Ultrasounds show how unborn babies react when their mothers smoke — this is REALLY disturbing: http://t.co/tNB2zw0xwYpic.twitter.com/ItbH9LHndk — Cosmopolitan (@Cosmopolitan) March 24, 2015

If the mom is smoking, the kid is a baby, but if she wants an abortion, she’s not a mom and the kid’s not a baby but a fetus? @Cosmopolitan — Ryan T. Anderson (@RyanT_Anderson) March 24, 2015

It is almost impossible to be completely morally consistent. Life is messy; we all make compromises and rationalize them. Most of us, I think, manage to be aware of the tension between our ideals and our behavior, and at least make an attempt to reconcile them, or acknowledge the gap.

And then there are mindless partisans like the the ladies of Cosmopolitan, above, and like the angry libertine feminist Amanda Marcotte, the Cosmo reader’s idea of a Diana Trilling, who is OUTRAGED at a legislator who wants to equip poor, sexually active women with state-sponsored contraception.

But wait, don’t many progressives want this? Well, yeah, but this legislator is a Republican, and wants to equip the poor with contraception for the wrong reason. Excerpt from Marcotte’s commentary:

Free contraception programs are a great idea. Free contraception programs that offer access to IUDs and hormonal implants—which are long-acting and highly effective, but carry upfront costs—are an especially great idea. A program offering free IUDs in Colorado helped lead to a 40 percent drop in the teen pregnancy rate in a mere four years. The St. Louis Contraceptive Choice Project showed that IUDs and implants can be wildly popular with young women. There are IUD programs that respect women’s intelligence. And then there are IUD programs like the one proposed by Arkansas state representative Kim Hammer, who has introduced a bill that would offer free IUDs—but only to single mothers on Medicaid.

More:

But Hammer’s little stunt, with its troubling whiff of eugenics, could cast a pall over more legitimate efforts to make contraception more accessible and affordable for all women.

The reader who sent this item in says:

See how that works? For years, conservatives complain about the size of government and how culture is driving up costs, like you know, out of wedlock births and taking care of those kids and blah blah blah. So progressives say, “Well, gee, if you were REALLY interested in saving money, you’d support aggressive provision of long-term birth control for poor women.” So this politician does just that. He says yeah, right on progressives, let’s give these poor single moms birth control so we don’t have to take care of their kids. And wham! Not good enough! Whiff of eugenics! The only approved comment is, “I actively affirm your decision to have sex with whomever you want to have sex with, and I dutifully offer to to pay whatever it costs for you to do so without any ramifications as they relate to procreation.” Yeah. Whiff of eugenics is right.

What would it mean to have a government-funded IUD program that “respected women’s intelligence”? How would that work? Do they get a free subscription to the New York Review of Books with their new IUD?

Let it be noted that a couple of weeks ago, Marcotte blasted conservative lawmakers for all the money unintended pregnancy and childbearing costs the taxpayer. Excerpt:

Pregnancy-related medical care isn’t cheap. Total government expenditures on unintended pregnancy in 2010 totaled $21 billion, or approximately $336 for every woman age 15-44 in the country. That’s an important number to keep in mind when you hear Republicans touting their willingness to slash family planning funding or even just denying that there’s a need to make contraception more affordable: For less than what we spend on the costs of unintended pregnancy, we could make sure every woman who wants reliable contraception can get it. In fact, as Guttmacher notes, “In the absence of the current U.S. publicly funded family planning effort, the public costs of unintended pregnancies in 2010 might have been 75% higher.” The recent report from the Brookings Institution shows that women who make a middle-class or higher income have exponentially lower unintended childbirth rates than women living in poverty, in no small part because middle-class women use contraception and even abortion more, as needed, to time their pregnancies. This is disturbing on just a human rights level, because it suggests that lower-income women would like to be able to control their own fertility more but simply can’t because they don’t have the same access to contraception and abortion as middle-class women do. But if you aren’t moved by the human cost of an inadequate reproductive health care system for low-income women, perhaps looking at the price tag will do it.

How, exactly, is what the Arkansas Republican legislator proposes different from what Marcotte wants to see happen? She says poor women having babies they don’t want to have are costing taxpayers plenty, and says that if the humanitarian plight of these women doesn’t move you to support providing them with free birth control, the cost to taxpayers should.

So an Arkansas Republican agrees with her, and files a bill to do just that. But now he’s a villain. That Marcotte minx needs to acquaint herself with proper theology and geometry.