Voices: Lauren Boebert’s hypocrisy over children isn’t just absurd. It’s cruel

If you want to see the hypocrisy of the modern Republican Party, look no further than Lauren Boebert. While Republicans preach about sexual immorality and police how other people raise their children, her son is expecting a baby with a younger teenage girl. While Republicans attempt to repeal no-fault divorce, Boebert files for one.

This week, though, the congresswoman from Colorado truly outdid herself. “I left a prescription at a pharmacy once. I went to get birth control,” she said during a Tuesday hearing on Capitol Hill. “I was there at the counter, went to pay for it, and the price was very, very high. I said wow, is this a three-, six-month prescription? They said, no ma’am, this is one month. I said it’s cheaper to have a kid. And I left it there, and now I have my third son, Kaydon Boebert, and so it actually turned out to be a really great thing.”

I am very glad that Boebert is happy with the birth of her third child. The problem is not that it worked out the Boebert family, but that for many if not most women in her situation, it may not have – a fact Boebert seems incapable of understanding or empathizing with. “And then she voted against the right to contraception so she could double this problem and give it to the next person,” Democratic Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez of New York tweeted following Boebert’s comments.

Ocasio-Cortez was referring to the Right to Contraception Act, which Boebert voted against last summer. The bill, which would have protected women’s access to contraception as a basic right (the name is pretty self-explanatory) passed the House but was blocked in the Senate by Republican Joni Ernst of Iowa. Republicans, including Boebert, clearly do not believe that women should have a right to family planning, whether or not they can afford it.

Leaving aside the fact that if Boebert was more open-minded about contraception she might not be on the verge of becoming the youngest grandmother since Leviticus – to quote the great Dorothy Zbornak, “condoms, Lauren! Condoms! Condoms! Condoms!” – her comments are ignorant bordering on asinine. Even with the exorbitant cost of pharmaceuticals including contraception, there is nowhere in this nation where it is cheaper to have a child than it is to fill a prescription. A study last year by the Brookings Institute found that an average family will spend $310,605 to raise a child born in 2015 through the age of 17. That breaks down to $1,522.57 a month. The burden, the study found, falls heavier on lower income families, who pay a higher percentage of their monthly income in housing, food, gas, and other necessities than middle- and upper-income families.

According to Planned Parenthood, birth control pills cost between $0 and $50 every month – with many insurance plans and some government programs making them totally free at the point of access for women who qualify, a benefit of the Affordable Care Act which Republicans, of course, opposed. Planned Parenthood, on the other hand, helps women access affordable family planning (again, it’s in the name). Yet the first thing Boebert did in this Congress was introduce a bill to defund Planned Parenthood.

That’s because Boebert and her Republican ilk do not actually want women accessing birth control. While announcing that her son and his young girlfriend had conceived a child out-of-wedlock, she applauded the high birth rates in rural communities. “There’s something special about rural conservative communities – they value life… teen mom rates are higher in rural, conservative areas because we understand the preciousness of the life that is about to be born,” she said in March, with no comment on the preciousness of the life of the young girl being stripped of her bodily autonomy and future.

That is because Republicans don’t actually consider that girl’s life precious except insofar as she can reproduce. It is no coincidence that Republicans like Boebert both back draconian laws rolling back the reproductive rights of women while also espousing racist conspiracy theories such as the Great Replacement, which baselessly claims that white Americans are being systematically “replaced” by immigrants of color. By forcing American women, particularly white women, to carry babies to term, Republicans hope to stave off this imagined replacement. In doing so, they follow a long and racist history of anti-abortion, forced birth sentiment on the American right.

Far from “pro-life,” Republicans like Boebert are indeed pro-birth and nothing more. Their support for mothers stops the moment the baby crowns, as evidenced by their attacks on benefits such as Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Just this month, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities warned that Republicans’ debt ceiling proposal “would slash science-based WIC benefits that families use to buy fruits and vegetables for 5 million pregnant and postpartum participants and young children under 5.”

Not content with starving small children, they have also opposed free school lunches and challenged a Biden Administration rule prohibiting discrimination against LGBTQ students in school lunches. Nothing else. Just school lunches. The cruelty is the point.

To bring this back to prescription drugs, last year, Senate Republicans introduced a bill to roll back measures to lower prescription drug prices passed by Democrats in the Inflation Reduction Act. Boebert herself has voted against making insulin affordable and lowering the cost of prescriptions, thus proving Ocasio-Cortez’s point that she would rather double the problem and pass it on than actually solve it so no one else had to go through what she claims to have gone through.

This is a lot of public policy information to digest, I realize. It is important to unpack Boebert’s comments today, though, because they illustrate a fact Americans need to understand: despite rhetoric that sounds like they understand what you and I and countless of our fellow citizens go through every day, Republicans do not care about us. They do not want to help us. They do not think we deserve it.

Void of compassion and empathy, theirs is a world where the government tells you what to do and then leaves you to do that with no support whatsoever. Republican family policies are essentially unfunded mandates passed not to the states, but to American families – most of whom cannot blithely afford another a child. Recognizing the problem, though, Republicans like Lauren Boebert exacerbate it rather than solve it because to solve it would require helping poor and working-class families – and we can’t have that.