A Hobby Lobby Patch For Obamacare, Ctd

by Dish Staff

Reactions to the Obama administration’s latest move to promote contraceptive accessibility keep coming. Jonathan Cohn elaborates on why free birth control is worth fighting over:

Late last week, lots of people were talking about a story by Sarah Kliff, of Vox, on why teen pregnancy has been declining in just the last few years. It’s a great article, well worth your time, but the part that jumped out at me was the much bigger decline in teen births that occurred many decades ago—in the 1960s, when the teen pregnancy rate fell by about 25 percent. What changed? The big factor, as social scientists (and friends of QED) Harold Pollack and Luke Shaefer reminded me over the weekend, was birth control. The Food and Drug Administration first approved the pill in 1960.

It wasn’t just teenagers on whom the introduction of cheap, highly effective medical contraception had profound effects. It was also older women, including married women, who gained the ability to control the timing of pregnancy and child rearing.

James C. Capretta, meanwhile, says the HHS “non-accomodation” isn’t a real solution:

In a moral sense, the supposed “accommodation” is meaningless. If an employer with religious objections to the HHS mandate offers insurance to its workers, that coverage will, by definition, always include the objectionable services and products. There’s no way around it. The objecting employers therefore know, in advance of making the decision to offer coverage, that if they do offer coverage, the insurance plan they sponsor will provide full coverage for these products and services that they find morally objectionable.

The real solution is of course a full exemption, not this convoluted non-accommodation. Employers with religious objections to the HHS mandate should be allowed to offer insurance in conformance with their consciences. It’s that simple. This would likely affect a very small percentage of the American workforce.

And S.M. the “complicity” of Obamacare objectors:

By sending HHS a letter requesting an exemption from the birth-control mandate, the objecting groups claim they are prompting a process that will implant murderous IUDs in the uteri of their workers.

This claim is a stretch. An employer does not buy a weapon when his employee takes his paycheck to a gun show. Nor does he buy a morning-after pill if a female employee uses a benefit paid for by the federal government but provided through his insurer to secure a prescription for ella. If requesting an exemption from the birth-control mandate can plausibly be thought to represent complicity in the provision of birth control, then anyone can claim to be complicit in just about any act. But (even religious) pacifist taxpayers cannot sue the government for using their tax dollars to send troops to the Middle East. Nor can Catholics opposing the death penalty deduct the share of their tax bill going toward executions in states with capital punishment. Political society cannot operate this way.