UNITED STATES
Salon
PATRICIA MILLER
Adapted from “Good Catholics: The Battle Over Abortion in the Catholic Church”
From a father in Missouri who’s looking to keep his daughters from accessing birth control, to the refusal of key contraception mandate plaintiffs to accept the Obama administration’s latest “accommodation,” the Hobby Lobby decision continues to reverberate.
But while the Green family who filed the Hobby Lobby suit objecting to the mandate are evangelical Christians, the road to Hobby Lobby wasn’t paved by the Christian Right. It was the Catholic Church, more specifically the U.S. Catholic bishops’ conference, that largely engineered Hobby Lobby to block the legitimization of contraception as a standard health insurance benefit—a last ditch effort to prevent by law what it couldn’t prevent from the pulpit: women from using birth control.
The Catholic bishops’ interest in “conscience clauses” that would allow employers to opt out of reproductive health care services began in earnest in the late 1990s, with the increased viability at the state and national levels of contraceptive equity measures designed to ensure that health plans covered prescription contraceptives like the Pill just like other prescription medications. For years, insurers had omitted contraceptives from prescription drug plans—the only entire class of drugs routinely and explicitly excluded—which made women’s out-of-pocket medical expenses some 70 percent higher than men’s. Measures to ensure contraceptive equity had been stalled by male legislators and social conservatives who asserted that employers and insurers shouldn’t be forced to pay for what they called a “lifestyle” choice, not a health care need. Despite that fact that nearly all women use contraceptives at some point in their lives—98 percent, according to government surveys—and that at any given moment two-thirds of women of child-bearing age are using a contraceptive method, the implication was that fertility management was frivolous or immoral and that “other people” shouldn’t be forced to pay for it.
When Connecticut considered a contraceptive equity measure in 1999, a Catholic priest, the Rev. Joseph Looney of Bethlehem, Connecticut, told the legislature that covering contraceptives would only benefit “playboys” and would fund “craziness and irresponsibility.” It was a framework that conservatives had successfully applied to abortion—asserting that it must be segregated from other health services and government funding because it was immoral—and now were trying to apply to birth control.
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