In response to the Obama administration’s contraceptive coverage mandate, a Rick Santorum supporter offered an alternative solution: use Bayer aspirin as a contraceptive.
The remark – which has been dubbed “a joke” by the Santorum entourage – received backlash after it was widely circulated on the internet.
“This contraception thing, my gosh, it’s so … inexpensive,” Foster Friess, one of Santorum’s top financial backers, said on MSNBC. “You know, back in my days, they’d use Bayer aspirin for contraceptives. The gals put it between their knees and it wasn’t that costly.”
Santorum later explained to Fox News on Thursday the comment was a “bad, off-color joke” and one that should not be considered a part of his Republican presidential campaign.
“I’m not going to be responsible for everybody … any supporter of mine and what they say,” Santorum said. “Foster is known in political circles as telling a lot of jokes, and some of them are not particularly funny, which this one was not. He’s not creepy. He’s a good man. He’s a great philanthropist. He’s a very successful businessman.”
Friess later apologized for the comment via his blog following a comment where he explained that “everyone laughed at the silliness on how an aspirin could become a birth control pill.” He later added: “My aspirin joke bombed.”
“To all those who took my joke as modern day approach I deeply apologize and seek your forgiveness. My wife constantly tells me I need new material — she understood the joke but didn’t like it anyway — so I will keep that old one in the past where it belongs,” Friess wrote.
