Contraception and Healthcare Rights
Contraception does not respond to an authentic healthcare need, and the state acts untruthfully and beyond its legitimate authority when it mandates contraception coverage.
In the drama of our recent debt crisis, a key announcement from the Department of Health and Human Services received inadequate attention: from now on, contraceptives (including the morning-after pill) and sterilization are to be considered “preventative” medicine and will be entirely covered, along with other forms of preventative medicine, by insurance policies, without co-pay.
Many religious leaders and academics worried that the new healthcare regulations would inadequately address the conscience concerns of religiously affiliated healthcare institutions. The worries about conscience were well-founded. While the new regulations provide exemptions for religious healthcare institutions, those exemptions are exceedingly narrowly drawn, and only apply to those institutions that primarily employ and serve those who share the religious tenets of the institution. This requirement will, it seems, effectively rule out most religious healthcare facilities, which, after all, serve all comers, and not just co-religionists.
So, how should religiously affiliated institutions respond? They should, no doubt, continue to argue that the regulations violate freedom of conscience and attempt to expand relevant exemptions. But they must not overlook a more fundamental problem. By treating the provision of contraceptives as a necessary part of the political common good, these regulations create a political entitlement to contraceptives, a right that has never been part of our collective self-understanding as a nation.
The ground for claiming a political right to contraceptives and sterilization comes out of a more general idea underlying the recent attempt at reforming healthcare, which is this: it is reasonable to make affordable healthcare, including preventative care, a political entitlement for people who are unable to obtain it themselves. That idea strikes me as fundamentally correct. We can grasp that healthcare, broadly defined as access to medical interventions, drugs, and technologies, is essential to the preservation of life and bodily integrity, and proper organ functioning. Death, not far from those who are seriously diseased or disabled, brings an end to human existence and well-being–the focal points of health. And to be healthy enables one not only to thrive physically, but also to pursue all kinds of other opportunities. So health, and thus healthcare, is centrally important to human life.
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