Denying Women Coverage Under Any Guise Is A Big Step Backward
Maybe you saw the pictures. Five middle-age men seated at a congressional hearing table to discuss freedom of religion and contraception. And not a single woman was on the panel. Unbelievable. Do you think Congress would ever have a hearing on prostate cancer and only have women speak? Of course not.
Washington is so out of touch with what’s happening to families across this country that the Senate is about to vote on an amendment that would allow any insurance company or any employer to claim a vague “moral conviction’’ as an excuse to deny you health care coverage. Here’s the really astonishing news: Senator Scott Brown is not only voting for this amendment, he is fighting to get it passed.
What does this mean? If you are married and your employer doesn’t believe married couples should use birth control, then you could lose coverage for contraception. If you’re a pregnant woman who is single, and your employer doesn’t like it, you could be denied maternity care. This bill is about how to cut coverage for basic health care services for women.
Let’s be clear what this proposed law is not about: This is not about Catholic institutions or the rights of Catholics to follow their faith. President Obama has already made sure religious institutions will not be forced to cover contraception – at the same time that he has made sure women can get the health care they need directly from their health care insurers. Carol Keehan, the president and CEO of Catholic Health Association, said that Obama’s approach “protects the religious liberty and conscience rights of Catholic institutions.’’
I support Obama’s solution because I believe we must respect people of all religious faiths, while still ensuring that women have access to contraceptives. Brown has rejected this compromise. Instead, he has cosponsored a bill that will let any employer or any insurance company cut off contraceptive care, maternity care, or whatever they want, and leave women without coverage at all for this basic medical care. This bill is about how to cut coverage for basic health care services for women.
It is shocking that in 2012, Brown and his Republican colleagues would try to pass a law to threaten women’s access to birth control and other health care. Women all across this Commonwealth should have the right to use birth control if they want to. Giving corporate CEOs and insurance companies the power to dictate what health care women can and cannot get is just wrong. Those decisions should be up to women and their doctors.
Our goal should be to ensure that everyone has access to affordable, high-quality health care. At a time when families are struggling with the costs of health care, we should be trying to strengthen our health care system – not finding ways to create loopholes that threaten the rights of women to obtain the health care they need.
Massachusetts has been a leader in every aspect of health care: increasing access, reducing costs, and engaging in the innovations and research that make higher quality care better. We need to keep moving forward – not take a big step backward.
By: Elizabeth Warren, Democratic Candidate for US Senate (MA), published in The Boston Globe, February 24, 2012-
Utah House Passes Bill To Allow Schools To Skip Sex Education
A bill to allow Utah schools to drop sex education classes — and prohibit instruction in the use of contraception in those that keep the courses — moved significantly closer to becoming law Wednesday. The House passed HB363 by a 45-28 vote after a late-afternoon debate that centered largely on lawmakers’ differing definitions of morality.
“We’ve been culturally watered down to think we have to teach about sex, about having sex and how to get away with it, which is intellectually dishonest,” said bill sponsor Rep. Bill Wright, R-Holden. “Why don’t we just be honest with them upfront that sex outside marriage is devastating?”
It was a viewpoint that met with equal conviction from those opposed to the bill.
“You cannot speak of abstinence without talking to students about methods of birth control that are not certain, about protecting oneself from [sexually transmitted diseases] and all the things that can happen in a negative sense to a young person who engages in sex ,” said Rep. Carol Spackman Moss, D-Holladay. “It’s really immoral not to teach kids about what the consequences are.”
Over the course of nearly an hour, lawmakers took turns trying to change the bill. Ultimately, the version the House passed would allow school districts to forgo teaching about sex altogether.
Lawmakers also, however, changed the bill on the House floor to prohibit schools that continue to teach sex education from instructing students in “the use of contraceptive methods or devices.” It was a change from the version that passed out of committee earlier this month that would have prohibited “instruction in the advocacy or encouragement of the use of contraceptive methods or devices.”
Wright said the version of the bill that passed Wednesday would prohibit instruction in contraception, although teachers could respond to student questions about the matter.
It would be a big shift from current law, which prohibits only the advocacy of contraceptive use. Current law requires high schools to teach sex education, allowing them to choose whether to simply stress abstinence or teach abstinence-only.
By: Lisa Schencker, The Salt Lake Tribune, February 22, 2012
“The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”: House Republicans To Democratic Committee On Women’s Health
First, House Democrats couldn’t get a woman onto the all-male panel at a contraception hearing last week.
