On Tuesday we told you about the bishops’ campaign to contest the decision to make no-copay contraceptive coverage available to employees, including those working for Catholic institutions. This Department of Health and Human Services ruling was an important victory for the many women and men who need this coverage, especially during these tough economic times. With your help, this victory will actually reach the pocketbooks of American workers.
Right now, the Catholic voice reaching the White House is almost exclusively coming from conservative Catholics, including the US bishops and their allies. The media is continuing this misconception by running these reactions as a reflection of a monolithic Catholic outrage. These protests are not on behalf of employees’ conscience rights, and do not reflect most Catholics’ convictions or practice related to contraception. We need to speak up now and let the administration know that US Catholics support the right to choose contraception, just as they support no-copay coverage for employees’ contraception.
We need you to call and e-mail the White House today with a simple message: the bishops do not speak for me on contraceptive coverage.
Remember to include a personal story in your e-mail to the White House. Your voice is needed now more than ever to preserve this great advance for the well-being of US workers.
We are also looking to share your stories as part of a campaign bring a different vision of Catholics into the spotlight: the experiences of Catholics like you who believe this contraception coverage supports employees’ freedom of conscience and should be available to all Americans, regardless of their employer.
Share your story online and send this link to others you know. There is no more effective way to educate policymakers and the media about the widespread Catholic support for equitable access to contraception.
Thank you for taking action with Catholics for Choice. Please forward this alert to your friends, family, colleagues or any others who may be interested in getting active on this important issue.
Healthcare Reform has meant a lot to people who need access to health care and as the law is fully implemented, it will mean even more. Over the last year, we’ve watched as some leaders have tried to take it back. Check out this ad by Family Planning Health Services to find out how health care reform helps people and what we stand to lose.
[This letter from Lon Newman appeared at Factcheck.org.]
Thanks for the fact check on the South Carolina Gingrich-versus-Romney ad ["Gingrich’s ‘Baloney’-filled Attacks on Romney," Jan. 11]. Confusing the public about emergency contraception pills (ECP) is deliberate, pervasive, and routinely served by opponents of contraception.
Although fact-checking the fact-checking seems tedious sometimes, it is important to explain that available research on Plan B One-Step (“the morning after pill”) shows that it prevents pregnancy by preventing ovulation and/or fertilization.
Ron Hamel, a Catholic ethicist publishing the conclusions of five years of scientific review in the January-February 2010 issue of Health Progress, said: ” … virtually all of the evidence in the scientific literature indicates Plan B has little or no post-fertilization effect, that is, it has little or no effect on the endometrium that would make it inhospitable to implantation. Its mechanism of action is to disrupt ovulation.”
One objection frequently repeated by Plan B opponents is that there is language in the pill package that the drug may prevent implantation. However, Nicanor Pier Giorgio Austriaco, a priest, theologian, and scientist also studied the active drug’s effects and determined that it has no post-fertilization effect. On the argument of labeling, he stated that: “ … labels mean nothing without the scientific data to back up their claims.”
The important answer to the question on emergency contraception is that there cannot be an abortion before there is a pregnancy; therefore, preventing unwanted pregnancies prevents abortions. But even if you believe pregnancy is the same as fertilization, you no longer have to put up with the warmed-over baloney that Plan B is an “abortion pill.”
Thanks, again, for your excellent work.
Lon Newman Executive director, Family Planning Health Services Wausau, Wisc.
Washington, DC – Congresswoman Gwen Moore expressed her disappointment in a decision by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to overrule the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) proposal to significantly expand young women’s access to a critical medication that can prevent unintended pregnancies.
“I regret that HHS has stepped in and overridden the FDA’s long-overdue decision to remove the unnecessary age restriction on Plan B One-Step emergency contraception,” said Rep. Gwen Moore. “The FDA’s proposal would have meant that emergency contraception would be brought out from behind the pharmacy counter, onto the shelves with other similar contraceptive methods. Medical experts, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, agree that Plan B is perfectly safe for over-the-counter use for anyone at risk of an unintended pregnancy, including younger women. I fervently hope that HHS is not putting politics or ideology over science in their decision.”
Plan B One-Step is a safe and effective emergency contraceptive that is meant to be taken within 72 hours after contraceptive failure or unprotected intercourse. Plan B prevents fertilization from happening, and does not work if the woman is already pregnant.
