Contracepting Conscience
This article first appeared at PublicDiscourse.com.
by Helen Alvaré
The new, pro-contraceptive recommendations by the Institute of Medicine endanger the health and well-being of women.
Richard John Neuhaus once commented that the “philosophes” of the French Revolution would turn over in their graves to discover how the Catholic Church had become the chief defender of the place of reason in the public square in the late 20th century. Today in the 21st century it is the feminist revolutionaries of the 1960s who are squirming in their rocking chairs as the Catholic Church dares to defy “the establishment” to stand for the freedom of women and of conscientious objection to federal mandates.
The greatest attack on women’s freedom is last week’s recommendation by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) that the new health care law should mandate “the full range of FDA-approved contraceptive methods [and] sterilization procedures” as “preventive services.” This means that every health insurance plan must provide these services without co-pays or deductibles. “Grandfathered” employer plans are exempted, but these lose their “grandfathered” status if the plans are significantly changed; HHS estimates that by 2013, about 88 million Americans’ preventive services coverage will be affected by federal decisions. The Secretary of Health and Human Services has solicited IOM’s recommendations and will render a final decision August 1.
Cardinal Daniel DiNardo of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops responded immediately that the new threat to religious conscience posed by this recommendation fails women. He noted further that the “FDA-approved” category includes even abortion-inducing methods (such as Ella), and that IOM’s report appeared to be driven by ideology, not science or care for women’s health.
If you want to give new meaning to the word “outsider” in Washington today, identify yourself prominently as a conscientious objector to birth control as a tool in the “war against unintended pregnancy.” A giant federal health care bureaucracy becomes your enemy. So does one of its closest collaborators, the self-described champion of all things female, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. The IOM’s report gave Planned Parenthood everything it lobbied for—even the opinion that abortion, too, is a form of preventive health care, but one that the IOM believed it could not recommend in light of extant law.
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Thanks so much for a very helpful, insightful article. The new HHS regulations do serve to perpetuate a mindset & approach to women’s health demonstrated to be self-destructive on a number of different levels.
May I pick on a small issue of word usage? I cringe when I hear Christians use the term, “Committed Relationship” or anything close in a postive way. The term has been coined & used as an appositive to “Marriage”: “Oh, how can you call what we’re doing ‘fornication'(, ‘sodomy’, etc)? We don’t need to be ‘married’ we’re in a ‘committed relationship.'” This term has at best fluid parameters and can be used to justify any kind of dalliance. A recent spoof video, “Cohabitation Vows” had as part of the monologue, “Just because it doesn’t last doesn’t mean it wasn’t special.”
As Christians I don’t think it’s out-of-bounds to insist on genital sexual activity being licit only within the context of authentic marriage. I don’t find it helpful to cede legitimacy (much pun intended) to the term, “Committed Relationship.”
What do you think?
Agree, Father. I am also very sad to see contraceptives and sterilization called “prevention.” Who wants to “prevent” children but old hairy legs himself? Maybe what we need in the church is more children’s choirs. I loved singing in the choir as a child, and I love seeing and hearing children sing now that I am an adult.
I married the son of a minister and assumed a minister’s family would love children. Wrong!
Wrong! Wrong! I had to beg my husband for the second child, then I was hounded into being sterilized by his mother. How many tears I have cried over such a terrible loss. As soon as I was sterilized, my husband lost interest in me. Without the graces given through my subsequent conversion to the Catholic Faith, our two children would be fatherless. I never could have survived the feelings of loneliness and emotional abandonment without knowing Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament.
Wow, Cathy. What an awesome story, though I am so sorry you had to go through what you did.
Thanks for sharing.
@Fr. Fizzlewit
I agree. The state benefits and people benefit by saying unmarried sex is illicit, and only married sex is licit. We don’t need to start arresting people of course, but it’s good to have a fornication law on the books just so as to not cede legitimacy of marriage. Marriage establishes the consent that makes sex licit, without official witnessed consent sex should be understood to be a crime of fornication, which is a sort of rape, it’s non-consensual sexual intercourse, unless there is official witnessed and established consent. Consent is impossible when there are “fluid parameters” such that one can’t know what is being consented to. Marriage, and all the body of laws around it, makes consent possible and sex licit.
I agree with this as well.
“We don’t need to start arresting people of course, but it’s good to have a fornication law on the books just so as to not cede legitimacy of marriage.”
What would be the point? Fornication laws are unconstitutional.
Fornication laws are not unconstitutional, there is no right to have sexual intercourse except in marriage, where there is certainly a right to have sexual intercourse. Saying fornication laws are unconstitutional is like saying that marriage is unconstitutional. I know Virginia’s court overturned their fornication law based on Lawrence, but remember the Virginia supreme court has been wrong before.
Lawrence was not about sexual intercourse at all, or marriage. What was prohibited by Texas had very different public implications (ie, no babies ever result, and it was something that was a practiced by a class of people). Lawrence did mention marriage, however, when it stated that marriage is “about the right to have sexual intercourse”, though of course not “just” or “simply” about that right, which would indeed be demeaning to the other aspects of a marriage such as mutual care and commitment. But for something to not be “just” or “simply” about something, it has to first of all be about that something, for it to then be about more than that. If it wasn’t understood by the court to be about the right to have sexual intercourse, the “just” and “simply” wouldn’t make sense.
And the point of having the law on the books would be to remind people that unmarried sex is not expected or approved behavior, there is no right to do it or expect someone else to do it. It would empower people to say “no”, or to not think they were supposed to have sex. It would also remind people that marriage is about the right to have sexual intercourse and they should marry before if they really want to have sex and consider carefully who they want to have sex with. Having the law on the books would not cede legitimacy to “committed relationships” or drunken one-night stands.
The article states “the greatest attack on women’s freedom is last week’s recommendation by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) that the new health care law should mandate ‘the full range of FDA-approved contraceptive methods [and] sterilization procedures’ as ‘preventive services.'” While I understand the author’s disgust at this, I don’t understand how it is an affront to women’s freedom. Women aren’t being forced to do anything against their will. Rather, women would have uninhibited access to certain procedures. Even if insurance plans have to provide contraceptive services, women are still free to reject them. Regardless of the morality of those procedures and whether they conflict with the Church, this is an expansion of women’s freedom.