“An Emboldened Anti-Choice Movement”: Republican Family Values Put Women’s Lives In Danger Worldwide
Last week, a committee in the US House of Representatives approved a spending bill that would slash funding for international family planning and reimpose a harmful policy that reduces contraceptive access and tramples on the rights of healthcare providers.
On Monday, the supreme court ruled that some US employers could deny employees access to birth control coverage if they claim a religious objection to contraception.
Is it just me, or do we seem to be in retreat? This latest disregard for women – in the US and overseas – is not unexpected, but it is certainly disappointing. In many ways, we have been fighting the same battle for the past 30 years. But the battle lines have shifted and, frequently, we have to struggle to retain hard-won ground.
When I started working on this issue in the early 80s, there was true, bipartisan support for family planning. Some of the most sincere anti-abortion Republicans realised that the consistent, commonsense public policy position for them to take would be to support overseas family planning funding. Better access to contraception would reduce unintended pregnancies and abortions, especially unsafe abortions.
The global gag rule, also known as the Mexico City Policy, was one of the first instances of the domestic anti-choice agenda interfering with the health and lives of women in developing countries. Introduced 30 years ago, during the Reagan administration, the policy bars foreign organisations that receive US family planning assistance from using their own private, non-US government funds to provide information, referrals, or services for legal abortion, or to advocate for the legalisation of abortion in their own countries.
Since it was introduced, the gag rule has been subject to the vagaries of US politics – imposed or kept in place by Republican presidents, and repealed by Democrat leaders. Though it was rescinded by President Obama on taking office in 2009, Republicans in the House have tried every year since to reinstate it.
Their efforts are testament to a rightward shift in US politics, including an emboldened anti-choice movement that has continued to gain political power. The middle has shrunk, the partisan divide has grown, and the Republicans being elected to Congress now are more extreme and bent on undermining women’s health and rights. Under the guise of “protecting the unborn”, the misguided policies they espouse threaten the health and lives of millions of women and families.
The US’s $610m contribution to international family planning and reproductive health in fiscal year 2014 helped 31 million women and couples receive contraceptive services and supplies. It prevented 7 million unintended pregnancies and 3 million abortions (2 million of them unsafe), and saved the lives of 13,000 women. In addition, 60,000 fewer children lost their mothers.
The fact is that family planning saves women’s lives. But in Washington these days, the facts do not matter. Last week Republicans on the House spending committee imposed a completely unnecessary cap on international family planning funding.
The House committee bill proposes cutting international family planning funding by $149m, almost 25% from current levels. Using analysis from the Guttmacher Institute, this would result in more than 7.7 million fewer couples using contraception, more than 1.6 million additional unintended pregnancies, and 745,000 more abortions. Almost 3,000 more women would die in pregnancy or childbirth, and 13,400 more children would lose their mothers. So much for family values.
We have been fortunate in that during the past few years, Republican attacks in the House have been blocked by Senate family planning champions, where, for now at least, Democrats retain control. This has essentially resulted in maintenance of the status quo on family planning policy and on funding. The Senate version of this year’s spending bill counters the House by including $644m for international family planning, and a permanent, legislative repeal of the global gag rule.
But this uneasy stalemate could change, depending on the outcomes in key races in November. If Republicans take control of the Senate, the truce will be broken and battle lines redrawn. The drastic cuts the House committee approved last week could be seriously considered in an omnibus spending bill, and an offensive could be mounted by opponents to attempt to force the gag rule on a pro-choice president.
The health of women around the world is far too important to continue to be thrust on to the frontline of US domestic culture wars.
By: Craig Lasher, Director of US Government Relations at Population Action International; The Guardian, July 17, 2014
“The High Court’s Highhandedness”: Rulings Are Based Less In Law Than In The Personal Beliefs Of The Men On The Tribunal
It is a case of Supreme hypocrisy.
The adjective refers to that nine-person tribunal at the top of the American legal system, the noun to its latest act of judicial malpractice. Meaning not the notorious Hobby Lobby decision handed down at the end of June, but a less-noticed ruling a few days later.
