I was raised to believe that it was impolite to talk about your health issues with people other than our doctor and those among your family and friends who absolutely needed to know. Doctor-patient privilege has long been the accepted norm, and Congress in recent years has taken steps to protect our medical records from prying eyes. And yet, there are men right who think it's perfectly acceptable to insist that a woman talk to her employer about what reproductive medication she is taking, but explain why, and justify it.
Apart from the obvious silliness -- you hardly see them demanding that men announce that they need a penile dysfunction medication and explain why -- it got me thinking. Do those employers REALLY want to have those conversations?
I expect not. Here's an example of how I would have had to explain and justify my use of birth control pills for non-reproductive reasons when I was a young woman. Try to guess how long an employer (especially a man) is going to want to sit and listen to this:
From the time I started my periods, they were extremely heavy and lasted 8-10 days. At the peak of the flow, I would change menstrual pads hourly, and clothes almost as often because of leaking. I had severe cramping, to the point that I would stay home from school or work, taking double and triple doses of aspirin, and later ibuprofin, to help curb the pain.
When I was 18, I had a hymenectomy to help the flow stop backing up and to prevent injury when down the road I married and became sexually active. Although it helped some, I continued to experience enough cramping that I would frequently miss work for a day. Having ruled out other reasons for the pain (and given my age), my doctor put me on a very low hormone dose, hopefully to help retrain my body. The difference was amazing. While I took those hormones, I was able to go about my life normally every day.
If it had been necessary to talk to my employer to have it paid for, I would have had to explain my medical history, have my employer sit in judgement as to whether or not my doctor was prescribing the right treatment, AND I would have had to try to convince them that as a 23-year-old single woman I was not sexually active. (I wasn't.) Given that many of the people I worked with (including my boss at the time) were sexually active, it would have been a hard sell.
My bet is this: the average employer will last about as far as the word "pad", gross out and cut right to the question: "Are you having sex?"
Because that's what this so-called debate is really about. Do we really want our employer to know our private life? What employer wants that burden? There are plenty of laws on the books, as well as constitutional amendments, that support the idea that an individual can live his or her life as they see fit. One of the drawbacks to living in a free society is that other people can live their lives in a way we don't like, and we can't stop them.
I dare the men who think this is a great idea to sit and listen to the story from each of their female employees about how "The Pill" has made their lives easier. (And we might remind them, too, that unless they were celibate until marriage, it made their lives easier, too.) And then we will see how keen they will be to pass that law into existence. They won't do it, of course -- they wouldn't even let Sandra Fluke speak.
