Advocates of religious freedom were outraged on January 20, when the Obama administration announced it would enforce its new mandate for contraception and sterilization coverage in private health-insurance plans without a meaningful conscience exemption. Even most religious organizations can’t qualify for the rule’s incredibly narrow “religious employer” exception, which will remain unchanged. NARAL Pro-Choice America and Planned Parenthood have said pro-life organizations are wrong to oppose such mandates: After all, they argue, increasing access to contraception (especially “emergency contraception” or “EC”) will reduce abortion, and don’t we all want that?
This argument conveniently ignores studies showing that such access simply doesn’t reduce abortion rates. For example, out of 23 studies on the effects of increased access to ECs, not one study could show a reduction in unintended pregnancies or abortions. It also ignores the fact that at least one EC drug covered by the mandate, “Ella,” is a close analogue to the abortion pill RU-486; both drugs can induce abortion weeks into pregnancy.
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But the final proof that this mandate was sold using cynical falsehoods has just been unveiled.
On January 26, a house committee in the Washington State legislature approved what may become the nation’s first-ever law forcing private health-insurance plans to cover abortion through all stages of pregnancy. This “Reproductive Parity Act” states that any health-insurance plan providing “coverage for maternity care or services” must prove “substantially equivalent coverage” for “the voluntary termination of a pregnancy.” It seems that if a health-insurance plan will cover a full-term live birth, it must also pay for a late-term abortion.
Hailed in the Huffington Post as “groundbreaking” by “reproductive rights” advocate Laura Bassett, the bill is being promoted by the local affiliates of Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice America — the same groups that endorsed the birth-control mandate and claimed it would reduce abortions.
If mandating coverage of contraception is expected to increase use of contraception (in an effort to reduce abortions), presumably mandating coverage of abortion will increase the use of abortion. Supporting both mandates may seem inconsistent. The inconsistency disappears if we recognize that these organizations support both policies in order to reduce live births, on the assumption that this will mean a better America. Most unintended pregnancies end in live births rather than abortions, so a contraceptive mandate will likely reduce births more than it reduces abortion.
The Washington bill, in requiring insurance plans to treat childbirth and abortion identically, represents a pro-abortion ideology in its purest and most extreme form: It suggests a belief that abortion is the moral equivalent of childbirth, that killing is the same as healing. And that bizarre view must be imposed on everyone who offers, sponsors, or buys insurance — they must provide and pay for abortion on demand as though they believed it too.
That ideology must be imposed by law to get anywhere at all — because few people, left to their own devices, would give it the time of day. About half of Americans identify themselves as “pro-life”; more than half see abortion as “morally wrong”; and most Americans oppose public funding of abortion and would choose not to have it covered in their health plan. Most doctors and hospitals, regardless of secular or religious affiliation, do not perform abortions — in one recent survey, only 14 percent of ob/gyns said they ever perform abortions — and 87 percent of U.S. counties have no identifiable abortion provider. Among the general public as well as the medical profession, abortion is a painful reality, a moral problem, and an embarrassment — a wrong that, at most, some see as a necessary evil. If you are committed to making it a mandatory aspect of basic health care for all, the coercive power of the state is your only option. And of course that has nothing to do with respecting freedom of choice.
Supporters of the bill offer yet another argument why it is needed — and that argument is a tissue-thin pretext. They say most insurers in Washington already cover abortion, and new legislation is needed to “retain” the coverage that already exists in the face of the new federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) and President Obama’s executive order on that law.
"Mandatory Abortion Coverage?" A slippery slope indeed. And as we've seen, there are a number of useful idiots out there that have unwittingly helped Obama ram through these mandates. A shameful crew ... External Link
Of course the intent is to force all Americans to pay for abortions!! I personally spoke with the chief of staff of a far left Congressman. She said that all people should have to pay for abortion, since it is 'legal', "just as conscientious objectors have to pay for military spending". The HHS ruling on contraception is the first step on this path.
The Obama administration has used and played Catholics, and now is discarding us in the waste basket, just like the millions of little lives they want us to destroy and throw in the trash. See: External Link for more on this.
Of course the intent is to force all Americans to pay for abortions!! I personally spoke with the chief of staff of a far left Congressman. She said that all people should have to pay for abortion, since it is 'legal', "just as conscientious objectors have to pay for military spending". The HHS ruling on contraception is the first step on this path.
The Obama administration has used and played Catholics, and now is discarding us in the waste basket, just like the millions of little lives they want us to destroy and throw in the trash. See: External Link for more on this.
