About a month ago, people who thought religious institutions shouldn’t be forced to pay for things they morally oppose were unremarkable, boring even. Now, they are waging a heinous War on Women.
Through the twisted logic of statism run amok, opposition to a new Health and Human Services mandate forcing employers to buy insurance covering contraceptives becomes opposition to access to contraceptives altogether. White House spokesman Jay Carney calls a Senate bill to allow employers to forgo buying coverage for services they oppose — as they have throughout the nation’s entire history up to this point — “dangerous and wrong.”
Three Democratic women senators, Jeanne Shaheen (New Hampshire), Barbara Boxer (California), and Patty Murray (Washington), wrote in the Wall Street Journal that critics of the mandate “are trying to force their politics on women’s personal health-care decisions.” How are they proposing to do that exactly? The Catholic bishops are merely fighting to keep institutions affiliated with their church from getting coerced into participating in what they consider a moral wrong. They are the agents of a status quo that the day before yesterday wasn’t considered objectionable, let alone an assault on women’s health.
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Supporters of the mandate like the three senators cite the statistic from the Guttmacher Institute that 99 percent of women who have been sexually active in the U.S. have used birth control. This doesn’t sound like a country facing a crisis of contraception. But prescription contraceptives are expensive, the senators argue, costing as much as $600 a year. (Or, looked at another way, less than $60 a month.)
Never mind that a vast government apparatus exists to provide poor women access to contraceptives, from Medicaid and community health centers to Title X. There are roughly 4,500 Title X–funded clinics around the country. They are required to provide free birth control to the poor and subsidized birth control to people with incomes between 100 percent and 250 percent of poverty. They serve about 5 million people a year.
By any reasonable standard, we are one of the most lavishly contracepted societies in the history of the planet. Whoever wrote the Kahun Gynecological Papyrus circa 1800 b.c., with its references to crude contraceptives, would be shocked and awed at the bright, cheery display of condoms at the average drugstore. At drugstore.com, a pedestrian pack of twelve goes for about $10, with no stigma attached.
A Centers for Disease Control report this year found that among teen mothers who had unintended pregnancies, only 13 percent said they had trouble getting access to birth control. Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, an expert on out-of-wedlock births, says the category of unplanned pregnancies is more ambiguous than it sounds. It includes women who weren’t planning a pregnancy right away but were still thinking about getting pregnant and so weren’t zealous in their use of contraception.
Of all the causes of the explosion in illegitimate births, limited access to contraception can’t be high on the list. At the same time that we have seen a profusion of contraceptives that are dazzling in their variety, impressive in their efficacy, and democratic in their widespread accessibility, out-of-wedlock births have gone from 10 percent in 1970 to 42 percent today (largely among poor women with access to government-provided contraceptives).
In its extension to religious institutions, the HHS mandate can only reach a very narrow slice of the population: women who aren’t poor enough to get government assistance, yet aren’t well-off enough to afford their own contraception, can’t get any other help, and have no alternative but to work for an objecting religious institution. On behalf of this vanishingly small number of women, the Obama administration is willing to risk a political backlash and a rebuke in the courts.
If the mandate were only about extending contraception coverage, exempting religious institutions would be obvious. But it’s more than that. It is about bringing institutions thought to be retrograde to heel, and discrediting their morality. It is kulturkampf disguised as public health.
In the name of public health progressives are manipulating to impose their will and of course the ironic unintended consequence is that health care will be destroyed.
The new popular in-vogue and politically correct term is no longer health care delivery, its been transformed to health delivery. Medical centers, insurance groups (that want to remain in business), medical think tanks are recalibrating to ‘health', there will be no more 'health care'.
What is the difference? Well in the ‘spin’ world we live in health care means greedy doctors coldly treating the sick and injured. Health on the other hand is the nurturing benevolent ether which prevents people from getting sick and injured. Sounds good but if you peel the next layer of the onion, the World Health Organization definition of health is, ‘a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.’
A lot of tyranny and misery will befall the citizenry as the elite impose social well being on us all. Even if they just stick to traditional health care, its delivery in the hands of our bureaucratized inexpert imperious government managers, healthcare will degrade to clinics that even Ivan Denisovich would seek to avoid.
