Sandra Fluke, a Georgetown University law student, appears before the House to testify in favor of birth control coverage. (Associated Press )

Those pesky Republicans are at it again. In the past couple of weeks it has become common knowledge that they are hell-bent on taking away every woman’s God-given right to birth control. In a concerted media attack led by neanderthal Rush Limbaugh, they have tried to sully the reputation of the brave Georgetown Law Student, Sandra Fluke, who wanted only to shed light on the grave injustice done to her by her school.

Georgetown is a Catholic university, so in their student health plans they do not cover birth control because it goes against the teachings of the church.

Barbarians.

How can they find it moral to refuse to give Fluke and other female friends access to birth control? It places an undue financial burden on female students, to the tune of $3,000 over the course of law school.

Faced with the insurmountable cost of this necessary drug and the university’s unwillingness to break with millennia-old church teaching and help her out, Fluke naturally went to Congress to get some help. Her testimony almost went unheard, but luckily she found a sympathetic ear in the members of the enlightened Democratic Party.

The Republicans, meanwhile, prevented her from speaking on their misogynistic panel of religious experts. They invited only men to be on the panel. Can you believe it? On the topic of birth control? The amount of disrespect for women’s health the Republicans have shown is disgusting. Any woman considering voting for the Republicans in November is crazy.

This is the media narrative that has prevailed over the past couple of weeks surrounding the administration’s decision to mandate that birth control coverage be provided for everyone. All of this media outrage is ridiculous. No Republican wants to prevent anyone from obtaining contraception when they want to. They just reject the notion that anyone else but the user should pay for it.

If you mandate that insurers provide free contraception, everyone’s premiums go up. This means that Catholic hospitals, schools and universities would in effect be forced to pay for contraception against their will. The first amendment of the Constitution reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…”

By forcing religious institutions to go against their will, Congress and the Obama administration are in clear violation of the first amendment. This is the argument Republicans have been making. But think of the women who are being bankrupted by the cost of their contraception!

After hearing the media scream about this issue, you might find this surprising: in the United States, the issue of providing contraception to anyone who needs it has been solved for quite some time. 

Fluke claims to spend $1,000 a year on contraception. I reject this number completely. If she is actually paying that amount, she is being robbed. I think Fluke is a pretty intelligent person, I mean she goes to Georgetown Law, where genius and woman’s rights expert Bill Clinton went to school.

But, if she is not intelligent enough to go online to the Planned Parenthood (half-taxpayer funded by the way) website and find that birth control costs from $15 to $50 per month, I question her qualifications to testify before Congress.

Another fun fact I looked up: there is a Planned Parenthood 1.5 miles away from the Georgetown Law School.

In addition, birth control at Wal-Mart and Target can cost as little as $9 per month.

So, any reasonable person who did some market research would find that in fact birth control and most other contraception methods are very affordable, and cost nowhere near $1,000 a year. Yet, Fluke thinks that her right to have free birth control is more important than her university’s right to have a religious conscience.

Except for one thing: her university’s right to practice its religious beliefs is established in the Constitution, and the right she is trying to establish for herself comes from some weird sense of entitlement. Of course, there is always another way of dealing with the problem of expensive contraception that would help both men and women: personal responsibility and less sex.

Andrew is a sophomore majoring in finance, French and markets and culture.