A committee of advisers recently recommended that the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) begin allowing sales of an over-the-counter (OTC) birth control pill—the first of its kind in the nation. All 17 members of the committee voted to recommend sales of Opill to the public, at a time when the Republican Party has carried out a widespread assault on reproductive health care. Although the FDA can decide whether or not to follow the committee’s recommendations, it rarely overrides it, and is unlikely to do so given President Joe Biden’s pledge to defend against “politically-driven attacks on women’s health.”

Margery Gass, one of the advisory committee members, who is an emerita professor at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, told the Washington Post, “I think this represents a landmark in our history of women’s health.” Not only is the expected legalization of Opill a step toward bringing the United States up to international standards—currently such pills are available in more than 100 countries worldwide—but it is also a useful political counterattack against a party leading a full-scale assault on the rights of everyone but rich white men. And, most importantly, it has the potential to buttress women’s economic independence.

By making the purchase of a contraceptive pill as easy and affordable as a trip to the drug store, birth control can become more accessible to those who are uninsured or underinsured, who may not have the time and resources to make an appointment with their OB-GYN, or who may live in rural areas where Republican officials have decimated local free abortion clinics. It is also likely to increase accessibility to the pill among young people of color.

There have been many studies in the U.S. examining the impact of access to birth control on women’s independence and educational achievements. A report by Planned Parenthood concluded that “Being able to get the pill before age 21 has been found to be the most influential factor in enabling women already in college to stay in college.”

The Institute for Women’s Policy Research reviewed the available evidence from many such studies and found that since prescription birth control pills began to be available in the U.S., they helped women stay out of poverty, enabled women to enter college and graduate in higher numbers, and empowered women to find jobs, keep them, and access more senior, higher-paying roles in their workplace.

It’s no wonder that a massive majority of women surveyed were in favor of an OTC pill being available in the U.S.—77 percent of women aged 18 to 49, as per a Kaiser Family Foundation survey in November 2022.

There was a time when Republicans were also fully in support of OTC birth control pills—in 2015 when they fought against the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that insurance companies cover the cost of the pill. Seeing an OTC pill as a weapon against Obamacare, GOP lawmakers argued that people should simply be able to buy the pill on their own. Democrats countered that it might become too expensive if insured people were forced to pay out of pocket. Indeed, the Affordable Care Act made birth control pills more affordable for insured women.

Setting aside the idea that all health care and medication should be tax-funded and cost nothing at the point of access—a radical notion that Medicare should be for all—an OTC contraceptive pill should supplement, not supplant prescription birth control, which the FDA is expected to shortly allow.

Moreover, legalizing an OTC contraceptive pill does not undo the damage of the ongoing GOP assault on abortion access. Florida became the latest state to ban abortions past six weeks into pregnancy—a stage at which pregnant people barely realize what has happened to their bodies. Governor Ron DeSantis signed the ban even before an earlier ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy could take effect while it is being challenged in court. The Associated Press explained his reasoning in plain language: “The ban gives DeSantis a key political victory among Republican primary voters as he prepares to launch an expected presidential candidacy built on his national brand as a conservative standard bearer.”

Privileging fetal cells over the autonomy of the living, breathing human hosting those cells is not the real reason for the GOP’s attacks on abortion. The real reason is to obtain the political allegiance of a reliable subsection of anti-abortion fanatics among the U.S. voting public.

How fanatical are they?

One organization peddling flat-out lies in order to pave the way for ending access to contraception is Pulse Life Advocates. On its website are claims that are so preposterous, they veer on comical, such as, “Contraception increases likelihood of divorce,” and “Contraception kills babies.”

These same sort of zealots want the GOP to attack access to prescription birth control pills, as well as Plan B, the “morning-after” pill. The popularity of such pills offers little political protection—a majority of Americans have continued to support access to abortion and yet it is  no longer a right federally.

If the anti-abortionists were truly interested in protecting fetal cells, contraceptive pills would help ensure such cells were not generated in the first place. But of course, the ultimate agenda—usually couched in faux concern for women’s health—is to control women. Indeed, Pulse Life Advocates sees the birth control pill as akin to couples saying to god, “We want the physical pleasure of sex, but we want control, we want to leave you out of it.”

Um, yes. Wanting control over one’s body is a fundamental tenet of democracy. The anti-abortionists and their antiquated views on birth control represent medievalism, not modernity.

Mother Jones reported in May 2022 that such fundamentalist activists were plotting their next move against birth control pills and that one attendee at an anti-abortion conference called birth control, “Unbiblical and harmful to women’s bodies.”

Pregnancy is far more harmful to women’s bodies, education, careers, wages, and overall well-being than abortion or contraception. For those who choose to have children in spite of the disadvantages—people like me—the risks are worth the rewards. But the critical factor is choice.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Author:   Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her forthcoming book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

Americans are being slammed by a “tripledemic” this holiday season as three major respiratory illnesses—COVID-19, influenza, and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV)—are spreading at indoor gatherings. Hospitals are once more in danger of running out of beds, and the Biden administration has revived a program to mail out free at-home COVID-19 testing kits. It seems that the United States has learned nothing from the early months of the pandemic when our healthcare system broke along the fissures created by corporate models of profit-based medicine.