"...critics of the mandate “are trying to force their politics on women’s personal health-care decisions.” How are they proposing to do that exactly?"
Lefties commonly believe that social conservatives are going to make them behave by force. This is because force is the lefty default position. If they believe some light bulbs are evil they enact laws forcing people to buy the right light bulbs. If they believe some vehicles are evil they enact laws forcing people to buy the right vehicles. If they believe some speech is evil they enact laws forcing people to speak only the correct things.
Left-liberals operate on the principle that anything which is not explicitly permitted must be forbidden and anything that is explicitly permitted must be mandatory. And they project that view onto conservatives because they can't conceive of any other possibility.
"At the same time that we have seen a profusion of contraceptives that are dazzling in their variety, impressive in their efficacy, and democratic in their widespread accessibility, out-of-wedlock births have gone from 10 percent in 1970 to 42 percent today..."
By creating a false sense of security widespread use of birth control actually increases unplanned pregnancy.
Since even the most effective contraceptive, "the pill" has only a 99% effectiveness (when used perfectly under laboratory conditions -- real world performance drops radically), that means that 1 out of every 100 sexually active women using "the pill" will get pregnant each year.
I've only ever worked out the numbers for teens:
With something in the vicinity of 4 million teen girls in the US, just about half of whom report being sexually active equipping every single one of them with birth control (and assuming the laboratory effectiveness rate), would do nothing but ensure that each year would see at least 20,000 unplanned, teen pregnancies.
Time is short. We need issues that will motivate independents, and this ain’t one of them. If we ride hobby-horses while the Dems ride war horses, we have only ourselves to blame when we’re left in the dust. Okay, so we’re right on this one; let’s not wind up like Burma-Shave’s Danny O’Day who died defending his right of way.
We shouldn't abandon important rights to a socialist night just because it doesn't poll well among independents. Sometimes it is not about winning the next election. Sometimes it is about winning on an issue of importance.
How precious of (female dog) Boxer to accuse people of ramming their social views down everyone's throats, when that's exactly what HHS just did.
In fact, that is precisely what Griswold v. Connecticut, Eisenstadt v. Baird, and Roe v. Wade did in the first place: mandate one moral view govern everywhere throughout the union.
The Constitution is silent on these issues. That is why we have Article V, and it's why we have states. And to learn that is why I thought we had schools, and 7th grade civics classes.
Without the courts and regulatory agencies of the executive branch to do its bidding outside of democratic processes, much of the left's agenda would lie on the cutting room floor of legislatures throughout the country.
Which is why "Democrats" use unelected officials to mandate their agenda onto everyone by fiat.
You can learn everything you need to know about leftists by studying their complaints of their opponents.
There is a reason Saul Alinsky wrote the "Rules for Radicals", and it wasn't out of a commitment to candor and forthrightness.
And the working man in the private sector gets screwed again. Unions get the cadillac plans and obamacare exemptions ... women get all these freebies ... but I get stuck paying for these high priced plans with high deductibles. I had to pay $2600 for crowns last year and then have to listen to these public employee union jerks call Scott Walker a nazi for making them pitch in a nickel. If there is one plus to this guy getting reelected, it's that it should reignite the tea party into a major force that creates real change.
I think we are all making a mistake in referring to this as being about contraceptives. It is also about sterilization and morning-after abortion pills, and the overall issue is religious freedom. We are adopting the slanted terminology of the left in talking about contraceptives.
Darrel Issa screwed up by selecting only guys. The only soundbites from that hearing were Democrat Senators pontificating about women not having a voice at the hearing. And I'm watching it on Fox.
Krauthammer had it right. Once Obama turned it into a woman's rights issue ... game over.
The trouble with Rich's commentary is it ignores 10 years of history in attempting to present this as a 'new' problem. In 28 states Contraception is a required part of Women's Health Care packages. In 8 of those states, including New York, there is no religious exemption except for the church itself. The Catholic Church, at the heart of this 'dust devil', has not withdrawn it's services or charities from any one of these states. Not one of these states has faced a single challenge over a breach of First Amendment Rights.
