Majority Of Catholics Believe Employers Should Cover Birth Control
More than 150 Catholic bishops have criticized President Barack Obama’s approval of a law that will require religious organizations to provide contraception coverage in employees’ insurance offerings.
But a new study by the Public Religion Research Institute shows that Catholics overwhelmingly support the new rules. The poll reveals that six out of ten Catholics believe employers should be required to provide their employees with healthcare plans that cover contraception, while 55 percent of Americans at large supported the new requirement.
White evangelicals opposed the new regulation more than any other religious group, with 56 percent saying it imposed on religious freedom.
Nearly 75 percent of Democrats approve of the new reform while only 36 percent of Republicans support it.
The new law is part of the president’s healthcare overhaul, and will make it mandatory for religious colleges, non-profits and hospitals to offer employees insurance packages that include contraception coverage. While some organizations will be granted an adjustment period, eventual failure to provide coverage to employees could result in penalties
A large proportion of Catholics polled did say, however, that the government should not require churches to provide their employees with insurance covering birth control.
Nearly three quarters of white evangelicals also agreed that churches should remain exempt from the new law.
By: Lauren Fox, Washington Whispers, U. S. News and World Report, February 7, 2012
Mitt Romney And The GOP’s War On Birth Control
The night of the Florida Republican primary, Hotline National editor Josh Kraushaar (@HotlineJosh) Tweeted, “Romney line about religious liberty CLEAR reference to Obama health law on contraceptives. Sleeper issue in general.”
With the Colorado Republican caucuses on Tuesday, I can only respond, “Oh please oh please oh please.”
Here’s the real question: How much will former Gov. Mitt Romney and the Republican Party’s hostility to birth control cost them with voters, especially women voters, in the fall?
This is not about religion. This is about a Republican party actively campaigning against contraception, something that is enormously popular with the electorate. I would love nothing more than Mitt Romney going around the country telling voters he wants to take their birth control away, which he’s pretty much doing already. Seriously dude, bring it.
According to the Center for Disease Control, 99 percent of American women use birth control during their reproductive lifetime. According to a Reuters report on a Guttmacher Institute study, 98 percent of sexually active Catholic women use some form of birth control banned by the church. And a NPR/Thompson Reuters poll found that 77 percent of Americans favor insurance coverage for the birth control pill.
In swing state Colorado, there are approximately 114,000 more women voters than men, and they vote in higher percentages than men do. Personhood measures that would ban birth control have failed repeatedly by landslide margins, and the 2010 version probably cost Ken Buck a Senate seat. Personhood even failed in Mississippi, the most religious-conservative state in the country.
Meanwhile all the Republican candidates are actively campaigning against Title X and family planning funding. A plank in the Republican platform upholds the “life begins at conception” foundation of “personhood”, which would ban the most commonly-used forms of contraception such as the Pill and IUDs. Mitt Romney has repeatedly embraced “personhood”, most notably in 2005 when he vetoed a bill expanding access to emergency contraception for rape survivors “because it would terminate a living embryo after conception”.
For those of you, like Mitt Romney, unsure how birth control works and why “personhood” would ban it Rachel Maddow goes into the Man Cave to explain it all to you.
As for the Obama administration’s decision that Catholic institutions have a year to figure out how to include birth control in their insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act, Rep. Xavier Becerra, a Catholic, explained it beautifully on Meet the Press: Religious employers, like any other business that offers insurance, can’t discriminate against women by excluding reproductive healthcare.
Anyone who doubts the power of contraception and women’s healthcare as an issue need only see the blowback against the Komen foundation by supporters of Planned Parenthood. I’ve been in politics for 20 years, and I’ve never seen a public fusillade like this one. Komen badly underestimated not only how many Americans have used Planned Parenthood’s services—1 in 5—but how many people support Planned Parenthood because they provide healthcare, including birth control, without judgment.
The pundit class piled on George Stephanopoulos for asking a question about contraception at the January ABC News debate. Apparently since it didn’t fit within the Cool Kids Acceptable Topics list, it wasn’t worth asking. And Romney fumbled the question badly, just as badly as he did the question on releasing his taxes. It was the rhetorical equivalent of strapping the dog kennel to the top of his car.
But it’s entirely worth asking for the millions of average American working families who get by on $50,000 a year and can’t afford to have another kid. It’s entirely relevant to millions of American women whose economic and physical well-being is dictated by when and if they get pregnant. Self-determining the size of your family is a baseline economic issue.
Mitt Romney and the Republicans are welcome to campaign against contraception all they want, because they are on the wrong side of that issue with voters by a landslide.
