On Friday February 1, the Obama administration presented a compromise to respond to the objection from religious groups concerning birth control coverage in health insurance. As a twenty year-old college student who is concerned with human rights, I follow this issue closely. It’s baffling to me that there are people so strongly against safe sex when we were previously a nation sigmatized by teenage pregnancy. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, teenage pregnancy is at an all time low for US teens. Still, new proposals to provide contraceptives for female employees are being stopped with debates of religious involvement.
The Proposal
For those who are unfamiliar, the goals of the proposal were to provide women with free contraceptive care and to do so while respecting religious beliefs. The proposal looks like this:
• Employers provide women with coverage at no cost for “preventative care and screenings” which includes contraceptives including Ella and Plan B.
• Employers who do not provide this coverage will be fined.
• Nonprofit organizations like churches, religiously affiliated hospitals, religious universities, and other religious institutions are not required to provide contraceptive coverage (They won’t even have to arrange, contract, or pay for their employees or students to get services).
• Female employees receive free contraceptive coverage through a plan provided by their health insurer if their employer is exempt for religious reasons.
So what’s the problem?
According to the New York Times, “Religious groups dissatisfied with the new proposal want a broader, more explicit exemption for religious organizations and protection for secular businesses owned by people with religious objections to contraceptive coverage.” Essentially, if the owner of a small business is religious and does not believe in the use of contraceptive, he/she should be able to withhold the services to his/her female employees. Consider this: Walmart employs 2.1 million people. If we assume that half of them are women, which means that the head employer at Walmart would be in a position to decide whether his religious beliefs can affect the contraceptive methods that 1.05 million women have access to.
Nowhere in this proposal does the Obama administration demand that an employer provides every woman with contraceptives. Women seeking contraceptives, like the pill, do not make up the entire female society. More women than ever are using contraceptives, but it is important to note the differences in cost and frequency of couples using condoms and the pill.
From 2006-2008, the CDC surveyed 62,000 women, of which over 68% of all women were using some form of contraceptives: 17.3% were using the pill and 10% were using condoms. Does this number seem low to you? That’s because this data includes women who were sterile, pregnant, trying to get pregnant, or virgins at the time of the survey (30.8%). Excluding those categories as groups “Not using contraceptives” the number of women practicing safe sex is over 98%. The bottom line is: women who are sexually active and not seeking pregnancy are using birth control. The provisions are allowing for women, who are in charge of their own bodies, to take preventative measures if they see fit.
Who’s paying?
The New York Times explains, “Insurance companies would bear the cost of providing the separate coverage, with the possibility of recouping the costs through lower health care expenses resulting in part from fewer births.” As said previously, nonprofit religious organizations with religious objections will not be forced to pay for or provide coverage. Insurance companies are not permitted to “impose any premium, fee or other charge” for the coverage. The user fees would be chaged to the insurers as insurance exchanges and would not be a cost to the federal government or taxpayers. “The fees are private dollars paid by private insurers that choose to operate in the exchange,” said Chiquita Brooks-LaSure, deputy director of the federal office that regulates health insurance.
Is Religion Really the Issue?
The constant enemy of birth control is always religion, but do religious women truly not support birth control methods or is it an outdated argument? According to the Guttmacher Institute study on New Evidence on Religion and Contraceptive Use, “Among all women who have had sex, 99% have ever used a contraceptive method other than natural family planning. This figure is virtually the same, 98%, among sexually experienced Catholic women.” The study also reveals that, 68% of Catholic women use highly effective methods: sterilization (32%, including 24% using female sterilization,) the pill or another hormonal method (31%) and the Intrautirine device (IUD) (5%). Futhermore, the study explains that attendance at religious services and importance of religion to daily life are largely unrelated to use of highly effective contraceptive methods. In no way do I mean to offend believers of the Catholic faith. With information like this, it is hard to understand why there is such heated debates over contraceptive use.
Safe Sex is for Everyone: The Political End
Instead of fighting about contraceptives, the Republicans and Democrats should be fighting for them. Women, despite of race or age, use contraceptives. For all of the moments that politicians use demographics to target their issues, you would think this one is a no brainer. Whether religious institutions choose to see it or not, 99% of women 15-44 years of age between 2006-2008 who had sexual intercourse with a male have used at least one contraceptive method. Safe sex is not only a positive, but it’s the norm. See Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (PDF) for more statistics and information.
The control that an employer can have based solely on his/her religious beliefs over an employer’s body is frightening. I understand that employers are responsible for the success and standard of their business, but asking someone to wear a uniform does not equate to deciding whether or not they can have children. are absurd to When examined from a person-to-person standpoint rather than a religion vs. government view, it becomes an issue of rights not an issue of beliefs. Compromises, arguments, and proposals are still being hashed out. Hopefully in the end, Cecile Richards, the president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America will be right in asserting that, “Your boss does not get to decide whether you can have birth control.”
Sources:
• Images from data:Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (PDF) / http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6117a1.htm?s_cid=mm6117a1_e
• http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/02/charts-birth-control-statistics-catholics
• http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/Religion-and-Contraceptive-Use.pdf