n recent weeks, newspapers around the country have reported on the surge in birth control costs college women must now pay, placing routine prevention out of reach for many of those already most at risk of unintended pregnancy. The price spike was caused by changes implemented through Bush's Federal Deficit Reduction Act that eliminated incentives for pharmaceutical companies to sell contraceptives at discount to college health centers. With college students now returned to campus, the scope of the problem is more fully realized prompting many editorials pages to call for immediate action from Congress to find a remedy.

The Chicago Sun Times last month reported on a college student who could no longer afford birth control as a result of the change and got pregnant. Of course, the religious right's brightest came up short in sympathy for the student. Dennis Burne at Human Events wrote,

"So, it has come to this: A 20-year-old Illinois college student is whining because she won’t be able to vacation in Costa Rica, because she got pregnant, because she couldn’t get birth control anymore, because it cost $20-a-month more at the university clinic, because its federal funding was cut, because President George Bush signed the Deficit Reduction Act.

Boy, doesn’t that beat all. Bush lied to us, got us into an unnecessary war and now he got a 20-year-old pregnant and denied her the entitlement of drinking mai tais on a tropical beach."

If you ever wondered how the rabid right would respond to women suffering unintended pregnancy as a result of their campaigns to scale back access to birth control, Burne offers a great example. He continues,

"The story obviously is an attempt to depict Harris as a victim and a thinly disguised case for more federal funding for birth control. No one was quoted in the story who defended the funding cuts or bemoaned Harris’ appalling irresponsibility. But that’s not surprising.

Rather, the story said: “Harris, coming from a low-income home, said she cannot afford to pay so much more for birth control." Sure. And what is the cost of the cell phone she was shown holding in the newspaper photo? Maybe if she can’t afford to protect herself, she should -- perish the thought -- abstain from sex."

Of course! Funny that no one thought about this up until now. College students should just abstain or forgo other modern life necessities like a cell phones (no matter that their increasingly used to alert students to emergencies on campus) in order to afford unnecessarily high prices for protection. Great to have finally solved that problem.