It's not framed as a question of rights, of course. It's framed as a question of costs – because you can argue about ethics all you like, but money is its own argument and absolute. That's the tack taken by Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal on Sandra Fluke's appearance at the Democratic National Convention. (Fluke, you'll remember, is the American student who was labelled a "slut" and a "prostitute" by the ever-gentlemanly Rush Limbaugh because she campaigned for contraceptives to be covered by insurers.)

"She really does think – and her party apparently thinks – that in a spending crisis with trillions in debt and many in need, in a nation in existential doubt as to its standing and purpose, in a time when parents struggle to buy the good sneakers for the kids so they're not embarrassed at school … that in that nation [author's italics] the great issue of the day, and the appropriate focus of our concern, is making other people pay for her birth-control pills," writes Noonan, as if a course of oral contraceptives were a delicious sugar-coated snack and Fluke was selfishly dipping into the public pocket for the cost of her candy.

Meanwhile, back in the reality based community:

...studies taking different methodological approaches arrive at the same conclusion: Unintended pregnancy costs U.S. taxpayers roughly $11 billion each year. Both estimates are conservative in that they are limited to public insurance costs for pregnancy and first-year infant care, and both studies conclude that the potential public savings from reducing unintended pregnancy in the United States would be huge. A related new study provides first-ever estimates of unintended pregnancy for each state, and a starting point for future efforts to monitor states’ progress toward reducing unintended pregnancy...

...All three articles—“Unintended Pregnancy Rates at the State Level,” by Lawrence B. Finer and Kathryn Kost of the Guttmacher Institute; “The Public Costs of Births Resulting from Unintended Pregnancies: National and State-Level Estimates [PDF]," by Adam Sonfield, Kathryn Kost, Rachel Benson Gold and Lawrence B. Finer of the Guttmacher Institute; and “Unintended Pregnancy and Taxpayer Spending [PDF],” by Emily Monea and Adam Thomas of the Brookings Institution—are currently available online...

Article excerpts above from The Guardian and The Guttmacher Institute.