Mandatory abortion coverage: what's next? Let me hazard a guess:
1. Mandatory euthanasia coverage. 2. Mandatory abortion for fetuses deemed undesirable for society. 3. Mandatory euthanasia for the infirm and the elderly and others the society deems too expensive to care for. It's a slippery slope: watch out!
I have to assume the title "Mandatory Abortion Coverage?" was meant as a rhetorical question because we've already arrived at that point. The real question is perhaps "Mandatory Abortion?"
How long before Obamacare's health care rationing committee is ruling mandatory abortions?
You know, based on a cost/benefit analysis and such.
Why does anyone believe the president's "oft-repeated" support of a federal protection for conscience with regard to abortion, gay marriage or, indeed, to any of the sacraments of the left? Any such belief is destructively and dangerously naive. Look at his actions - they are remarkably consistent, from his first days in office and use of executive orders to overturn abortion funding restrictions to the HHS mandate.
The government is, at best, an obstreperous servant. At worst, it is a coercive force for evil.
Ever since the Obama Administration announced the HHS decision on contraceptives, I have suspected that this is the ultimate end-game. The pro-abortion lobby will stop at nothing short of free abortion for all, without any provisions for conscience. God help us all.
"About half of Americans identify themselves as 'pro-life'; more than half see abortion as 'morally wrong'; and most Americans oppose public funding of abortion and would choose not to have it covered in their health plan."
But see, that's precisely why we need a statist administrative bureaucracy like the Obama administration to think for us, because we poor benighted prols are clearly incapable of thinking for ourselves. Big Brother must protect us from our quaint, anachronistic, deluded sense of morality. Trust them, we're much better off this way. Now, somebody please pass the Soma.
I suspect that there will also be a mandate that BOcare will pay for the 1st two births but not the third - but will pay for the abortion of the third child. Remember Biden likes the China plan - soon to come to a country near you.
Washington is dominated by Democrats because of three or four counties out of 39, Seattle/King County being the largest population center in the state. In voter terms, they have just enough to eke out a bare majority of just under 51% in state-wide elections. Our legislature is dominated by Democrats in both the Senate and the House and currently, the governor's office. Despite our ongoing budget deficit in the $1.5 billion range, the governor, a nominal Catholic, and the Democrats, joined by about four Republicans just passed a "gay marriage" bill sponsored by the governor herself rahter than concentrate on the urgent issue staring us all inthe face. We adopted an assisted suicide law a couple of sessions ago, and this abortion bill is just the latest step. Amazingly, neither the media nor many otherwise intelligent members of the Democrat voting public have yet come to the realization of how radicalized their party has become and how far it has strayed from anything it used to stand for. Things here will only get worse until there is a sea change brought about by - one hopes - a massive grass roots Tea Party-like reaction to the ever increasing overreaching by the party of the Left.
ddot - good summary of the sorry condition of Washington (state) politics. Let's hope the state can still be saved - I fear it's already too late for California, New York, and Illinois (where I live).
And the cancer of immorality keeps eating away that which is good - conscience no longer exists within those on the left who support these type of laws.
What makes their devilish laws anydifferent than that of the Nazis, who also believed in these same tactics?
A society devoid of moral, and christian values is doomed.
Enough with the slippery slope talk. We passed the PATRIOT Act then everyone freaked out about SOPA/PIPA and successfully defeated it. There's no reason to believe that anything more egregious won't be successfully stopped again.
The way I see, the SCOTUS just confirmed that religious institutions are exempt from employment discrimination claims based on the teachings of the institution.
If these institutions are still going to hire individuals of different faiths, then why shouldn't they offer the same coverage that every other employer is required to offer??
The solution seems pretty clear. If you're a religious institution and you don't want to cover contraceptive services, don't hire employees of conflicting beliefs.
According to your pretzel logic, there can be no religious exemption for conscience, because it's impossible to ferret out at an interview all potential points of divergence between the potential employee and the tenets of the religion.
If you are so utterly hostile to the First Amendment, you can move to any number of all those countries on Earth that the NYT has written about that don't have a First Amendment.
But, again, we have the admission from the pro-abortion crowd that abortion is the only "right" the exercise of which others -- here, employers -- are forced to pay for.
Pay for my gun, abortionist. Hmmm?
You'll just have to trust that I won't aim it at you.
"The solution seems pretty clear. If you're a religious institution and you don't want to cover contraceptive services, don't hire employees of conflicting beliefs."
One "fact" you seem to have overlooked is, according to PPACA, it doesn't matter WHO you hire, or WHAT their beliefs are, the employer MUST offer a health care plan that includes contraceptives, including abortifacients.