“I thought we could all agree on the importance preventing unintended pregnancy, especially among teenagers,” said Rep. Moore. For the past few years, my home city of Milwaukee has worked very hard to reduce our epidemic teen birth rate. We’ve seen a 15% drop since 2005, when our teen birth rate was second in the nation only to Baltimore. But we still have a long way to go. A recent study released by United Way of Greater Milwaukee showed that statutory rape is among our biggest challenges to reducing teen pregnancy. Seventy-one percent of babies born to Milwaukee’s teenage girls were fathered by men at least 20 years of age. These pregnancies have serious consequences not only for these young women—who often experience tremendous isolation and vulnerability—but for their communities at large. Decisions like the one made today by HHS will only exacerbate the problem in places like Milwaukee.”
The Catholic Church says new federalregulations requiring employers to provide no-cost prescription birth control as part of their health insurance plans infringe on their religious liberty.
“If we comply, as the law requires, we will be helping our students do things that we teach them, in our classes and in our sacraments, are sinful — sometimes gravely so,” Catholic University President John Garvey wrote in The Washington Post. “It seems to us that a proper respect for religious liberty would warrant an exemption for our university and other institutions like it.”
But while some insist that the rules, which spring from last year’s health law, break new ground, many states as well as federal civil rights law already require most religious employers to cover prescription contraceptives if they provide coverage of other prescription drugs.
While some religious employers take advantage of loopholes or religious exemptions, the fact remains that dozens of Catholic hospitals and universities currently offer contraceptive coverage as part of their health insurance packages.
“We’ve always had contraceptive birth control included in our health care benefits,” said Michelle Michaud, a labor and delivery nurse at Dominican Hospital in Santa Cruz, Calif. “It’s something that we’ve come to expect for ourselves and our family.”
Dominican is part of the Catholic Healthcare West System. A spokeswoman for the 40-hospital chain confirmed that it has offered the benefits since 1997.
Michaud, who was raised Catholic but doesn’t practice now, says she doesn’t see any problem for a Catholic hospital to provide a benefit that conflicts with the religion’s teachings.
“Oh no, because they don’t just employ Catholics,” she said. “They may be Catholic, but who they employ are not necessarily Catholic.” At the same time, said Michaud, “even practicing Catholics would want to have birth control options.”
Indeed, studies have shown that the vast majority of Catholic women in the U.S. use artificial birth control.
But while Catholic Healthcare West began offering coverage before it was legally required, today the landscape is quite different. According to the National Women’s Law Center, 28 states currently require contraceptives to be offered in health plans that also cover other prescription drugs; eight of those laws include no exemption for religious organizations.
Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., also offers contraceptive coverage to its employees – though not to its students.
That’s a relief for Andrea Waters, who works at the university’s law school. She’s 26, Presbyterian and lives with her boyfriend.
Without the coverage, she says, “I think I’d have to reevaluate what I spend monthly” in order to afford birth control pills.
Now some religious employers have been able to skirt state requirements by becoming “self-insured,” rather than buying insurance from a company. That makes them subject to federal, rather than state regulation. But they are wrong if they think that gets them out of having to offer contraceptive coverage, says Sarah Lipton-Lubet of the American Civil Liberties Union.
“Institutions like hospitals and universities … you’re required to include contraception coverage in your insurance plan where you include coverage for other prescription drugs, as a matter of basic gender equality,” she says.
That’s the result of a ruling in 2000 by the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. It found that employers whose health plans offer prescription drugs and other preventive services but not contraceptives violated the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, 1978 civil rights law that amended the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
And what does contraception have to do with pregnancy discrimination? “Prescription contraception is a form of health care that is unique to women, and the consequences of the inability to be able to access contraception, those fall primarily on women,” Lipton-Lubet says.
The EEOC ruling isn’t technically binding unless people who are being discriminated against take action. That happened recently when some faculty members at a small Catholic college in North Carolina filed a complaint. The EEOC ruled in their favor.
What the Catholic Church’s leaders are now seeking from President Obama is a broader exemption from the new rules, which would let them not offer — or stop offering — contraceptive coverage. They have the strong backing of Catholic members of Congress like Pennsylvania Republican Tim Murphy.
“The foundation of our country is not to impose laws that restrict the ability of persons to practice their faith,” he said.
But Lipton-Lubet of the ACLU says this isn’t a fight about religious liberty.
“What the bishops and their allies are asking for is the ability to impose their religious beliefs on people who don’t share them,” she said.
A decision by the administration on the rules is expected soon.
The Obama administration has announced that starting as early as August of next year, many women will have coverage for contraception with no out-of-pocket costs. At the same time, many other women will be denied this coverage.
Understandably, the focus of the debate has been on the coverage, not the denial of coverage. But in the midst of the maelstrom surrounding the announcement by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) about new regulations for coverage of women’s preventive services, it is easy to forget that these are the facts as they currently stand. Sadly, the many women left behind by these regulations, those working for religious employers, have had their voices drowned out both by extremists opposed to all birth control and those ordering them to remain seated silently at the back of the bus—unseen and unheard as the limelight shines on the positive step for those women who will benefit.
