Earlier this month, U.S. District Court Judge for Washington's Western district, Robert Lasnik, ruled that insurance companies must provide birth-control coverage for women. The outcome of a lawsuit waged by a female employee of Bartell Pharmacy in Seattle, WA, this verdict is a prime example of not only the expanding definition of sexual discrimination, but also the fundamental misunderstandings about the use and misuse of medical insurance.

A female employee of Bartell Pharmacy brought this suit, demanding that all birth control options be included in the Bartell health-care coverage. Alleging that preventive drug and treatment options for medical conditions are available for men, her lawyers extrapolated that the failure to provide birth control coverage constitutes discrimination.

Apparently this line of "reasoning" appealed to the judge. Judge Lasnik said of his decision, "Although the (Bartell) plan covers almost all drugs and devices used by men, the exclusion of prescription contraceptives creates a gaping hole in the coverage offered to female employees, leaving a fundamental and immediate health-care need uncovered."

Today's medical birth control has revolutionized the way women deal with their status as potentially childbearing individuals. Since childbirth isn't for everyone, birth control has increased the choices for women to a level approaching that of the male population's choices for when and how to become a parent. What birth control is, at the essential level, amounts to a tool for avoiding a specific outcome. In most instances, it is not a medical treatment.

Medical insurance is expensive enough as it is, without adding to the costs subsidies for treatments that are not medically indicated. Just as anyone should balk at the government-mandated addition of male contraception products, we should balk at the government-mandated inclusion of treatments that are not aimed at controlling a disease or injury. Just because it happens to the body, there is no reason to treat pregnancy as a medically treatable disease.

Instead of celebrating this judgment as a success for women's reproductive rights, women should understand that this decision is something entirely different. They are surrendering responsibility for their own birth-control choices to their employers.

Women can and should take responsibility for their own fertility. Pushing doctors and insurance companies into further reaches of responsibility for ensuring access to these tools should not be a laudable goal. One can only hope that the next level of appeal will find more reasonable judges, who understand that health care and personal care are different things.