A group called Birth Control Watch is suggesting that we ask the following questions to the candidates:

1. Do you support couples having access to safe and effective birth control options, including emergency contraception?

2. Do you agree that for women to achieve equality, they must have access to family planning services, including birth control and contraception?

3. Do you support requiring health insurance plans that cover prescription drugs to cover birth control and contraception?

4. Do you support expanding current federal funding for Title X and Medicaid so that women with low incomes have more access to birth control options?

5. Do you support requiring pharmacies to dispense birth control to patients without discrimination or delay?

6. Do you support comprehensive sex education being taught in schools that includes information about abstinence, contraception and how to avoid sexually transmitted diseases such as HIV/AIDS?

7. Do you support the Prevention First and Access to Birth Control (ABC) Acts?

John McCain would hate to answer any of these straightforward questions.  His policy toward birth control is incoherent when it doesn’t outright seek to invade the private sex lives of Americans.

This article at Alternet (“The Real Pro-Life Candidate”) makes it clear that Barack Obama is the true pro-life candidate.  Why?

Study after study suggests the right to life approach, which McCain has helped execute for decades, is actually the root of the problem: leading to more abortions and later ones too . . . The data show that the pro-choice approach is more effective at achieving what the American public views as “pro-life” goals — i.e. reducing the number of abortions, preventing late term abortion — than the so-called “pro-life” approach.

By the way, who is likely to support freely available birth control pills?  Almost everyone:

Obama could remind the voter that only 11% of sexually active women don’t use contraception and from this 11% comes 50% of the nation’s abortions. Ninety-one percent of the American public strongly favors contraception because of this very reason.

The only people not favoring birth control are those who seek to encourage unplanned pregnancies.  That’s a great policy in a world of dwindling resources, right?  Who are such nuts?  People like this .

I agree with the writers of the Alternet article.  It’s time to cater to 89% of sexually active women, thereby recognizing the right of women to control their own bodies and simultaneously decreasing the number of abortions.  For much more on the wacky resistance of a highly vocal minority to birth control pills, see here.