We have to revisit the former to provide context for the latter. On June 30, the court ruled that a “closely held” corporation may deny employees health insurance covering any contraceptive method that conflicts with the company’s religious beliefs. Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito faulted the government for failing, under the Affordable Care Act, to choose the “least restrictive” means of ensuring women access to all FDA-approved methods of birth control. He pointed out that the ACA already makes an exemption for nonprofit groups with religious objections; simply fill out a form certifying those objections and they are relieved from having to provide the disputed contraceptives.
Alito saw this as a win-win. Employees get the birth control they want — they pay directly to the insurance company — but the government does not “impinge” on the organization’s religious beliefs.
Three days later, the court issued an injunction freeing a Christian school — Wheaton College in Illinois — from having to fill out the certification form. The school had argued that simply doing the paperwork — the form asks only for name, contact information, signature and date — infringed upon its religious liberty because it would trigger the employee’s ability to get the disputed contraception. So the same form that the court held to be a reasonable compromise on Monday was judged an unreasonable burden on Thursday. Or as Justice Sonia Sotomayor put it in a withering dissent, “Those who are bound by our decisions usually believe they can take us at our word. Not so today.”
Indeed, the malleability of the court’s logic suggests these rulings are based less in law than in the personal beliefs of the men on the tribunal. One gets the sense they chose the desired result first, then backfilled whatever “reasoning” would get them there.
Which is not just Supreme hypocrisy, but also Supreme faithlessness. And, yes, Supreme sexism.
I once saw a protest sign to the effect that if men gave birth, contraception would be bacon flavored and dispensed from vending machines. Can anyone argue the truth in that? Would we even be having this debate if some company had a religious objection to Viagra — or vasectomies?
And how far down the line must a company’s religious scruples be honored anyway? If it is too much to ask Wheaton College to fill out a form because an employee will be “triggered” to buy contraception on her own, does the school also have a right to scrutinize and approve other purchases made with the salary she earns from them? If she buys whiskey or pornography with “their” money, does the school have a right to object?
Not to mention the frightening precedent the court is setting in the name of religious liberty. It makes faith a potential get-out-of-jail-free card, exempting the holder from any law he finds onerous. Given that Mormons once embraced a theology of racism and evangelical Christians still deny basic freedoms to gay people, the danger of this is obvious.
In its rush to confer personhood on organizations and constrain women’s choices, the court steers us toward a day in which corporate rights would trump human rights and you could no longer take for granted that you would be served by a given business without first checking to make sure you didn’t offend the owner’s religious sensibilities. It’s hard to imagine what that world would be like.
Pretty soon, we may not have to.
BY: Leonard Pitts, Jr., Syndicated Columnist, The Miami Herald; Published in The Seattle Times, July 13, 2014
“Who’s Paying The Premiums?”: Health Insurance Is Not A Favor Your Boss Does For You
The debate over the Hobby Lobby case has been plagued by many problematic presumptions, but there’s one that even many people who disliked the decision seem to sign on to without thinking about it. It’s the idea that the health insurance you get through your employer is something that they do for you—not just administratively, but in a complete sense. But this is utterly wrong. You work, and in exchange for that labor you are given a compensation package that includes salary and certain benefits like a retirement account and health coverage. Like the other forms of compensation, the details of that insurance are subject to negotiation between you and your employer, and the government’s involvement is to set some minimums—just as it mandates a minimum wage, it mandates certain components health insurance must include.
Those who support Hobby Lobby are now talking as though mandating that insurance include preventive care is tantamount to them forcing you to make a contribution to your local food bank when you’d rather give to the pet shelter. You can see it, for instance, in this piece by Megan McArdle in which she tries to look at the clash of rights involved in this dispute, but running through the whole piece is the idea that an employee’s health insurance isn’t compensation for her labor but a piece of charity her boss has bestowed upon her for no reason other than the goodness of his heart. Referring to the question of whether the religious beliefs of Hobby Lobby’s owners are being imposed on its employees, she writes: “How is not buying you something equivalent to ‘imposing’ on you?” Then later she refers to “a positive right to have birth control purchased for me.”
But when your insurance coverage includes birth control, your employer isn’t “buying you” anything. Your employer is basically acting as an administrative middleman between you and the insurance company. Your employer isn’t the one whose money is paying the premiums, you are. It’s compensation for the work you’ve done, just as much as your salary is.