Now, they’ve invited her to testify at their own unofficial hearing — and they say the Republicans won’t let them televise it.
House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi is organizing a Democratic Steering and Policy Committee event on Thursday to allow Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown University law student who tried to testify at last week’s House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing, a chance to talk about the issue.
Pelosi aides say the House recording studio has denied a request to broadcast the event, “apparently” at the behest of the Republican-controlled Committee on House Administration.
Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammill pointed to a July 2008 decision in which the committee lifted restrictions on use of the studio.
“If Chairman [Dan] Lungren has reversed this policy, he has done so in secret and not consulted with CHA Democrats,” Hammill said in an email. “This leaves us only to think that the House Republican leadership is acting out yet again to silence women on the topic of women’s health.”
Salley Wood, a spokeswoman for Republicans on the Committee on House Administration, said the policy wasn’t updated in 2008. Instead, she said the recording studio is operating under policies set in 2005.
Wood said the committee did not play a role in the decision not to broadcast this week’s hearing.
Pelosi’s office said this event is the first in which the studio has not covered a hearing or told Democrats that it couldn’t because of other commitments.
By: Jennifer Haberkorn, Politico, February 21, 2012
“Property Of The State”: For Women In Virginia, It’s All About Your Vagina
The Right’s War on Women really has become focused. It’s not just a general war on the gender, with trivial things like equal pay for equal work. No, it’s now reduced down the core. It’s all about your vagina.
For example, see CNN’s latest monster, Breitbart protege Dana Loesch. Commenting on the proposed Virginia law that would require women seeking abortions be forced to undergo vaginal penetration by an ultrasound-wand wielding health care professional, Loesch says that once a woman has had sex, consensual or not, she’s given up all say on what happens down there.
LOESCH: That’s the big thing that progressives are trying to say, that it’s rape and so on and so forth. […] There were individuals saying, “Oh what about the Virginia rape? The rapes that, the forced rapes of women who are pregnant?” What? Wait a minute, they had no problem having similar to a trans-vaginal procedure when they engaged in the act that resulted in their pregnancy.
Sorry non-virgins, all your vaginas belong to the state now. Hell, with this reasoning, if you’ve used a tampon you’ve pretty much given up control. It’s not just soulless, attention seeking gasbags saying so, it’s the state. Here’s what one Virginia lawmakersaid about the bill, as reported by Dahlia Lithwick.
During the floor debate on Tuesday, Del. C. Todd Gilbert announced that “in the vast majority of these cases, these [abortions] are matters of lifestyle convenience.” (He has since apologized.) Virginia Democrat Del. David Englin, who opposes the bill, has said Gilbert’s statement “is in line with previous Republican comments on the issue,” recalling one conversation with a GOP lawmaker who told him that women had already made the decision to be “vaginally penetrated when they got pregnant.” […]
There you go, women of America. If you’ve ever had sex, your vagina is fair game. You don’t get to say what happens to it now.
Can’t imagine why that’s such an unpopular idea in Virginia. It’s so unpopular, in fact, that the House has decided to put off consideration of it, at least for today.
By: Joan McCarter, Daily Kos, February 20, 2012
Will 2012 Be The Year Of The “Birth Control Moms”?
First came the soccer moms.
Then the security moms.
Will 2012 be the year of the “birth control moms”?
Just a few weeks ago, the notion would have seemed far-fetched. The country is deeply divided on abortion, but not on contraception; the vast majority of American women have used it, and access hasn’t been a front-burner political issue since the Supreme Court decided Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965.
But then Rick Santorum said states ought to have the right to outlaw the sale of contraception.
And Susan G. Komen for the Cure yanked its funding for Planned Parenthood.
And the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops teed off on President Barack Obama’s contraception policy.
And House Republicans invited a panel of five men — and no women — to debate the issue.
And a prominent Santorum supporter pined for the days when “the gals” put aspirin “between their knees” to ward off pregnancy.
Democratic strategist Celinda Lake says it’s enough to “really irritate” independent suburban moms and “re-engage” young, single women who haven’t tuned into the campaign so far.
And, she says, the stakes are high: Women backed Barack Obama in big numbers in 2008 but then swung right in 2010. If the president is to win reelection in 2012, he’ll need to win women back — and Lake and other Democrats see the GOP push on contraception as a gift that will make that easier.
