Contraception: Obama vs. the Catholic Church

last updated 8 January 2015

“It’s hard to fathom a government dictate more offensive than this one,” said James Capretta in NationalReview.com. President Obama’s Health and Human Services Department last week ruled that the Catholic Church and other religious institutions that serve the general public must provide free contraception, sterilization, and abortion-inducing drugs to employees—even if doing so violates the religion’s moral teachings. Since they serve non-Catholics as well as Catholics, Catholic universities, hospitals, and charities will now be compelled to subsidize policies that violate church doctrine or face the wrath of a government that is “essentially hostile to religious sentiments.” This tyrannical attack on religious liberty is “ominous and unprecedented,” said Jeffrey Kuhner in The Washington Times. The president’s radical message couldn’t be clearer: “Abandon Catholic doctrine or go out of business.”

There’s nothing radical about this ruling, said the Minneapolis Star Tribune in an editorial. In multiple decisions, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that religious beliefs do not protect discriminatory practices, and 28 states have policies just like the one just adopted by the federal government. That makes perfect sense. If a church could ban insurance coverage of contraception on religious grounds, what would be next? HIV testing? Vaccines that prevent sexually transmitted diseases? What if a church said its tenets prohibited providing services to black people? “The door would be left wide open for eliminating almost anything.” Access to birth control is critical, because unwanted pregnancies cause serious personal, financial, and social problems. Millions of women of different faiths work for religious institutions in this country, and their access to the same legal health services available to all must trump any claim of “religious freedom.”

Liberals may regret cheering Obama’s decision, said Ross Douthat in The New York Times. For the crime of serving people of any religion in its hospitals, the Catholic Church is being ordered to pay for practices it considers deeply immoral. This ruling threatens any charitable community that doesn’t share the moral sensibilities of the growing “health-care bureaucracy,” which has now taken sides in the culture war. At some point, a more conservative president will control that bureaucracy, and liberals won’t be cheering its coercive dictates. In “a darker American future,” churches, charities, and other groups where people voluntarily associate will wither away, and the government will make all the rules for everyone.