Take the current shortage of antibiotics and other medications. Axios reported that “Parents have been calling [pharmacies and other health care providers], distraught over the trouble they’ve had securing everything from Children’s Tylenol to amoxicillin to Tamiflu.” Hospitals are also running out of drugs. The reason for this is that the pharmaceutical industry, which operates adjacent to the healthcare industry, functions on thin margins, producing just enough inventory based on projections in order to maximize profits and not overproduce items that may remain unsold. But when a crisis hits, the projected supply is outstripped by demand.

Another example is that of Ascension, a company most of us have never heard of but one that the New York Times described as “one of the country’s largest health systems.” Although it is technically a nonprofit company, Ascension operates like a for-profit corporation, cutting costs by cutting staff. This has left existing staff overstretched and exhausted, leading to mass resignations of nurses and other medical staff. According to the Times, “When the pandemic swamped hospitals with critically ill patients, their lean staffing went from a financial strength to a glaring weakness.”

Meanwhile, for those people lucky enough to have private or public health care coverage, out-of-pocket health costs have risen sharply. The U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released figures for 2021 showing that Americans spent an average of $12,914 per person for healthcare costs that were not covered by their plans. This is equivalent to 18.3 percent of the national gross domestic product (GDP).

Almost everyone agrees that our healthcare system is in dire need of an overhaul. But rather than seeing it as a problem that needs solving simply and efficiently, the system has become a target for capitalist opportunism. The technology industry, which has sold society the lie that it can innovate a solution to any problem, has tried and failed to solve health care. For example, in 2018 Google decided to get in on the game, launching “Google Health” as a way of “helping billions of people be healthier.” Three years later, the company gave up.

Oliver Kharraz, a former physician and the founder of Zocdoc, another tech attempt at solving the health care crisis, wrote in an op-ed on Fast Company that health care “is the problem of our generation, and if we don’t fix it then it will break the bank, our health or both.” Admitting that so far, technological approaches have not worked, Kharraz said, “It is tempting to fix the symptoms, but ultimately, we must address the underlying cause.” Unfortunately, being invested in a private, for-profit mindset prevents Kharraz and others like him from seeing the situation in anything other than capitalist terms.

But there is a simple mathematical formula that appears to elude the world’s most brilliant minds: Taxpayer funding minus health care costs equals a net positive remainder. Recast as a word problem, this means that people pool their money together so that their representatives spend it on their health and well-being.

After all, this same formula is applied to other issues that political leaders consider important, such as war fighting—known more commonly by the term “national defense.” Each year Congress appropriates more and more taxpayer money toward military spending, and this year was no exception. Lawmakers in mid-December approved a whopping $858 billion military spending bill—an 8 percent increase over the previous year. It is a mind-bogglingly large figure—close to a trillion dollars.

Conservative politicians (whether Democrat or Republican) roll out endless objections to government funding of health care and squabble over the Affordable Care Act, single-payer health care, Medicare spending, and more. But they manage to set aside their differences when it comes to applying the same idea of taxpayer funding to military spending.

This is not surprising. Conservatism is aligned with national and personal self-interest. Government spending on the Pentagon ensures American military supremacy. But government spending on health care means spreading the wealth among people based on collective concern for public health.

It turns out that conservative politics—based on individualism and selfishness—is bad for everyone’s health. A Harvard study examining the correlation between lawmakers’ voting records and the COVID-19-related mortality rates of their constituencies came to a stark conclusion. The Washington Post summarized the results: the rates of death from COVID-19 “were 11 percent higher in states with Republican-controlled governments and 26 percent higher in areas where voters lean conservative.”

What this means is that state-level policies that strip funding from welfare and social programs, in combination with behavior influenced by conservative politicians such as forgoing masks and vaccines, can result in poor health outcomes.

Offering a contrast is the United Kingdom’s national health care system. A federal system like the UK National Health Service (NHS), flawed as it is, was able to enact broad, protective measures during the COVID-19 pandemic that saved lives. Meanwhile, in the U.S., a sprawling and fractured profit-driven system in combination with myriad local public agencies was unable to agree on which measures to adopt. One American infectious disease expert, William A. Haseltine, explained in the Hill in 2021 that given the U.S. healthcare system’s lack of “federal authority to enact nationwide policy, it is unsurprising that a period of immense political polarization, as we are witnessing today, leaves public health matters divided across party lines rather than scientific consensus.”

The good news is that there is a public appetite for adopting the simple equation of using taxpayer funds to cover health care—as long as the idea is not labeled as progressive. The Intercept reported that voters enthusiastically passed a slew of progressive-leaning healthcare initiatives across the country during the November 2022 midterm elections.

As the Intercept noted, the example of Dunn County, Wisconsin, is particularly instructive because a voter-passed initiative excluded language commonly associated with progressive Democrats such as “single payer” or “Medicare for all.” Instead, the ballot measure asked voters a very simple question: “Shall Congress and the President of the United States enact into law the creation of a publicly financed, non-profit, national health insurance program that would fully cover medical care costs for all Americans?”

A majority agreed with this idea. Although the measure was a symbolic one, the fact that voters from a rural Midwestern county support their taxes being used to fund their health care is a positive sign.

The existing corporate model of treating our healthcare needs purely through the lens of supply and demand, profit and loss, is utterly broken. We don’t need any more examples of crisis-related breaking points. And we certainly don’t need tech bros agonizing over complex ways to exploitatively extract profits from our need to see a doctor. There is a simpler, easier way to fix this mess.