Women's Media
Center, February 13, 2012
Birth
Control and the Bloviators: What Just Happened?
By Angela
Bonavoglia
The
author of "Good Catholic Girls: How Women Are Leading the
Fight to Change the Church" explains what's behind the Catholic
bishops' hard-line reaction to President Obama's compromise.
Last
week, before the great contraception compromise, as the “old
boys club” attacked President Barack Obama for daring to
require religiously affiliated hospitals, universities, and social
service agencies—but not churches—to provide birth control
coverage free of charge to their employees, Rachel Maddow had
a question.
Given that
28 states have birth control mandates with which Catholic institutions
comply, that some major Catholic institutions provide contraceptive
coverage, and that new polling shows that the majority of Catholics
agree that female Catholic hospital and university employees should
have the same right to contraceptive coverage as other women,
Maddow asked: How does the Beltway media narrative get so entirely
captured by the other side?
For one thing,
even random drop-ins on the most popular TV news programs revealed
a major contributing factor: few women participated in the conversation
(reportedly twice as many men as women appeared on cable shows
to talk about the birth control battle). Women like Jodi Jacobson
of RH Reality Check and Sarah Posner of Religion Dispatches and
many others were lighting up the blogosphere on the subject, and
if you watched Maddow you would have seen clips of three powerful
senators—Barbara Boxer, Kristin Gillibrand, and Patty Murray—digging
in their heels to defend women’s rights to contraception.
But by and large, women equipped to talk about the issue from
a feminist—and a Catholic—point of view on television
were few and far between.
Day after
day, there was Joe Scarborough, with four or five men (Willie
Geist, Sam Stein, Mike Barnacle, Michael Steel, and so on) often
talking over—or, in the case of Scarborough, utterly dismissing—the
barely audible points made by Mika Brezenski. A pinnacle was reached
last Friday, when Scarborough brought in Washington D.C.’s
Cardinal Donald Wuerl.
As everyone
was fawning all over the cardinal, Stein tried to ask an important
question: What about the woman who needs birth control because
she has ovarian cancer who won’t have her care paid for because
of your position? Scarborough apparently found humor in that.
“Have you been talking to your mother, Sam?” he chided.
Sam’s mother is an ob-gyn, who’d warned her son that
“if he didn’t ask a serious question today, she’d
kill him.” Everyone laughed, including Wuerl, who promptly
lapsed into his assigned talking points, declaring that “there
is a difference between access and freedom….This is about
freedom….The real issue is freedom…Our basic freedom,”
thereby leaving the woman with ovarian cancer out in the cold.
Would that Loretta Ross of Sister Song Reproductive Justice Collective
had been there to drop a quick counter punch, to note that “freedom
of religion also encompasses freedom from religion,” as she
said last week on Democracy Now.
Another factor
in the lopsided way this debate played out was that the main religious
players in this drama are men who head up a powerful institution
that discriminates against women by closing them out of the ranks
of clerical power while continuing to act as their reproductive
overlords. That sexist structure ensures is that no woman seated
side by side with a Catholic bishop, archbishop, cardinal or even
a collared priest will be perceived as having the same gravitas.
In that regard, however, President Obama has done something astonishing—particularly
so to the nation’s 350 unhappy bishops.
Back when
the health care reform battle was raging, Obama refused to play
by the bishops’ rules, listening not only to the bishops,
but also to a very brave and smart woman, Sister Carol Keehan,
head of the influential Catholic Healthcare Association. While
the bishops refused to give their support even after they got
what they wanted—no public money for abortion—Sister
Keehan gave her public and unequivocal support. That led to widespread
relief among some Catholic members of Congress and the Catholic
laity and helped pass the bill.
As to the
birth control compromise that Obama unveiled last Friday—whereby
health care insurers, not religiously affiliated employers, would
communicate with, provide, and pay for birth control coverage
for women working for these employers—Archbishop Timothy
Dolan, head of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB),
initially declared it to be “a first step in the right direction."
By contrast, Sister Keehan did it again, lending her public full-throated
support, which went a long way in leading disgruntled Catholics
to fall in line.
One of those
disgruntled Catholics was E.J. Dionne—a liberal Catholic
who failed to support Obama on the birth control issue—approved
the compromise. He came down hard on the narrowing of the exemption
to churches alone because that failed to recognize the religious
nature of the missions of Catholic-affiliated institutions. On
the PBS NewsHour, Mark Shields made the similar point.
