A Big Old Can of Worms

By Amy Phillips Bursch, Media Relations Manager

In all the excitement of the Olympics (USA! USA!) you might have missed this bit of news on Friday: A judge in Colorado issued a preliminary injunction so that a Catholic-owned business can ignore the requirement that it provide contraception coverage for its employers, at least for now. Remember: That coverage will soon be mandated under “Obamacare.”

The owners of the business, Hercules Industries, say that providing their employees birth control violates their religious beliefs. The majority of Catholics think that employers SHOULD cover birth control, but apparently that’s not germane to the conversation.

Religious exemptions open up a huge can of worms -- and they won't be tasty worms like these bad boys. (Nomadic Lass/Flickr)

So where do we draw the line? It seems to me that if the courts ruled in favor of this employer, it would open a big old value-sized can of worms. If we’re going to allow for religious exemptions, it seems like these court fights might be next:

• A Christian employer refuses to cover misoprostol, a drug used to prevent ulcers in people who take certain other medications, such as aspirin. What’s wrong with that? Misoprostol is also used in combination with mifepristone to end an early pregnancy. ABORTIFACIENT!
• A Christian employer refuses to cover chemotherapy for an employee with cancer. Why? Because the employee happens to be pregnant. Think that sounds far-fetched? It’s not.
• A Christian employer refuses to cover these medications because they can lower sperm counts and affect male fertility (and therefore go against God’s whole “Be fruitful and multiply” thingy.)
• A Christian employer refuses to cover all FDA Category X medications when used by women because they might cause birth defects (and subsequent abortions.)
• A Jehovah’s Witness employer refuses to cover a blood transfusion for their church janitor who got in a motorcycle wreck (and happens to be a Methodist.)
• An orthodox Jewish or Muslim employer refuses to cover a tissue transplant because the tissue came from a pig.
• A Scientologist employer refuses to cover psychiatric medications or visits.
• A member of the Church of Jenny McCarthy refuses to cover any vaccinations. (OK, that’s not a real church, but you get my point.)

Making all of these exceptions sounds like a great way to continue to have a health care system that looks like Swiss cheese. It’s also extremely unfair to women, since most of the “religious” outcry relates to care only women need. How soon before employers decide that there are too many ethical potholes if they hire people with a uterus, so they hire only men?

Universal coverage of family planning isn’t just good for women – it’s good for families, communities, nations, and our planet. It’s too bad some employers seem to be blinded by their beliefs.

Philippines Family Planning Fight

By Amy Phillips Bursch, Media Relations Manager

 

Oh Vatican.

For an organization that does a huge amount of good (nuns advocating for poor people, for example), the Catholic Church sure can gum up the works on what should be noncontroversial reproductive health issues.

(Disclosure: I used to be a practicing Catholic. My husband and I planned on getting married in the church. But after 40 hours of premarital education – including a “natural family planning” seminar – we were told to leave if we didn’t agree with all of their stances. So we did.)

The latest front in the Vatican-fueled culture war is in the Philippines. You see, the Philippines has a big problem: Dying women. In fact, its maternal mortality rates have skyrocketed – from 162 deaths per 100,000 in 2006 to 221 per 100,000 in 2011. Not good.

What’s one of the best ways to cut maternal mortality? Make sure women only get pregnant when they want to. So the Philippines hopes to invest about $12 million in contraception this year.

 Basilica of the Immaculate Conception, Manila (Salim Photography)

Hope is the operative word here. The Catholic Church – an extremely powerful force in a nation that’s more than 80% Catholic – is in the midst of an intense lobbying campaign to kill a reproductive health care bill that would allocate money for contraceptives and provide sex education for the nation’s children. The church’s objections all center around one argument: Contraception is immoral. You know the drill.

So the Vatican will keep derailing reproductive rights, and fighting against insurance coverage of contraception. Meanwhile, the women of the Philippines are suffering:

"The statistics and acronyms mean little to women like Irish Gili, 31, a mother of eight who had just delivered her latest baby at Fabella (Hospital). She has never had access to family planning advice, much less free contraceptives. She nearly died while delivering her seventh child, but found herself pregnant again, barely a month after giving birth."

War on Women Rages On

Amy Phillips Bursch, Media Relations Manager

A couple new fronts just opened in the war against women who have sex, whether it’s consensual or not. You know, sluts.

First up: A Tampa woman who was raped was given emergency contraception by her local rape crisis center. Some brands of EC involve taking one pill right away and the second pill 12 hours later. The woman took the first pill. She then reported her attack to the police – who promptly took her into custody on an arrest warrant for failure to pay restitution and failure to appear. Here’s what happened next, according to Courthouse News Service:

At the Hillsborough County Jail, staff confiscated her second pill. R.W. (the rape survivor) says she requested her second pill the next morning, but jail employee Michele Spinelli refused. ‘Spinelli told the Plaintiff that she would not give R.W. the pill because it was against Spinelli’s religious beliefs.’

You might want to finish these before going to jail. (Florian/Flickr)

REALLY? It’s disgusting enough that pharmacists are refusing to provide legal prescriptions – you know, DO THEIR JOBS – because of opposition to contraception. Now jail guards have veto power over decisions made by rape survivors? What’s next: Bus drivers refusing to drop young women off at Walgreens?  Security guards pulling birth control pills out of purses at metal detectors?

Luckily, R.W. will be allowed to sue. Whether young women in Calgary, Alberta, will have any legal recourse is another issue. According to the National Post, a Calgary bishop has decided that the HPV vaccine “contributes to promiscuity.” You know, turns girls into sluts:

Staring down the edict of a Calgary bishop who says the HPV vaccine contributes to promiscuity, a newly formed advocacy group is pushing Roman Catholic schools to allow students to be immunized against the sexually transmitted virus. Calgary is the only major city in Canada with a publicly funded school board* that withholds the vaccine on religious grounds, the group says. This puts the thousands of girls in the city and southern Alberta at risk of cervical cancer.

*My emphasis. For emphasis.

Keep in mind that the HPV vaccine works regardless of your sexual history. In other words, the bishop’s ban could be sentencing a woman who is raped to cervical cancer. Or a woman who is a virgin until her wedding night to cervical cancer. Not just those slutty slutty sluts.