morally repugnant hold your nose and support it based on avoiding abortions and saving our state from costly premature babies that are born drug addicted, unwanted and most likely sentenced to a life of poverty and abuse. The facts are that a vast majority of people have premarital sex and young people are having sex whether you like or approve of it or not. The best that we as a society can do is educate them and keep them safe. Sadly our lawmakers appear to be dedicated to saving the fetuses and don’t seem to give a damn about our kids once they are born.