Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), a 36-year-old grandmother who just filed for divorce from her sex pest husband, said at a House Oversight Committee hearing on prescription drug markets Tuesday that she left a pack of birth control pills at a pharmacy once because it cost too much, and she figured that raising an actual child for 18 years would be cheaper.
“I left a prescription at a pharmacy once. I went to get birth control,” she said. “The price was very, very high... And I said, ‘It’s cheaper to have a kid.’ And I left it there, and now I have my third son.” The cost of raising a child in the U.S. averages out to over $300k over 18 years, according to a Brookings Institution analysis. Birth control pills range from $0 to $50 a month. That’s not cheaper than a kid.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) immediately took the opportunity to dunk on Boebert’s comments, noting in a tweet that Boebert voted against a bill last year that would have guaranteed all Americans the right to contraception without the government’s interference.
“And then she voted against the right to contraception so she could double this problem and give it to the next person,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote.
Boebert’s 17-year-old son apparently doesn’t like birth control much either, as he is now expecting a baby with his girlfriend, whom Boebert has assured us is over the age of 14.
The Colorado congresswoman has also tried to attack contraception in other ways: The first bill she introduced in 2023 was a proposal to defund Planned Parenthood, which offers low-cost or no-cost birth control pills to uninsured and low-income people. So it seems, as Ocasio-Cortez pointed out, that the congresswoman is not actually interested in making contraception more affordable; her complaints about the cost of it only appear intended to encourage everyone to have more babies—like she did.