News is all about perception. For women, a few topics immediately come to mind when it comes to what shapes perception, not the least of which is birth control. Including birth control in health insurance has become a controversial subject since the dawn of ObamaCare. One of the main concerns is that providing free birth control will encourage promiscuous behavior and do little to prevent abortions. This reflects on the restraints women have when it comes to media perception; too often are we defined by birth control, abortions and other things men are not vilified for. According to this study, that’s a misleading idea. Check it out:
Women Don’t Have More Sexual Partners When They Use Birth Control — But Why Do We Care?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/amanda-duberman/birth-control-risky-sexual-behavior_b_4920363.html
Valencia Richardson 
The amount of misinformed vitriol surrounding the issue of birth control is truly horrifying. I recently got into an argument with a family member on Facebook about Representative Katrina Jackson’s ‘Unsafe Abortion Protection Act,’ the bill I posted about in the discussion forum that would limit access to currently over-the-counter emergency contraceptive medication for women in this state to only those women who obtain a prescription for these drugs from a physician and agree to have their patient information entered into a database for ‘statistical’ purposes. This outrageous invasion of privacy, I’m sure, would have the effect of shaming some women into simply not obtaining these medications, even if they were in the position of needing them. What is more terrifying to me, though, is that my family member didn’t seem to understand what emergency contraceptives were or how they functioned. He believed that these pills were meant to induce an abortion, which is simply not the case. Emergency contraceptive medication is meant to be taken in the first 72 hours following intercourse and will simply have the effect of preventing pregnancy. The fact that some people don’t seem to understand basic information about contraceptives and birth control for women, to me, is evidence of a failure on the part of mainstream media. Rather than priming people to equate birth control means abortion, shouldn’t the media try to report more of the facts surrounding these issues?
What makes me most uncomfortable is that this stigma is used to fuel the fire for conservative legislation. In the article, a Republican legislator used the “recreational activity” excuse to justify not including birth control in health care initiatives. The lack of education among the public just adds to this. Education is the single line of defense to breaking frames set by people with self-interests. In my opinion, anti birth control initiatives are made in effort to keep underprivileged women and minorities disenfranchised, so it scares me when people lack understanding of available contraceptives in the first place.