By: Laura Chapin, U. S. News and World Report, February 6, 2012
Rick Santorum Is Coming For Your Birth Control
Here is an actual Rick Santorum quote: “One of the things I will talk about, that no president has talked about before, is I think the dangers of contraception in this country.” And also, “Many of the Christian faith have said, well, that’s okay, contraception is okay. It’s not okay. It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”
These comments were not dug up from some bygone moment of ideological purity, before dreams of a presidential campaign. He said them in October, to a blogger at CaffeinatedThoughts.com (they met at Des Moines’ Baby Boomers Cafe).
It’s pretty basic: Rick Santorum is coming for your contraception. Any and all of it. And while he may not be alone in his opposition to non-procreative sex, he is certainly the most honest about it — as he himself acknowledged in the interview.
This is important, because while reproductive rights are always cast in terms of pro or against a woman’s right to an abortion and in what circumstances, even liberals are surprised to find out what social conservatives really want to do about contraception. Liberals are even willing to cast the proposed defunding of Planned Parenthood and all Title X programs (a position that has become mainstream in Republican circles) as an abortion issue, when it is actually about contraception. (The Hyde Amendment already bans almost all federal abortion funding.) So is this about “babies” or is this about sex? Rick Santorum isn’t even pretending it’s (only) about childbearing.
Speaking to ABC News’ Jake Tapper, Santorum recently reaffirmed his opposition to Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 Supreme Court decision that struck down a ban on discussing or providing contraception to married couples, and established a right to privacy that would later be integral to Roe v. Wade and Lawrence v. Texas. (It is generally better-known how Santorum feels about gay people.) That would be the case where the majority asked, “Would we allow the police to search the sacred precincts of marital bedrooms for telltale signs of the use of contraceptives? The very idea is repulsive to the notions of privacy surrounding the marriage relationship.” Rick Santorum disagrees. He thinks, using the currently popular states’ rights parlance, that “the state has a right to do that, I have never questioned that the state has a right to do that. It is not a constitutional right, the state has the right to pass whatever statues they have.” This is a view Santorum has held at least since 2003.
The trouble with this is that not only have more than 99 percent of sexually active women used at least one form of birth control, helping people get access to birth control is actually a popular issue. According to a June survey by the Public Religion Research Institute, 82 percent of Americans actually want to expand access to birth control for women who cannot afford it, while only 16 percent were opposed.
Santorum isn’t alone. Five of the current or former Republican presidential candidates signed the Personhood Pledge (though unlike Santorum, Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul added some caveats to their support). Mitt Romney told Mike Huckabee he’d support an amendment saying life begins at conception — which Personhood folks interpret as the fertilization of an egg, meaning that contraceptives like the IUD and sometimes even the pill are murderous. (Good luck figuring out what Romney actually thinks on that one.)
Santorum just happens to be happiest putting it at the top of the agenda. In the Caffeinated Thoughts video, he promises that “all those issues are going to be front and center with me,” and says, ”I know most presidents don’t talk about these things and maybe people don’t want us to talk about these things. But I think it’s important that you are who you are… these are important public policy issues.” Among those important public policy issues: Sex for fun. In the same video, Santorum bemoans sex becoming “deconstructed to the point where it’s simply pleasure.”
Many people don’t want them to talk about these things because it shows the true colors of what social conservatives wish for this country, which is very different from what Americans wish for themselves. Maybe the near-win in Iowa yesterday is the end of the road for Santorum, and maybe no one will ever succeed by openly suggesting a contraception ban that would send the condom police into America’s bedrooms. But that’s clearly the world Santorum wants, and it’s one that is entirely consistent with the antiabortion movement’s goals. That would be the same movement that over the past year decided it had a mandate in states across the country, the same one that demanded endless obeisance from the Republican candidates in Iowa this year — and mostly got it.
By: Irin Carmon, Salon, January 4, 2012
Restrictions On Birth Control Hurt Everyone
Restricting women’s access to birth control hurts everyone. It hurts women by limiting their ability to get an education or become self-sufficient, and risks their health when they can’t plan or space their pregnancies. It hurts children born into families not ready or able to care for them. And it hurts families by robbing them of the ability to decide whether and when to have a child.
That is why independent physicians, nurses, and other health professionals agree that providing access to contraception is good medical and economic policy. And yet – surprisingly – birth control is under attack. Anti-women groups, and some members of Congress, are pressuring the Administration to roll back some of provisions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The ACA guarantees access to important preventive health services without expensive co-pays. This includes contraception for women. But if anti-women forces get their way, thousands of employers will be allowed to refuse to cover contraceptives in their employer-sponsored health plans. These forces are attempting to directly interfere with the individual health needs of millions of women by limiting the type of care they can get.
