New rules on contraception

The Obama administration has proposed a new compromise on its controversial contraception policy that would exempt religiously-affiliated employers from paying for birth control through health insurance, while guaranteeing that their employees will have contraception covered by a separate insurance policy. Facing a wave of lawsuits from religious groups that say providing contraception coverage infringes their freedom of conscience, the White House has broadened the definition of a religious organization to include hospitals, schools, and universities, and ensured that they don’t pay for contraception even indirectly. “The administration is taking the next step in providing women across the nation with coverage of recommended preventive care at no cost, while respecting religious concerns,” said Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.

This is a “reasonable compromise between religious objections and the right of women to affordable birth control,” said The New York Times in an editorial. The administration was never out to curtail religious freedom, despite what its critics have claimed in trying to “discredit the health-care reform law.”

It looks to me like “a parlor trick,” said Michael Gerson in The Washington Post. The administration is just trying to wiggle a way through the legal challenges—44 and counting—to its mandate for services that many religious people believe the government shouldn’t be paying for, including day-after pills, which some consider abortifacients. It has “made no attempt to deal with the hard cases,” such as why a business “with a highly religious owner” should still be forced to pay for contraception.

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Obviously, “not everybody will be happy,” said Michelle Cottle in TheDailyBeast.com. But a chastened White House has tried to mute “the my-way-or-the-highway bossiness” of its original proposal, and now the debate over contraception looks calmer than it did a year ago. While the new tweaks won’t convince “hard-core opponents of contraceptive coverage,” they make it harder to cast Obama as an “amoral elitist determined to ram his views down the throats of decent God-fearing Americans.”