Posted on 09/07/2014 9:08:49 AM PDT by Kaslin
At the Supreme Court oral arguments in the Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood Specialties cases in March, Justice Anthony Kennedy tested the limits of the government’s argument by asking if, under the government’s theory, people could be forced to pay for others’ elective surgical abortions through their insurance plan. The solicitor general dodged, responding (somewhat inaccurately) that there was no law like that at present, and did so in a tone that indicated he was happy not to have to defend such an illiberal and unwise law. Cue California.
On Aug. 22, prompted by two Catholic universities’ refusal to provide abortion coverage, the California Department of Managed Health Care announced that all insurance plans must immediately begin covering elective abortions. Citing a 1975 state law, the department concluded that, although it had previously approved health plans that did not include elective abortion coverage, it had belatedly decided that the exclusion of elective abortion “discriminat[es] against women who choose to terminate a pregnancy” in violation of the 40-year-old law.
It should come as no surprise that the ACLU of Northern California applauded the use of state power to force Catholic institutions to pay for abortions. While the nation long had consensus that no one should be forced to participate in abortion in violation of their faith, the ACLU has never joined that truce. Even when Democratic politicians routinely joined their Republican colleagues in overwhelmingly supporting religious liberty and opposing abortion mandates against religious institutions, the ACLU demanded that government bend the Church’s knee.
In the early 1970s, even as the ACLU challenged state abortion laws in the cases leading to Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, it was also working to force Catholic hospitals to perform abortions – focusing these anti-conscience efforts in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. The ACLU tried to have it both ways, citing conscience protections to defuse concerns about a constitutional abortion right leading to compelled participation in abortions even as it fought to force Catholic institutions to perform them.
Thus, in Roe, the Supreme Court could dismiss worries that creating a constitutional abortion right would result in violations of medical professionals’ conscience because the American Medical Association’s House of Delegates had resolved the following:
That no physician or other professional personnel shall be compelled to perform any act which violates his good medical judgment. Neither physician, hospital, nor hospital personnel shall be required to perform any act violative of personally-held moral principles.
And in Doe, the ACLU could likewise cite Georgia law confirming that “a physician or any other employee has the right to refrain, for moral or religious reasons, from participating in the abortion procedure” in order to quell concerns that a constitutional abortion right would infringe on conscience. Because “[t]hese provisions are obviously in the statute in order to afford appropriate protection to the individual and to the denominational hospital,” the Supreme Court explained, there was no need for broader restrictions on abortion to protect individual and institutional conscience.
Yet even as the Supreme Court was preparing these opinions, the ACLU was suing Catholic hospitals in Montana and Oregon (in the 9th Circuit), demanding they perform abortions and sterilizations because they received some Medicaid and Medicare funds. The ACLU’s efforts were ultimately rebuffed as the 9th Circuit held in Chrisman v. Sisters of St. Joseph of Peacein 1974, the year after Roe, “If the … refusal to perform [an abortion or sterilization] infringes upon any constitutionally cognizable right to privacy, such infringement is outweighed by the need to protect the freedom of religion.”
If the 9th Circuit’s decision did not let the ACLU know that it had overreached, a near unanimous Congress should have. It overwhelmingly passed the Church Amendment, rejecting the ACLU’s attempt to compel Catholic medical professionals and institutions to provide abortions or other procedures in violation of their conscience. Just two months after the Roe decision, the Church Amendment passed by a vote of 372-1 in the House and 92-1 in the Senate. Among its supporters was Ted Kennedy, who spoke against the ACLU’s efforts and in favor of conscience on the Senate floor:
I believe that the Court will sustain the judgment to protect individual rights and liberties. I believe that the Court will sustain the judgment of Congress that, in order to give full protection to the religious freedom of physicians and others, it is necessary to extend the exemption…to the facilities where they practice their profession and livelihood.
Subsequent additions to the Church Amendment and similar conscience protections in the Public Health Services Act found broad bipartisan support over the intervening decades. But even as its natural political allies rejected its extreme abortion views, the ACLU did not give up its goal of eliminating government restrictions on abortion nor of employing government to force private parties to facilitate abortions themselves.
