Around the same time as the incident I told about in yesterday’s post, the contraceptive mandate came up in another class.  I mentioned how strange it seemed to me personally to call artificial contraception, sterilization, and the provision of abortion-inducing drugs “health care,” because pregnancy is not a disease.

A young man responded that pregnancy is a disease.

“Do you mean that pregnancy itself is pathological,” I asked, “or do you mean only that although pregnancy is a natural condition, complications may arise during the course of it?”

He vigorously denied that the distinction was valid.  Pregnancy is associated with certain health risks, therefore it is a disease.  Although some of the other students were shocked, others agreed with him.  Still others seemed troubled and confused.

Since I had encountered this view in the writings of abortionists, I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I hadn’t fully realized how common it had become.  It was as though a plague vector had escaped from a containment facility and was spreading through the population.