In reality,
the Catholic institutions we’re talking about today bend
over backwards to show that they are NOT about the business of
inculcating religion, evangelizing, or creating colonies of new
Catholics; this is a crucial aspect of the church’s ability
to attract non-Catholics—and their checkbooks—to these
institutions. They may say that they operate out of a Christian
or Catholic tradition. But the fact is that the mission of a Catholic
college open to the public is to teach; of a Catholic hospital,
to heal; of a social service agency, to provide care to needy
populations.
In all instances,
these institutions must carry out this secular mission in accordance
with laws that govern their activities: hospitals have to meet
standards to open a diagnostic and treatment center; universities
have to take specific steps to get accredited; hospitals and universities
have to meet the demands of the Americans with Disabilities Act;
a meals program has to follow food safety regulations. If an institution
takes on these responsibilities, they have to follow the law.
If their beliefs interfere (e.g., making abortions unavailable
for trafficking victims), and an accommodation cannot be made,
then the religious institution should not get to do that work
with public money. On the trafficking issue, that is now the case.
Regarding
the compromise, New York Times columnist and NPR and NewsHour
commentator David Brooks declared it to be “a fudge and a
subterfuge” as well as illogical, but still hailed it. He
thought it “showed respect and deference…especially
to the Catholic workers who are doing the Lord’s work in
these neighborhoods, serving the poor and the needy.” I don’t
know who he thinks those Catholic workers are, but they include
caseworkers and food pantry staff, shelter counselors and secretaries,
hospital cafeteria workers and cleaning ladies in Catholic dorms.
How refusing them the right to birth control is a sign of “respect,”
he doesn’t say.
By Sunday,
while many were still considering the matter at least temporarily
settled, the bishops had dug in their heels, rejected the compromise,
and actually, come clean. The fact is that protecting religious
liberty, safeguarding the consciences of religiously affiliated
hospitals, universities, and social service agencies, has never
been the bishops’ goal. Rather, they seek the complete elimination
of the mandate guaranteeing all American women access to birth
control, without a co-pay or deductible, as part of a package
of essential preventive services.
In a February
10 USCCB press release that followed the announcement of Obama’s
compromise, the bishops argue that exemptions from having to provide
or pay for coverage for birth control should be available not
only to religious employers and insurers, but also to secular
for-profit and nonprofit employers as well as to individual employers
with religious objections. Arguing on behalf of those individual
employers, Anthony Picarello, general counsel for the USCCB, complained
to USA Today that “If I quit this job and opened a Taco Bell,
I’d be covered by the mandate.”
Bishops who led letter-writing campaigns that stooped so low as
to characterize the government’s effort to insure that all
women have preventive health care as a “bigoted and blatant
attack on the First Amendment rights of every Catholic believer,”
that branded HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius “a bitter, fallen
away Catholic,” and went so far as to say “the devil
wants to silence the Church’s voice” are unlikely to
take their matches and go home. Indeed, despite their compete
lack of medical training and in the face of indisputable medical
evidence that birth control is crucial for the health of women
and babies, the bishops are poised to press on, arguing that birth
control is not “preventive care.”
Wuerl trended
in that direction on Morning Joe on Friday, paraphrasing what
the bishops claimed in their letter last August to HHS that “prescription
contraceptives, sterilization and related patient education and
counseling” are "not ‘health’ services…they
disrupt the healthy functioning of the reproductive system, and
they are designed to prevent pregnancy, which is not a disease.”
It’s
useful at this point to recognize that this broad demand to end
the birth control mandate, as well as the bishops’ successful
campaign to forbid the use of public money for abortions in the
ACA, are intimately related to the Catholic Church’s approach
to sexual ethics. That approach is based on natural law, the notion
that there is an unwritten law embedded in all of creation, which
humans can decipher through reason and use to build a universally
binding moral system. The church sees natural law as applying
to everyone, not just Catholics.
That is why
the targets of the church’s sexual repression—right
here, right now—are not just Catholic women, but all American
women. If that feels like mission creep, it is. If that scares
you, it should.
The views
expressed in this commentary are those of the author alone and
do not represent WMC. WMC is a 501(c)(3) organization and does
not endorse candidates.
Back
to Top
Send
this page to a friend!
