NYT Editorial on Contraception Just Doesn’t Get It
A New York Times editorial this morning is unsurprisingly myopic in dealing with contraceptives and the Catholic Church. Let’s look at the major points:
The Obama administration made the right call in August when it issued new standards requiring all insurers to cover contraceptives without a deductible or a co-payment, starting next year.
Fair enough. At least we know where this is headed.
The new rules already exempt churches and other religious institutions from having to provide contraceptive coverage for their employees.
So what more could they ask for, right?
Nevertheless, church leaders are calling for an expansive exemption for all employees of Catholic hospitals, charitable organizations, elementary and secondary schools, and colleges and universities. That would, in effect, deny coverage for contraceptives for millions of women who may not be Catholic and may disagree with the church’s stance on birth control.
But those women chose to work for a Catholic institution which makes no secret of its opposition to artificial contraceptives. To suddenly refuse a religious institution to operate according to its beliefs is a blatant violation of religious freedom.
Some opponents of contraceptives are pushing to allow all employers to opt out of providing contraceptives coverage if it offends their conscience.
How dare they! Since when should “conscience” be an important objection to anything?
At a House subcommittee hearing last week,
Jon O’Brien, the president of Catholics for Choice, testified that 98 percent of sexually active Catholic women in the United States have used a form of contraception banned by the Vatican.
So even Catholics don’t obey the bastion of medieval backwardness known as the Vatican! Why should anyone else listen, then?
He criticized the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops for doing the very thing that it wrongly accuses the administration of doing: trying to impede “the religious freedom of millions of Americans” by “taking reproductive health care options away from everybody.”
[Insert cheers and applause here.] Yeah, that’ll show ‘em!
Sarcasm aside, the implication here is an insidious one. It is disingenuous to suggest, as O’Brien does, that this is merely a question of the Catholic Church violating women’s religious freedom. The logical consequence of his position is that a woman’s right to affordable contraception should trump a religious organization’s right to act according to its beliefs. And this, in turn, is a logical consequence of the idea that one’s religion should never have any measurable effect on anyone else’s life. Believe whatever you wish to believe — in Jesus, in Allah, or in the Flying Spaghetti Monster — but never let it stray into the public square. If people are not free to act according to the ethical implications of their beliefs, then religious freedom has become devoid of meaning. So, in reality, the Bishops’ Conference is absolutely correct that the responsibility for violating religious freedom lies with the administration.
Finally,
The administration’s policy on birth control coverage follows the recommendation of the National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Medicine, which studied the medical facts, including high rates of unintended pregnancy and abortion largely caused by lack of access to birth control. President Obama should stand by the policy.
So. If the above careful and thorough argumentation were insufficient to convince you, here’s some science. But this merely sidesteps the issue: the Catholic objection to contraceptives is not practical but moral. Hence the whole “religious freedom” thing.
If the New York Times is genuinely concerned about the availability of contraceptives, then it should advocate more funding for those organizations which do provide them. That would be a productive contribution to the debate. This editorial, however, oversimplifies the issue, implicitly misrepresents the Catholic position, and thereby short-circuits useful discussion.
November 6, 2011 at 15.31
While I don’t disagree with your objections to this editorial (catholic misrepresentation, simplification and all), I thought I would point out that the issue is not so much about availability of contraceptives, as insurance coverage of the cost of those contraceptives.
The recommendations don’t force catholic hospitals to provide contraceptives, but are rather about whether these catholic institutions should offer health insurance to their employees that provides coverage that includes them. So I don’t think anyone is saying that those employees wouldn’t have places to get them from, but that they wouldn’t be able to afford them. (And if you do the research, prescription contraceptives can cost around $1000 a year or more even with most current health insurance plans.)
Now that doesn’t necessarily make a catholic institution’s conscientious objection invalid. (And I’m obviously not a fan of the government intervention from any standpoint, regardless of the issue around contraceptives themselves) But it does make me wonder what the current state of affairs is in those institutions. Especially since (I believe I’m correct here) the catholic church allows the use of prescription contraceptive medicine for other non-contraceptive-intent medical needs. Do they offer health insurance plans that explicitly deny coverage for those particular class of drugs? How are those who may need them for the “valid” reasons under catholic teaching treated? It does seem more nuanced when the issue (in the eyes of the catholic church) is not the medicine themselves (unlike abortion for example) but rather the “intent” of those using the medicine.
And the whole additional factor of non-Catholics working for catholic institutions is also an interesting factor. On the one hand I can understand why they would not what to “fund” things they would hold as against their beliefs. But on the other hand if they don’t have an issuing hiring people who don’t share their beliefs (And thus “funding” any number of non-catholic activities through their salaries) it can be hard to see what makes this different. (But maybe the only reason they hire non-Catholics is because legally they can’t discriminate, I don’t know.)
So anyway… The government shouldn’t have anything to do with what employers cover or don’t cover in their health insurance. And that would solve all the problems.
November 6, 2011 at 16.06
Tori, thanks for the clarification. I’ve edited the post a bit to make it more clear. Right, the Church’s objection to contraceptives (as far as I understand) has to do with their use, not with anything inherent in them.
I think there’s a distinction, though, between Catholic institutions directly funding things which contradict official Church teaching (like contraceptives) and their non-Catholic employees buying contraceptives for themselves or donating money to organizations which oppose the Church. In the latter case, the Church isn’t responsible for how people choose to spend their salaries; its responsibility ends when the paycheck is cashed. Otherwise, they’d have to make sure that anyone doing any kind of work for the Church was Catholic (janitors, construction crews, etc.).
And ultimately, yes, all of this would go away if the government stopped messing with things that it shouldn’t.