Not surprisingly, the Catholic bishops have a hand in this debacle. Once again, the bishops and their allies seek to impose a refusal clause exempting some employers from having to follow the new and needed increase in coverage. Having failed to convince Catholics in the pews to follow their hard-line ban on all contraception, the bishops are ignoring the consciences of those who work for them by seeking to impose their extremist beliefs on all women, Catholic or otherwise.
As they assure pundits and policymakers that they have the right to determine what healthcare is best for others, the bishops and other conservative Catholics have hardly concealed their outright disdain for their own employees—those who work in diocesan offices, teach in Catholic schools and otherwise serve the Catholic community. Indeed, the head of the Catholic Health Association (CHA), Sr. Carol Keehan, went so far as to imply that the effect of these refusal clauses is somehow minimal by (erroneously) calling it “only” the “parish housekeeper exemption.”
It is disgraceful that the spokespeople for a faith that prioritizes the primacy of individual conscience would be so willing to trample the consciences of others, no matter the cost. It is disgraceful that the head of an organization supposedly committed to social justice would unabashedly look down her nose at a fellow human being simply because of that woman’s occupation. It is disgraceful that some reproductive justice advocates have thrown “the parish housekeepers” and other women affected by these exemptions under the bus. Simply put, they have all accepted a second-class citizenship designation for parish housekeepers and other employees of the church.
Downright discriminatory, however, is the fact that the Obama administration is willing to write all of this extremism into public policy.
In the summer of 2009, we outlined our hopes for what healthcare reform would look like. We believed then, as we believe now, that all women and men, regardless of income, should be able to access contraception that is not only affordable, but free. At the core of this belief is a sincere adherence to our faith’s respect for the primacy of every person’s conscience. Given the Obama administration’s professed commitment to healthcare reform that would be both cost-effective and that would guarantee equitable access, we hoped that those in power would share this belief.
The refusal clauses included in HHS’s regulations for contraception mean that the plan is fundamentally flawed. No person should be left behind in these steps forward, but the proposed regulations will do just that.
One woman who would be left behind is “Sandra,” a science teacher at a Catholic school in the Midwest whose story shows the reality of what many women can see in their future—and is an example of the many who will fall under the type of employer refusal clause that the bishops hope to extend to all.
As with almost all Catholic schools, her employers follow diocesan rules regarding employees’ insurance—meaning no contraceptive coverage, regardless of medical necessity. When she first learned of HHS’s regulations she was outraged. They added, as she explained, “insult to injury” by ignoring the healthcare needs of women like her and allowing her employers to continue denying her coverage.
“I just never assumed that in 2011 I would be denied birth control,” she said. “I’m in my mid-twenties. I have no intention of having kids at the moment. I like teaching kids, but it’s a whole other thing having them.”
“Sandra” lost coverage when she began working under the jurisdiction of her local diocese. “I went to fill my birth control prescription like I always do. I say ‘here’s my new insurance card,’ and they say I’m not covered,” she said. “They thought that it was weird and asked where I worked, and as soon as I said I worked in a Catholic school, they said, ‘Oh, 99 percent of Catholic schools will not cover it. We’ve never had it covered before.’ I had no clue.”
For “Sandra,” this posed a significant hardship. She had taken a salary reduction in order “to go to work everyday saying that it’s what I love” to do. She and her husband had carefully considered their insurance plans and determined that it was more economical for them to remain on separate policies, but once she had to pay out of pocket for the birth control that was best for her, a non-generic brand prescription, their careful financial planning went down the tubes.
“Birth control is a lot of extra money on top of the salary reduction, but the principle of it is really what gets me,” she told us. “I don’t like being told by some guy that I’ve never met that I can’t use it. The bishops are not even having sex in the first place. How are they supposed to know how to tell me what to do in that situation?”
Her story, as she recognized, is all too common and reflects the repeated marginalization of many women by the Catholic hierarchy—the same women whose voices have been deemed unimportant by those on both sides of the contraceptive coverage debate. She first noticed this silencing in her own Catholic home, where her devout grandmother and aunts all used birth control but were “quiet about it, because we didn’t want to anger the boys in the big house.”
With the bishops failing to convince Catholics in her own family, like the majority of Catholics, of their extremist views on birth control, “Sandra” saw the consequences of this extremism on her colleagues, Catholic and non-Catholic alike.
