The purpose of medical care is always restorative . . . or at least it should be. It is meant to treat the sick and restore them to health, at least as much as possible at our current stage of knowledge and development. A severed arm is reattached, if possible. A malfunctioning thyroid is treated with medicine to restore its natural function. We remove cancers, repair lacerations, fuse broken bones. Medicine is about healing the dysfunction, illness, and injury that interrupts our healthy, natural bodily functions. It is never about the inhibition of our healthy bodily functions; that would run counter to what medicine is about.
Yes, occasionally we remove or inhibit something as part of a medical treatment, but only when it is absolutely necessary. A kidney that is badly diseased and cannot be restored to its natural function because it is beyond the limits of modern medicine will be removed, for example. But even in this case, although the function of the kidney itself cannot be restored, the end goal of the treatment is to restore the body’s overall function as much as possible given the circumstances and prevent the spread of the disease to other organs. The fact that the person’s overall kidney function will be halved is a side-effect brought on by necessity; the inhibition of bodily function is not the goal, but the unfortunate consequence.
How curious, then, that contraception (and even abortion) is now being cynically labeled as health care, as if it is no different than pain killers or thyroid drugs. Except in very rare cases, these treatments are not restorative but inhibitory by their very nature. They interrupt and stymie the body’s natural functions as their primary goal. The reproductive cycle and the bearing of children is a perfectly natural and healthy function of the female human body, no different than the function of the kidney or the thyroid. It is part of who we are as human beings. Blocking that natural function, except when there is a restorative need to do so, is not medicine any more than me arbitrarily wanting to turn off my left kidney would be. I think everybody would recognize the absurdity of a demand that my health insurance plan cover my choice to shut down my left kidney, even if I had the right to do it (which I don’t; apparently some choices about inhibiting natural body functions are more equal than others).