In the news and making the news
December 5th, 2013
by Helen Alvare
It’s been a raucous week of exchanges on the HHS Mandate since the Supreme Court accepted the Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood cases! Here’s what’s been happening:
1. USA Today published my editorial making a “female” case for religious freedom. Yeah for our cause!
2. Supporters of the “women’s-freedom-means-no-children” agenda, however, seem very angry that women like us and religions like ours will not just sit down and shut up.
- So, the ACLU is suing the U.S. Catholic bishops as a body, claiming that their health care directives harm women.
- A Daily Beast editorial claims that the Mandate is necessary from both “public health” and “economic” standpoints…because everybody knows contraception is cheaper than kids!
- And the NYTimes’ Supreme Court reporter took me on by name to claim that my scholarship represents religion fighting a losing war against modernity.
- I have written a response to the NYTimes…but gee, they haven’t written me back!!
my response:
Linda Greenhouse misreads my research on the contraceptive mandate, and I’m sorry she does; both of us need to grapple with things as they are in order to serve women well. Ms. Greenhouse suggests that we disagree about whether many Catholics use contraception or adults should enjoy sex without conception, but we don’t. My work rather highlights what many women think, and empirical data shows: when we completely forget that sex is responsible for human existence, something important is lost. Relationships, stability, even romance, falter. A “sex without kids” agenda easily replaces things women need more, like paid family leave, a living wage, and a healthy marriage culture. Women, especially poor women, suffer the worst effects. How else to explain their skyrocketing rates of abortion and unintended pregnancies over the last 40 years of free contraception programs? Women are free to buy and use all the contraception they want. Religious people ask only for the chance to live their convictions that point to a more holistic (and beautiful) view of sex. Women will be the worse off if the state silences this witness and ongoing debate.
Yes, it’s frustrating to see one article for us, and umpteen articles (as usual) for the opposing argument…but we press on until everyone is perfectly clear that there IS a competing argument on behalf of women’s rights that does NOT begin and end with sex-without-relationship!
Can you please write a letter to the editor or editorial for your paper?? Feel free to borrow talking points from my USAToday article or my response to the NYTimes. And of course, all our past fact sheets for you are on our website. Remember, they can be loud at the top, but real change starts local…
Onward, yes!?
Best to you, and affectionately,
Helen
Loading ...