This goes all the way back to to the roots of our employer-based insurance system. During World War II, the government imposed wage and price controls, meaning employers couldn’t give raises. So they began to offer health insurance as an alternate form of compensation, and when the IRS decided in 1943 that insurance could be paid with pre-tax dollars, it made it all the more attractive as a form of compensation. And keep in mind that the preferential tax treatment of health insurance (which the self-employed don’t get) is a tax benefit to the employee, not the employer. If you eliminated it, employers’ balance sheets would stay the same (it would still be counted as an expense), but employees would have to pay taxes on the benefit.
You might or might not think that remembering the true nature of the insurance benefit should change the calculation in the Hobby Lobby case. I’m guessing that for the plaintiffs, it wouldn’t; they’d probably argue that even having to think about what sinful harlots their employees are imposes a “substantial burden” on their religious freedom. And as I’ve argued before, we should get rid of the employer-based insurance system entirely. That may happen eventually, but in the meantime, it’s good to remember just whose health insurance it is. It’s not your boss’. It’s yours.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, July 9, 2014
“The Default Setting”: Why Your Employer Can’t Cut Off Your Contraception Coverage
On the Fourth of July, while you were stuffing your face with patriotic burgers and watching patriotic fireworks, the Supreme Court handed down an emergency injunction in a case involving Wheaton College’s objection to the Affordable Care Act’s contraception benefit, a decision that acted as an addendum to the Hobby Lobby decision. As I ranted over here, this is the decision that could really open the floodgates to thousands of claims from all kinds of organizations and companies that don’t want to let their employees get contraception. But after thinking and reading about it for a while, there’s something I think everyone seems to be missing, and it could mean that no one is actually going to lose their coverage, even temporarily.
I should say that it’s entirely possible that I’m completely wrong about this, and there’s some bureaucratic detail deep within the ACA that I’ve overlooked. But the first thing to remember is that the ACA requires that insurance plans cover a variety of kinds of preventive care, including contraception; this issue is about what exactly a company or organization has to do when they have an objection to contraception coverage. The Obama administration constructed an alternative arrangement, which until now was supposed to be used only for religiously affiliated non-profits but, after the Hobby Lobby decision, may have to be used for basically anyone, including for-profit companies. The way it works is that if your group doesn’t want to be tainted by the sin of contraception, there’s a form you file with the government stating your objection. You send a copy to your insurer or third-party administrator (TPA), and the insurer/TPA (I’m just going to say insurer from this point on) arranges for the coverage with the government, by getting reimbursed out of other funds.
The problem is that Wheaton College, along with dozens of other organizations that have filed suit, believes that just filling out this form and sending it to their insurer makes them complicit in sin, because doing so triggers the arrangement under which their employees will get coverage. Let’s leave aside the merit of this belief, but by granting the emergency injunction the Court’s majority essentially accepted that filling out the form and sending a copy to their insurer was indeed a burden on Wheaton’s religious freedom. This made Sonia Sotomayor absolutely livid, since just four days before the Court had used the existence of that very form as proof that there was a less restrictive alternative than the contraception mandate available.
So what Wheaton would prefer is that they not fill out the form and send it to the insurer. Instead, they want to send a letter to the government just stating their objection—a letter which wouldn’t have to inform the government of who their insurer is. In her dissent, Sotomayor warned that this could become a bureaucratic nightmare, because now the government has to figure out who the insurer is for every company that sends a letter, so they can get in touch with the insurer and arrange the alternate payment procedure for contraceptive coverage.
And this is where I’m puzzled. Because under the ACA, ordinary insurance coverage has to provide prescription contraception with no cost-sharing (meaning without copayment or deductable). That’s the default setting. So let’s say I’ve started a new non-profit aimed at educating America’s youth about the important cultural contributions of 1980s hair metal bands. I get health insurance for my employees, and because of the requirement in the ACA, it includes coverage for contraception. Then after spending an extended period listening to Stryper, I realize that contraception is sinful and try to deprive my employees of it.
Depending on the outcome of these cases, I may have a couple of options. I can file the original form with the government and send a copy to my insurer, in which case those two will arrange for my employees’ contraception coverage to continue. If I object to the form, as Wheaton College does, I’ll just send a letter to the government saying “I’ll have none of this!”