“Most of the girls, the first thing they complain about is the lack of birth control coverage. It’s one of those unspoken things that no one talks about, because no one wants to risk their job—it’s hard enough to find a job right now, anyway,” she said. “You also don’t have to be Catholic to work at a Catholic school. I respect the beliefs of some of the parents in our school and others, but for those who don’t believe that or who aren’t Catholic, I think that as your own person, you should be able to do what you believe.”
As she explained, the majority of Catholic school teachers are female, but their access to contraception is determined by those most out of touch with their healthcare needs. The cost, however—and the emotional toll of an unspoken vow of silence—extend far beyond this direct impact on teachers. In “Sandra’s” experience, for the spouses of male teachers, some of whom share their husbands’ insurance policies, and for all teachers’ dependents, some of whom need birth control to regulate medical conditions, the complete lack of access poses a serious hardship.
In the course of telling her story, this one teacher outlined in chilling detail the ways in which the bishops’ own failure to convince Catholics in the pews has translated into their forceful imposition of extremist beliefs on everybody. It is the same story that the bishops hope all women will share, and Obama’s Department of Health and Human Services seems quite willing to let this happen. These refusal clauses do not represent the vision for the Affordable Care Act that we were promised, and we hope that it is not one that the Obama administration is willing to accept.
There is still time for Secretary Sebelius and the Department of Health and Human Services to do the right thing for “Sandra,” her family, her colleagues, their families and the many others who are relying on healthcare reform to ensure contraceptive coverage for all women. While some are busy claiming that this woman and others like her are unimportant, we know better.
We believe that each woman—her conscience, and her health—matters, and we know that if we do not stand in solidarity with every one, we will not only compromise our morality, but we will eventually lose coverage for all. We also know that there are many others, Catholic and otherwise, men and women, who share this conviction. HHS must hear from these people who need to argue strongly and consistently that leaving any person behind is unacceptable.
“Sandra,” whose anonymity was required because speaking up about birth control coverage could mean the loss of her job, may have said it best: “I was told by everybody, ‘What can you do about it? The church is never going to change.’ If it’s just me whining about it, that’s true, but if every woman said something, they’d have to take us into account.”
We are certainly taking her into account. It is high time for others to speak up and tell the Department of Health and Human Services to do the same.
It used to be that opposition to publicly funded birth control was linked to abortion.
Either the birth control in question allegedly caused abortion, or the organization providing the birth control (read: Planned Parenthood) also performed abortions. But that’s changing.
These days, more and more voices are opposing the provision of birth control for its own sake.
“They’ve called it preventative medicine. Preventative medicine,” said Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, on the House floor last month, shortly after the Obama administration adopted the recommendations of an expert panel and agreed to add contraceptives to a list of services insurance plans will be required to provide without a deductible or copayment. “Well, if you apply that preventative medicine universally, what you end up with is you’ve prevented a generation. Preventing babies from being born is not medicine.”
Some opponents, like conservative commentator Sandy Rios, say subsidizing birth control is simply too expensive in an era of tight budgets. “We have $14 trillion in debt, and now we’re going to cover birth control?” she said on Fox News, adding, “Are we going to do pedicures and manicures as well? I think that would be a good idea.”
Others, such as Jeffrey Kuhner, president of the conservative Edmund Burke Institute, say birth control is no less than an affront to God. “In short, liberals want to create a world without God and sexual permissiveness is their battering ram. Promoting widespread contraception is essential to forging a pagan society based on consequence-free sex,” he wrote in an opinion piece for the Washington Times.
Still others, like Marjorie Dannenfelser, of the anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony List, insist that providing birth control doesn’t even work at preventing abortions.
“As the money (for family planning) goes up, so do the number of abortions,” she said. “We have not seen a reduction in abortions since the full funding of family planning. We have seen an escalation.”
But that’s simply not the case, says Emily Stewart, director of public policy for Planned Parenthood.
“Without a doubt, when women have access to birth control, it reduces unintended pregnancies,” Stewart said. “The truth is we need to do more. And Americans agree that we need to do more to improve access to birth control.”
Abortion opponents are correct that widespread access to birth control hasn’t eliminated abortions in the U.S. — although the number has declined considerably over the last two decades.
But supporters of birth control like Stewart say the reason is that there hasn’t been enough access to contraception. Funding for Title X, the federal government’s main family planning program, has largely remained flat — mostly due to abortion-related fights. So it hasn’t kept up with inflation or population growth. As a result, Stewart says, “millions and millions of Americans in need of publicly funded family planning services today are not getting access to family planning services.”
But Helen Alvare, a law professor at George Mason University, says she thinks there may be yet another reason why widespread use of birth control hasn’t brought down the rate of unintended pregnancy more dramatically – something economists call risk compensation.
