Steve King: Covering Birth Control Could Make Us A 'Dying Civilization' (VIDEO)

WASHINGTON -- The new set of guidelines issued by the Department of Health and Human Services this week that will require health insurers to cover birth control with no co-pays have been controversial for a number of reasons, ranging from cost issues to moral objections.

Some conservative groups, such as Americans United for Life, have condemned the guidelines because they might force insurers to cover the morning after pill, which many anti-abortion advocates equate with abortion. The Catholics for Choice organization opposes the fact that the guidelines exempt certain religious organizations from having to cover birth control. And some businesses worry that the expanded coverage will raise insurance premiums for everyone.

But Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) expressed a fairly extreme concern on the House Floor Monday night about the expanded preventative health coverage: offering free birth control to women could eventually kill off the entire human species.

KING: We have people that are single, we have people that are past reproductive age, we have priests that are celibate. All of them, paying insurance premiums that cover contraceptives so that somebody else doesn't have to pay the full fare of that? And they've called it preventative medicine. Preventative medicine. Well if you applied that preventative medicine universally what you end up with is you've prevented a generation. Preventing babies from being born is not medicine. That's not— that's not constructive to our culture and our civilization. If we let our birth rate get down below replacement rate we're a dying civilization.

The new guidelines under the Affordable Care Act were nearly unanimously recommended by a panel of experts at the non-partisan Institute of Medicine, and they ensure that health insurance companies will fully cover a range of preventative health services for women, including contraceptives, cervical cancer screening, breast-feeding supplies and HIV testing and counseling.

An estimated 98 percent of sexually active women in America have used some form of birth control at some point in their lives. According to a recent Thomson Reuters/NPR poll, 77 percent of American voters believe that insurers should cover the cost of birth control with no co-pays.

The socially-conservative King called the new guidelines "bizarre" and "Orwellian."

"Now none of us would have health to worry about if they prevented us," he said, "would we, Mr. Speaker?"

WATCH:

Comments

[Sam-I-Am]

04:40 PM on 08/17/2011

Did he mean birth control or birther control?

[Untainted Love]

03:14 PM on 08/08/2011

Good grief this photo is starting to bug me. I can actually see the on/off switch for his positronic brain.

[suzc]

09:12 PM on 08/07/2011

I wonder how Steve King (Iowa's embarrassment) feels about insurance companies funding Viagra and fertility pills -- and making single people, priests and the elderly subsidize THOSE. He would no doubt find an excuse for THAT, despite overpopulation.

[jmcrtc1]

06:26 AM on 08/06/2011

This just shows how out of touch King and the rest of his Republican colleagues are. Is he really talking about a 10,000 deductible? and 50% copay of the first MILLION dollars? The majority of the American people don't have the luxury to even think in numbers that high when it comes to health coverage. There are no choices for affordable health care coverage. We are paying for things we don't use every day. I've never had to get an MRI or cat scan but I'm sure that someone has and we have helped pay for. It would be less expensive to pay for birth control than pay for someones doctor visits and to be in the hospital to have a baby that could have been prevented. Birth control is not about NEVER have baby's it's about controlling your body and choosing the right time to have a baby. King just sounds so STUPID and arrogant!

[ramsha]

05:28 PM on 08/05/2011

If Rep. Steve King would rather want the world to destroy itself from an over-population that is his business. But he has absolutely no right to deny the women and men in this free country 'Birth Control. No woman should be forced to carry a baby in her uterus for nine months and then raise an offspring because this moooron wants it.

[TXanimal]

05:07 PM on 08/05/2011

Can we PLEASE get some politicians who have opened a social studies and/or science book at some point in their lives?

[gmcinahuff]

05:28 PM on 08/05/2011

Many seem content in writing their own books, especially about history, you know so their children can learn "the real truth"....the way they see the world.

Mike Huckabee just released a children's book about 911.

[TXanimal]

10:47 AM on 08/08/2011

I've seen Slick Rick Perry's rewritten history books...scary stuff. If my wife and I decide to have kids, we will be LONG GONE from TX by the time they reach school age...

[buddha65]

04:12 PM on 08/05/2011

How is it possible to be this stupid and still hold down a full-time job?

[gmcinahuff]

05:24 PM on 08/05/2011

He can't hold down a full-time job, that's why he ran for Congress.

[gmcinahuff]

03:58 PM on 08/05/2011

If only his mother used birth control...

[Sam-I-Am]

04:41 PM on 08/17/2011

...and refrained from heavy drinking.

[gmcinahuff]

03:32 PM on 08/05/2011

Most women use birth control during the time when they choose not to have children.

What a genius. Steve King "If we let our birth rate get down below replacement rate we're a dying civilization." Nice choice of words, he wants people to believe we are "dying off".
Oh NO!!! We must vote with Steve, to end insurance companies covering birth control!

Steve King wants people to believe we are wiping ourselves off the planet by using birth control. The problem is the population is in growth rate: 0.963% (2011 est.) The population isn't disappearing any time soon. Jul 2009: 307,006,550 People in the U.S. Someone tell this guy we are an over-populated nation- our natural resources are decreasing, we have a big problem with lack of water in many states.. we could actually use a big drop in popluation.

Congress Representative Steve King (R-Iowa) is using a lame "scare tactic" to get people alarmed about human extinction. Is it any guess who he's working with here?

A lack of children is not the problem nor is birth control. The urgent problem are the children that we already have who are neglected and murdered every day. 2006 NAHIC stats. 16,866 unnatural deaths of children. (of which 3418 were MURDERED).

This congressman is not about solving issues that really matter but instead promoting the insurance companies that line his pocket.
Shame on you, Congress Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa). Shame on YOU!

[giant1]

02:25 PM on 08/05/2011

I think the idea isn't to prevent babies from being born, it's to prevent them from being conceived. That IS preventative medicine and the thing it prevents best is abortion.

You would think King's type would like this but that would require rational consideration.

[Jennifer Zirn]

02:21 PM on 08/05/2011

So by his way of thinking, no one wants to be mothers/fathers. Interesting set of numbers, wonder who polled to get those numbers.

[Brittany Lock]

01:17 PM on 08/05/2011

The stupidity of this man's argument makes my head hurt.

[luckyt]

02:18 PM on 08/05/2011

Unfortunately for us abstinence only for these people doesn't work because there are still to many of them still around. His fear is that their dwindling minority coupled with the pill may lead to their total eradication, oh whoopee.

[krocklin]

12:45 PM on 08/05/2011

This a common trope of many extremist groups: the gays, the U.N. and the U.S. Government is limiting our populatons through birth control. And yet extremely overpopulated nations are poor and suffering and have been engaged in wars BECAUSE of their escalating populations.
For a century out of control population growth has been at the heart of most of the world's problems and Humanity's suffering.
They formed the thesis of bestsellers in the 1960s, not to mention Malthus's these in an earlier century.
What happened. Teapartiers, dividers and Neocons like King I guess.

[krocklin]

12:39 PM on 08/05/2011

King is a Rightwing Fringe type, so naturally he advocates what many Islamo-fascist groups and other extremists advocate: the U.S. Government is trying to limit their numbers through birth control.
This world has had a major overpopulation problem for a century that is at the heart of much human suffering.

[Arcelio Martinez]

10:36 AM on 08/05/2011

Mr King speaks for the uterus police so eloquently, while willing to cut funds for pre-natal care and for childhood diseases ~~a REAL oxyMORON..mostly moron.