All Our Lives

I should point out before I begin that in this post, I am speaking for myself only. The All Our Lives board is not unanimous in the details of our opinions on requiring religious employers to provide insurance that covers contraception, though we are united in our belief that widespread access to contraception is vital.

I have a problem with the whole way this whole issue has been framed as “making churches pay for something they find morally objectionable.” Health insurance that someone earns as part of their employment compensation package is theirs, not the employer’s. If an institution’s religious freedom does not extend to allowing them to tell the employee that she can’t use her salary to pay for contraception, why should it extend to telling the employee that she can’t use her insurance benefit to pay for contraception? Yes, the money to pay the premium is coming from the employer, but so is the money to pay her salary. As far as I can tell, the difference is that religious institutions have been able to restrict the way that employees use their insurance benefits in a way that they have not been able to restrict the way that employees use their salaries, but the ability to do something does not make it a right. If there were some kind of special money that could be used to buy anything except contraception, would it be a violation of religious institutions’ First Amendment rights to require all employers to pay in standard money?

I’m an atheist. I rely on the separation of church and state to protect my freedom. Because of that, I’m leery of anything that even remotely smacks of government interference in religion or religious interference in government. That’s why I can appreciate the impulse behind the Adminstration’s accomodation allowing religious institutions to offer restricted insurance to their employees while still requiring the insurers to provide contraception coverage to those employees. I won’t claim to respect the belief that contraception is intrinsically evil. I think it causes great harm and is based on a number of false premises. But I do respect people’s right, as much as is possible in a pluralistic society, not to cooperate with something they think is evil. What happens, though, if Jehovah’s Witness employers decide that their employee’s insurance plans shouldn’t cover blood transfusions? What if Scientologist employers decide that their employees shouldn’t be covered for psychiatric treatment? At what point do we decide that a person’s right to practice their religion is interfering with another person’s right to live their life without having to submit to the rules of that religion? The degree of the employers’ “cooperation with evil” in these cases is remote — paying a benefit which the employee decides to use for a purpose condemned by the employer’s religion — while the impact on the employee who is restricted in their use of their own benefit is direct. The same is true of insurance coverage of contraception.

I've been reluctant to post on the whole Susan G. Komen/Planned Parenthood debacle because I kept feeling like there was information I didn't have. Some of my questions have been answered in the past few days. We now know that:

Only 19 Planned Parenthood affiliates received grants from Komen. Most PP facilities, and the breast exams and referrals they offer, were not affected.
Some of these grants were "pass-through" grants that were used to pay for mammograms at facilities to which PP referred patients. Some were for manual exams, referrals, and education. The "pass-through" grants were to be restructured so that instead the mammogram providers would be paid directly, which doesn't strike me as a problem.
By Nancy Brinker's own account, many women rely on PP for basic health care services, and to refuse to fund PP in those circumstances would be to "turn our backs on those women." Komen's announcement did not address their apparent change of mind on that subject (although in fairness, they were planning to continue funding three PP affiliates, probably because there were literally no other options in those areas).
Most of the women who are seen by PP are not in the age group most at risk for cancer (though the education would probably be of use to them later in life).

What's still not clear to me is how much PP's ability to provide breast exams and referrals would have been affected by the loss of this money. If someone is seeing a provider anyway, it doesn't seem to add any cost to also have them do an exam, but I may well be missing something there.

To the extent that women are relying on Planned Parenthood for essential breast health care, pro-lifers who want to promote breast health have three options:

Support those women getting breast health care at PP.
Provide a viable alternative: a clinic where women can get affordable comprehensive reproductive and sexual health care, but that doesn't do abortions.
Leave those particular women to rely solely on donations and services from pro-choicers – which has the side effect of teaching them that abortion proponents are the only people who care about their health.

I'd rather women didn't get their health care from a provider that also performs and lobbies for abortion. I'd rather they didn't have to. But many women do, and pro-lifers needs to ask themselves why. To me, the real outrage in this whole episode is this:

"The grants in question supplied breast health counseling, screening, and treatment to rural women, poor women, Native American women, many women of color who were underserved–if served at all–in areas where Planned Parenthood facilities were often the only infrastructure available. Though it meant losing corporate money from Curves, we were not about to turn our backs on these women."

That was Susan G. Komen founder Nancy Brinker in 2010, explaining why Komen funded Planned Parenthood. Areas where Planned Parenthood facilities were often the only infrastructure available. If you don't want money to go to Planned Parenthood – fix that.

On the contraception mandate

Susan G. Komen, Planned Parenthood, and — oh, yeah — women