But since I don’t want to inform my insurer and thus trigger the alternate arrangement, my insurer has no idea that I object to contraception coverage. That means they’ll continue to provide it to my employees, as the law requires. If because of ordinary bureaucratic slowness it takes the government a while to find my insurer and inform them of my objection, my employees will still have contraception coverage in the meantime. Whether I’m active or passive the coverage continues, either because the alternate arrangement has been triggered, or because the insurer keeps doing what they’ve been doing because they don’t know of my objection.
To repeat, there may be something I’m missing here. But it seems that even if the Hobby Lobby and Wheaton cases impose more bureaucracy and make things more cumbersome for the government and insurers, as long as contraception coverage without cost-sharing is the default setting for insurance plans, people won’t actually have their coverage interrupted, no matter what the preferences of their employer.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, July 7, 2014
“Endangering Health And Lives”: How Hobby Lobby Undermines All Americans’ Freedom
The Supreme Court’s recent decision in the Hobby Lobby case demonstrates that the court, at least the five justices who voted in favor of Hobby Lobby, has little concern for, and probably little understanding of, women’s health care. By ruling that corporations, on the grounds of the alleged religious views of their owners, can deny women access to some forms of contraception, the court set a horrible precedent that if followed will endanger the health and lives of many American women.
The Hobby Lobby ruling may at first seem like a victory for the minority of Americans who think that both abortion and contraception should be illegal, and for those who believe that the US should operate more as a theocracy than a country where state and church are separate. However, the ruling not only is terrible news for women seeking a guarantee of good healthcare through their employer, but also for anybody who believes in personal freedom.
In the US, where health insurance is linked to employment, health insurance is part of the compensation package. When most Americans are about to start a new job, or choosing between two or more jobs, one of the first questions they ask is about the quality of the health insurance they will get. In most cases, health insurance varies because some companies offer plans with lower co-pays, better dental care or things like that. Firms that deny dental care are doing it because of concerns about costs, not because they have an ethical or religious problem with healthy teeth. Hobby Lobby is doing something different, denying women access to some forms of health care because of the personal beliefs of the people who run the company.
This decision raises the question of whether the Supreme Court will next rule that employers can tell workers how to spend the money they earn at their jobs. This sounds a bit extreme, but in a very real way that is precisely what the court just did. By limiting how workers can use some of their compensation, the court, despite its own assertions that it was not setting a precedent, opened the door for further limitations. If Hobby Lobby can tell people how they can or cannot use their health care benefits, why can’t they also tell people they can’t, for example, use their salaries to donate to pro-choice political candidates or pro-marriage equality causes? The answer, one would think, would be obvious, but the recent court decision makes it considerably less clear.
The Republican Party has long, if not always sincerely, repeated a mantra of individual freedom, but the Hobby Lobby decision, in which all five justices who formed the majority were appointed by Republican presidents, undermines that. A central belief of all Republican politicians is that Americans should have a right to do what they want with, and keep as much as possible of, their hard-earned money. The Supreme Court made a big move against that idea this week, but the outrage from the Republican side has been absent.
Conservative opposition to healthcare have consistently argued that decisions about health care should be made by patients and doctors, not by the government. The death panel hysteria that Sarah Palin unleashed on the American people a few years ago took that point to a nutty extreme. After last week, conservatives who support Hobby Lobby should probably change their position and argue that health care decisions should be made not by a patient’s doctor, but by a patient’s employer. Similarly, for supporters of the Hobby Lobby decision, the new mantra of individual freedom should now be that Americans should be allowed to do whatever they want with their hard earned money, as long as their boss approves, but somehow that seems an unlikely campaign slogan for Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio.
The Hobby Lobby decision is about women’s health care and individual freedom, but it also is another sign of the consolidation of power by big corporations in the US. It is now legal for corporations to deny workers important medical services, and redefine their compensation packages, simply because, religious claims aside, they want to. During a very tenuous recovery in which real wages have not recovered, unemployment remains high and economic uncertainty on the part of working Americans is an enormous problem, the Supreme Court just gave more rights to corporations while taking wealth, as health care benefits are a form of wealth, out of the hands of working Americans.
By: Lincoln Mitchell, The Huffington Post Blog, July 6, 2014
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