“If you lower the cost of things, people will buy more of it,” she says. So “if you lower the cost of uncommitted sexual encounters, you completely dissociate sex from pregnancy and birth and a lifetime of child care. People will engage in more uncommitted sexual encounters.”
And because birth control is not perfect, and people don’t use it perfectly or consistently, she says, that will result in more unintended pregnancies.
Still, the question remains, why is it only now that objections to birth control are being raised in public? John Green, a political science professor who studies religion and politics at the University of Akron, says he thinks it has a lot to do with the recent battles over federal spending in general, and the new health law in particular.
“I think for a lot of conservative activists, it’s almost as if a bit of a threshold has been crossed in the debate,” he said. “Because they believe that at least in this area, the public sector has become a little larger than it should be and is threatening some of the basic values that they hold.”
But while calls to end federal funding for contraception may be on the rise, the public remains strongly on the other side, at least for now. A survey released last week by the Kaiser Family Foundation found two-thirds of respondents in favor of the new requirement for insurance plans to offer prescription birth control without a copay or deductible.
Margaret Sanger founded the American Birth Control League in 1921 to ensure every woman possesses the power and freedom to prevent pregnancy if she chooses. Ninety years later, this country has taken the next imperative step toward Sanger’s goal.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recently approved new guidelines requiring health insurance plans to cover the entire cost of preventative services like birth control and voluntary sterilizations. This will take effect Aug. 1, 2012, according to an article on CNN.com.
Before arguments ensue, this column is not encouraging premarital sex. However, we must not be ignorant. No matter how much we pay in taxes toward sex education classes for children as young as kindergartners, intercourse outside of wedlock will occur. But, this new legislation will make the inevitable a little easier to manage.
The rationale behind free birth control is obvious — avoid unwanted pregnancies. In 2006, there were 2 million publicly funded births, 51 percent of which were results of unwanted pregnancies. This alone accounted for $11 billion in costs out of the public’s pocket, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Yes, there will be initial costs for providing these preventative services, but that is chump change compared to the $11 billion that could be saved if more people had feasible access to contraceptives.
While the topic of birth control often leads to a heated religious debate, we must set down our Bibles and look toward the logistics. In 2000, there were an estimated 1.3 million legal abortions performed in the U.S., a number that steadily has grown since Roe v. Wade in 1973, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Free birth control leads to fewer unwanted pregnancies, which leads to fewer abortions. This should be something all people, regardless of religious affiliation, look toward as positive. I don’t think anyone is pro-abortion, just pro-choice. Therefore, this new insurance plan allows for the best of both worlds.
There is more to the battle against birth control besides just the issue of abortion, though. Take the Duggar family from the well-known TLC show “19 Kids and Counting.” Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar are fundamentalists who have decided to let God control how many children they have. Have a big family if you so choose, but shouldn’t there be a limit? When your 19th child was born via emergency C- section weighing only 1 lb. and spent the first 6 months of her life on a ventilator due to a life-threatening illness, do you honestly think you’ll get that lucky next time? Michelle Duggar was lucky to survive the birth, much less her daughter.
The Duggar family is a rare case, not because they don’t believe in contraceptives, but because they have the financial stability to afford raising 19 children and the hospital fees that accompany such close calls. Not everyone is that fortunate. That’s why every woman deserves to be on birth control if she chooses, despite financial limitations.
Yes, there are “natural” ways to avoid unwanted pregnancies. My high school religion teachers made sure I was well aware of this fact. Practices such as natural family planning — where a woman refrains from intercourse while ovulating — exist, but they rarely are reliable. The only true way to avoid an unwanted pregnancy is abstinence. It’s easy to say that to a teenager, but what about a married woman? She already has four kids and is living below the poverty line. She can’t afford to raise another child, much less afford to be on birth control. Is she supposed to just give up sex with her husband?
It doesn’t seem fair. Lucky for women, someone else decided it wasn’t right either, and a year from now, the size of your pocketbook won’t inhibit your sex life.
Molly Skyles is a senior communication major from St. Louis, Mo.
99% of all American women use birth control at some point in their lives. Recently, Kirsten Moore from the Reproductive Health Technologies Project got an iPhone and it caused her to wonder why there’s more innovation for the iPhone than their is for birth control. Here are her thoughts on it.
Lately, there’s been a lot of chat about how it’s “unfair” for people who oppose birth control to be required to pay for said coverage with their premiums. Well, Amy Johnson from the Federal Way Mirror, wrote a great opinion piece about why that opposition shouldn’t matter to the government. You can find it here, and I hope you enjoy it, too!