“I feel like the world is spinning backwards,” said former Rep. Patricia Schroeder, who has often related the troubles she had as a young married law student getting her birth control prescriptions filled in the early 1960s. “If you had told me when I was in law school that this would be a debate in 2012, I would have thought you were nuts … And everyone I talk to thinks so, too.”
Jennifer Lawless, director of the Women and Politics Institute at American University, also sees the chance of a huge female backlash if the Republicans overreach.
“If women feel they are being targeted again, that women’s health is on the line — that’s not an argument you want to make in an election year,” she said.
Not so, says Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway, who’s advising Newt Gingrich. Voters understand that Republicans aren’t trying to come between women and the pill. They are fighting for constitutionally protected religious freedoms.
“This doesn’t inhibit any woman’s ability to access contraception,” Conway said. “The question is should we pay for it, and should conscientious objectors be forced to compromise their beliefs.”
And, she argued, Obama blundered by talking reproduction while American women want to hear about recovery. Voters see it as a distraction from jobs, jobs, jobs.
“Overreach and distraction can really sink his presidency,” Conway said. “Voters demand a course correction from either party when they see overreach — and in his case, course correction means losing reelection.”
How it plays out between now and November may depend on how long the debate lasts — and whether the contraception-access or religious-freedom frame prevails.
The conservatives on the other side say the fight is not about birth control or women’s health. It’s about morality and religious liberty under the Constitution. And that’s a basic American value that resonates with voters, they say.
“That’s about as fundamentally American as any principle I’m aware of,” Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) told reporters this week. Blunt is sponsoring legislation that would allow any employer to refuse to cover any health benefit on moral grounds — not just birth control or abortion, and not just employers like a school or hospital that have a formal religious affiliation.
Republicans are beginning to insert the religious freedom argument into some Senate races, particularly those where at least one candidate is a woman.
But Rep. Tammy Baldwin, who is running for Senate in Wisconsin, said the radio ads in her state won’t work. She told POLITICO that Wisconsin voters are probably still most concerned about the economy, but they’re also “aghast that, in 2012, birth control could even be an issue of contention.”
That social and political acceptance of contraception has translated into broader insurance coverage. Contraceptives are increasingly treated like any other drug, according to Usha Ranji, associate director of women’s health policy at the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation.
Many states require contraceptive coverage as a benefit, and federal employees plans have included it since 1998. A Kaiser-Health Research and Educational Trust survey found that four out five large employers covered birth control in 2010, and nearly two out of three smaller businesses did. Abortion coverage is much less common.
The trend toward greater birth control coverage for women was also given a jolt after Viagra became widely available and covered under health plans in the late 1990s. Women demanded pill parity.
Although there was some variation depending on how the question was worded, several recent opinion polls found considerable support, even among Catholics, for Obama’s policy to require employers to cover contraceptives as a preventive health care benefit while allowing exemptions for religious employers.
But the debate from here out isn’t about religious affiliates, such as a parochial school or Catholic hospital. It’s about broader opt-outs for individual employers, not just those with an institutional religious affiliation.
Blunt noted that there are many people who have moral objections to specific medical services. Vaccines and blood transfusions are examples.
But advocates of broader coverage requirements note that many people pay, directly or through tax dollars, for policies they disagree with.
Public programs like Medicaid finance contraception, as do federally funded clinics. Federal tax breaks go to all qualified employee health plans, no matter what women’s health provisions they include. And people pay for all sorts of policies they disagree with, whether it’s a war or an environmental regulation.
Ironically, Lawless noted, all the attention to contraception at the moment may end up boosting the overall public standing of the 2010 health care law. Free preventive health care, whether it’s a cancer screening or the pill, may well become as popular as provisions like allowing young adults to stay on their parents’ health plans until age 26.
“People understand this,” said Lawless. “They can say, ‘I get it. This helps me. This helps my daughter.’ They don’t understand things like a tax credit for student loan interest.”
So far, the contraception policy debate isn’t precipitating the kind of online outrage that prompted the Komen about-face on funding breast cancer screening by Planned Parenthood. Schroeder said that’s because women don’t, at the moment, perceive this debate as a threat. “You aren’t hearing women’s voices now because they know they are winning,” she said.
But if the current starts to run against them, Schroeder predicted, voices will be heard. And votes will be cast.
By: Joanne Kenen, Politico (Contribution by J. Lester Feder), February 18, 2012
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