A woman already knows how important family planning is to her health and well-being. She knows that the decision of whether and when to have a child is extremely personal, and she makes that decision based on many factors, including: her age, the presence of a partner, the size of her family, her physical and mental health, and her personal values.
A woman knows that if she has a chronic disease, pregnancy prevention is critical in reducing poor birth outcomes. She knows, for example, that she risks her health and the health of her fetus if she has diabetes and becomes pregnant before getting her glucose levels under control. She knows that if her blood pressure is uncontrolled during pregnancy, she could develop Pre-Eclampsia, a condition that can require immediate delivery even if the fetus is not full-term. And she knows that if she becomes pregnant while taking any number of commonly prescribed medications contra-indicated for pregnancy, fetal development may be impaired.
That’s why women overwhelmingly support birth control. Indeed, contraceptive use is nearly universal: 99 percent of women 15-44 years of age who have ever had sexual intercourse with a male have used at least one contraceptive method. The overwhelming majority of sexually active women of all religious denominations who do not want to become pregnant are using a contraceptive method.
Refusal clauses fly in the face of women’s needs, scientific evidence, and medical standards of care. Refusal clauses undermine and ignore the personalized decisions that all people make about their health.
The Administration should respect the decisions of women and their families, and hold firm on its commitment to improve the health of all Americans by basing its health care decisions on science and medical practice – not politics.
By: Emily Spitzer, National Health Law Program, The Hill Congress Blog, November 24, 2011
Gov Rick Perry’s Abysmal Record On Women’s Health
If you’re a woman from Texas—or indeed, any woman—there’s a lot to dislike about Gov. Rick Perry.
The vanity. The boorishness. The belief you’re too stupid to make your own medical decisions. The weird resemblance to Animal House’s Niedermeyer in his college photo.
Perry reminds me of the scene in Thelma and Louise in which Thelma (Geena Davis) says of her n’er-do-well husband, “He kind of prides himself on being infantile.” Louise (Susan Sarandon) responds, “He’s got a lot to be proud of.”
So as we all prepare for the media barrage surrounding Perry’s presidential announcement on Saturday, and in tradition of my idol Molly Ivins, I’m going to start a new group, Texas Women Enraged by Rick Perry—TWERP for short.
As TWERP’s organizer, I feel obliged to point out that on a practical level, Rick Perry has made it pretty lousy for women in Texas, especially for women at the bottom of the economic ladder. He’s also made it pretty lousy for anybody who doesn’t look like him. As Eileen Smith wrote in the Texas Observer, “In just one session, Republicans managed to screw children, women, gays, immigrants, teachers, the elderly, Hispanics, the unemployed and the uninsured. The only people who got off easy were white guys. Can’t imagine why.”
The numbers tell the tale. Texas is dead last in the number of non-elderly women without health insurance, and 6th nationally in the percentage of women in poverty, according to the Texas Legislative Study Group. One in five Texas children lack health insurance, the highest rate in the nation. And if that weren’t bad enough, Perry tried to opt out of Medicaid, which provides healthcare to the most vulnerable Texas populations, including pregnant women and children.
When it comes to reproductive healthcare, the state budget guts family planning, leaving 284,000 Texas women without birth control or access to basic reproductive healthcare. This will also likely increase the abortion rate, sonograms or no sonograms. And of course there’s the standard right wing assault on Planned Parenthood. Women needing prenatal care fare no better.
As reported in the Texas Tribune, “Texas has the worst rate of pregnant women receiving prenatal care in the first trimester, according to the report commissioned by the Legislative Study Group…And though Texas has the highest percent of its population without health insurance, the state is 49th in per capita spending on Medicaid, and dead last in per capita spending on mental health, according to the report.”
So if you’re a working class Texas woman, Rick Perry doesn’t want you to have access to birth control or reproductive healthcare to prevent unintended pregnancy, but once you’re pregnant the state mandates a sonogram and a lecture to convince you of the error of your ways. After that sonogram and lecture, if you need prenatal care, you’re SOL. And once the baby is born, Texas is 47th in monthly benefit payments under the Women, Infants, & Children program, which provides nutrition assistance.
This is Rick Perry’s vision for women in the United States. Limited healthcare, little birth control, low income women and kids left to fend for themselves, a bunch of bureaucrats telling you what to do—and the very real human suffering that goes along with it. TWERP might be an understatement.
By: Laura Chapin, U. S. News and World Report, August 11, 2011
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