Over the past several years, this near universal support for freedom of conscience in the abortion debates has broken down. The congressional voting margins for the Weldon Amendment – prohibiting recipients of federal funds (including California) from discriminating against any entity that does not provide insurance coverage of abortion – were narrower than its predecessors. The Obama administration made one of its first acts the repeal of Bush administration healthcare conscience regulations. And, adopting a posture that even the most staunchly pro-choice Democrats of prior decades would have rejected, Democratic politicians have now famously attacked any defense of conscience protections for religious employers who object to paying for abortifacients as a “war on women.”
The California decision to compel Catholic institutions to facilitate abortions in violation of their conscience would have been unthinkable in 1975 when the state law now cited as the basis for this new mandate was enacted. After four decades of relentless effort by the ACLU, it has now found government support for its illiberal agenda to not just secure an unenumerated abortion right but to also subjugate any individual religious liberty objections to this abortion right.
It is time for the Healthcare Conscience Rights Act. Introduced by Rep. Diane Black and Sen. Tom Coburn, this bill would provide a permanent home in the U.S. Code for the Weldon Amendment, ensuring that critical protections for conscience rights are not subject to the political winds in any given budget cycle. It would also provide a clear right for anyone whose conscience protections are violated to seek to stop the violation in court.
After four decades of consensus on conscience, it is clear that this moment has sadly passed. California, and perhaps other states at the urging of groups like the ACLU, will seek to compel citizens to facilitate abortions against their conscience. Depending upon the Obama administration alone to enforce these federal laws and demanding that governments receiving federal taxpayer dollars respect conscience are unlikely to be sufficient efforts.
Whatever one’s abortion views, Americans should be able to agree – as even the most ardent abortion supporters in Congress historically have – that the “choice” should not involve government compulsion. California’s radical decision might provide the moment for a return to this commonsense common ground.
Why should my insurance rates have to go up to pay for abortions for women who refuse to use birth control? If they choose to get pregnant because they expect to have an easily available abortion, they should pay for it themselves. No one should ever have to pay for other people to be grossly irresponsible.
The abortion advocates have long salivated over coercive measures regarding abortion. I have seen them promoting the idea that all medical students should be forced to learn abortion techniques, for instance. (Presumably because forcing a medical student to murder another human being will teach them to like killing once they overcome their initial reluctance.)
That’s what all coercion concerning abortion is about: abortion advocates’ firm belief that if you try it, you will like it. So they want to force everyone to try it.
What if she USES birth control? (Half of them do.) Would that make it any different?
You can tell how sick a society is by how it treats its death row residents.
Innocents are killed in the womb while the convicted die of old age on Death Row.
Californians are indifferent to death .. and life too, it seems.
Fewer than half use *any* kind of birth control, and probably a large number of those who claim to have been using it at the time they got pregnant were lying because they did not want to admit that they just didn’t want to bother with birth control.
Of all the people I know about who have had abortions, not a single one, ever, volunteered the fact that she got pregnant despite the use of birth control. However, every single one quickly volunteered any number of excuses for having the abortion—every one of which would have been a valid reason to prevent the pregancy in the first place, although they are flimsy excuses for killing a baby. Those two facts together tell me that not a single one of them bothered using contraceptives of any sort.
More than half of all abortions are on repeat customers. That, too, is an indicator that those having the abortions were doing so because they did not bother with contraceptives, not that contraceptives failed.
To me, accepting the premise that most abortions are just cleaning up accidents that happened despite the abortive mother’s best efforts just provides cover for irresponsible behavior. The abortion industry has a strong incentive to promote the idea that women having abortions were raped or their contraceptives failed, because both of those scenarios absolve the woman of guilt and excuse her irresponsible behavior. IMO, we need to keep the stigma level high, and not accept the self-serving lies and excuses.