So much for the legal angles.
WHO is Health Insurance for? The recipient.
To my knowledge the affiliated, non-liturgical institutions the church runs do NOT discriminate in hiring based on race, creed, or national origin. Presumably they hire the best person for the job being offered regardless of religious affiliation.
With their position, the church is claiming the right to control these workers health care based on Canon Law.
By codifying this position, as some legislators are trying to do, they embark on a toboggan run which will, ultimately, allow ANY religion to demand that it's tenets be accepted as foundation for health care coverage.
A religion would be within it's rights, under these provisions, to provide coverages where transfusions would not be covered; where going to a doctor of a different sex would not be covered; where only faith healers can offer care; the list goes on. If a liturgy has a prohibition, their health care can be limited in scope to the liturgical allowed practices OR none.
The level of Health Care a person receives should be based on that persons tenets, not the beliefs / persecutions practiced by the buyer of the policy.
Hiring based on creed is illegal.
Denying health care based on creed, ESPECIALLY when the recipient may not be a disciple of the creed, is wrong.
The trouble with Rich's commentary is it ignores 10 years of history in attempting to present this as a 'new' problem. In 28 states Contraception is a required part of Women's Health Care packages. In 8 of those states, including New York, there is no religious exemption except for the church itself. The Catholic Church, at the heart of this 'dust devil', has not withdrawn it's services or charities from any one of these states. Not one of these states has faced a single challenge over a breach of First Amendment Rights.
So much for the legal angles.
WHO is Health Insurance for? The recipient.
To my knowledge the affiliated, non-liturgical institutions the church runs do NOT discriminate in hiring based on race, creed, or national origin. Presumably they hire the best person for the job being offered regardless of religious affiliation.
With their position, the church is claiming the right to control these workers health care based on Canon Law.
By codifying this position, as some legislators are trying to do, they embark on a toboggan run which will, ultimately, allow ANY religion to demand that it's tenets be accepted as foundation for health care coverage.
A religion would be within it's rights, under these provisions, to provide coverages where transfusions would not be covered; where going to a doctor of a different sex would not be covered; where only faith healers can offer care; the list goes on. If a liturgy has a prohibition, their health care can be limited in scope to the liturgical allowed practices OR none.
The level of Health Care a person receives should be based on that persons tenets, not the beliefs / persecutions practiced by the buyer of the policy.
Hiring based on creed is illegal.
Denying health care based on creed, ESPECIALLY when the recipient may not be a disciple of the creed, is wrong.
Contraceptives are used for other reasons than birth control. Endometriosis, ovarian cysts, heavy bleeding, debilitating menstrual cramps are a few. These are medical conditions that should be treated by an ob-gyn at an office not a free clinic. The free clinic or pay according to your income clinics, are fine for routine care, but when you need a specialist and are having problems you want to go to your own gyn. If you are lucky enough to have insurance and the care is paid for, then it should be expected that the treatment be covered also. Some conditions require surgery others need medications like contraceptives. It should not matter who you work for, if they pay for insurance, it should cover contraceptives, if they are used for medical reasons or birth control, it's no ones business. President Obama took a big step in standing up for women, he knows contraceptives are a needed medication. Also the Democratic Senators also know this is an important issue. This is a medical issue and should not be political.
As Rich points out, this affront to rational thought which the White House is attempting to impose on our nation serves a "vanishingly small number of women." This is, of course, the very irrationality of federal solutions to problems, the blanket, across the board awarding of federal largesse without a means test or an opt out (except for the politically connected,) The preferred attack to discredit these absurdities should be to demand that the administration express just how many women require this kind of assistance from the federal government and make them justify the spending they believe would be required to meet that need. Of course any such information coming from the city of OZ would be pure fantasy but it gives a reasonable and rational foundation for discussion. I'm afraid that those who argue that turning this into a women's health issue is the endgame for opposition have an almost misogynistic perception of women. They can understand the absurdity of spending billions to service a vanishingly small number of clients just as easily as a man can. They are equally capable of understanding the concept of federalism even if Joe What's-his-name doesn't. If only our press were not so Pavlovian.
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