The next slippery slope is euthanasia. Assisted suicide is allowed in Oregon, I think, and being pushed nationwide.
There are so-called doctors who will perform euthanasia. If doctors can be ordered to perform abortions, why not euthanasia? They already have to do end of life counseling with Medicare patients, and euthanasia is easily billed as a cost-saving measure both for pensions and Medicare.
Or take a non-life-threatening matter - medical marijuana.
Shall we see tee-totaller doctors disciplined for refusing to prescribe marijuana to someone who requests it? How can a doctor who doesn’t drink, smoke or do drugs impose his morality on a patient who wants a legal medical prescription to ease his/her suffering?
Question should be: Why is ‘health insurance’ a blank-check? Is not pregnancy the end-all of sex? Should insurance cover birth (how was THAT ‘unexpected’??)
Unfortunately, we’ve gotten away from the main points 1) Why is it the employers business/obligation 2) Insurance = covering the unknown/unexpected...not 6 mo. dental, annual checkups, etc.
• Fifty-one percent of women who have abortions used a contraceptive method in the month they got pregnant, most commonly condoms (27%) or a hormonal method (17%).
• About 61% of abortions are obtained by women who have one or more children.
That's why SEICUS/PP/Big Birth Controls want to get all women from 15 - 45 on a long-lasting hormonal method of birth control (not somethinbg tht requires daily dosing, like the Pill, but somethng that lasts 3 months, 6 months or more like the patch, the injection and the inserts) --- because all the oth ermethods have such a high failure rate.
Ultimately, they want the women spayed.
People who have decided to use a contraceptive have already decided sex is supposed to be child-free. When they get pregnant, they feel affronted ("I did the responsible thing and then THIS THING happened to me! How can that be??! I wuz cheated! I wuz robbed! Unfair!") and this feeling of false victimhood makes them feel justified in using the back-up, abortion.
Often as not.
Alan Guttmacher Institute exists for the sole purpose of giving a veneer of legitimacy to Planned Parenthood. Given its large financial stake in producing “research” results that are supportive/promoting of abortion, it is *not* a credible source.
Using AGI as a source for information on the prevention of pregnancy ranks right up there with using PETA as a source of the validity of animal models in medical research.
Indeed. A large part of this mess is that (to paraphrase Ann Coulter) health "insurance" is an expensive pre-paid service plan.
Insurance *should* cover my recent root canal and the subsequent reconstruction procedures, but not the routine dental check and cleaning.
On pregnancy, there is a case to be made for at least some coverage of childbirth. Since childbirth can have some drastic life-threatening complications, those should be covered even if health "insurance" were truly insurance.
An unfortunate consequence of the model of insurance as a pre-paid plan is that people expect to receive all kinds of expensive and difficult procedures for free, and they have utterly no appreciation of the education and skill it takes to provide those procedures. If they had to pay for routine care, saving the insurance for truly unexpected events, they might develop more of an appreciation for medical care. It takes slightly more skill to be a physician than a hamburger flipper--a fact you would never guess by listening to the current debates.
You are quite wrong about AGI’s reseaarch. Granted, the stuff they put out to the press is part of the PP propaganda matrix, but their regular published statistical research is the best there is. Family Research Council, Bishops’ Committee for Prolife Activities, National Right to Life, CDC, everybody goes to AGI for the real numbers.
Sure, AGI’s “analysis” of their numbers -— the “commentary” or interpretive part -— has be be re-tilted to get rid of their predictable biases; but their numbers are the gold standard. I’ve been following this field for almost 30 years, and that’s just the facts, Ma’am.
Yes, I can concede some points re: childbirth; though, I’d contend, it is not as nearly as ‘dangerous’ as it was in the (recent) past.
True too (RE: last point), but not entirely the point. My biggest concern: It currently hides the costs from the end-user. There is no ‘shopping’ the competition to reduce one’s costs because, hey, ‘insurance will cover it’
I’d say make it like car/home insurance, but even gov’t has its hands in that and screwed it up royally (more-so State, I know).
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