Birth Control Discussed by Those Who Know Best: Men.
In the world of politics, it's getting to the point where there isn't something that surprises me. The infinite stupidity of politicians making statements and suggesting laws and regulation on issues to only advance their own party, line their pockets, or pander to the voting masses is quite apparent. You'd be hard pressed to find someone who didn't think the words "politician" and "crooked" belong in the same sentence.
I thought I would share one such instance, though. Debates about the abortion thing are heating up again as everyone starts getting the next US Presidential election on their mind. This happens again and again, another notable time being when President Obama was just a candidate. And other times including once a semester on my college campus.
I came across this article on Jezebel.com. Now, you may want to know (or point out in your comments below) that this is a feminist website, so issues relating to women and how women are portrayed are the fodder for all of their articles. I don't want anyone discrediting this site because it's run by a bunch of feminists. Why? Because this topic was also covered by the Politicker and ThinkProgress.org and ABC News and the WashingtonPost's Wonk Blog. And feminists (at least modern ones) aren't as "crazy" as some folks like to think.
Republican Rep Darrell Issa from California put together a panel of five men in front of a Congressional committee on the topic of how insurers paying for women's birth control was wrong. Sandra Fluke wanted to be the one pro-birth control debater present at the hearing, but was surprised to find that she was deemed an 'inappropriate" witness and thought to be unqualified.
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Strangely enough, it seems this unqualified person would have been the most knowledgeable person there. Not only did she have a story to recount, she was also a junior studying law at Georgetown University, and of course, she would have been the only one in the room with a uterus.
About the first point: She saw a friend of hers denied the birth control that helped with her polycystic ovary syndrome. The woman couldn't afford the drug and had to stop taking it when her Georgetown University student insurance didn't cover it. Because of this, the woman developed a cyst, which ironically would likely keep her from reproducing ever.
I must say that lately I have been disgusted with politics regarding women. Every story I'm hearing has been negative: men not allowing a qualified female witness at the above mentioned hearing; Certain presidential candidates declaring women shouldn't be in the military because they're too emotional, or that men will compromise a mission to "save" them; etc, etc...
Have I missed the point where we all went back to the 1950s, and suddenly women are expected to be Mrs Suzy Homemaker in the kitchen, doing nothing but cook and clean and get her hubby's martini ready when he gets home from work?
Women are being grossly misrepresented and/or underrepresented in media and politics. It is certainly not true of all politicians or all men (and believe you me, women can be sexist against females too) but it's time to stop thinking about that-thing-with-boobs and start calling her a Person.
*Also of note is the fact that a second panel was held and two women did testify. According the the WonkBlog on the Washington Post's website, Sandra Fluke was invited by Democrats to speak. Rep. Darrell Issa claimed her name was submitted late, and therefore for that reason was not considered to be a part of the panel.
So what do you think? Too much feminist mumbo-jumbo, or are male politicians making decisions without women involved? Are we getting the whole story here, or was the fact that the panel of five people were all men just a statistical accident (highly unlikely, considering the topic). I'd like to see your opinions on this.
Sources:
http://jezebel.com/5886038/meet-the-inappropriate-female-witness-barred-from-speaking-at-the-birth-control-hearing
http://thinkprogress.org/health/2012/02/17/427677/the-woman-prevented-from-testifying-in-favor-of-birth-control-says-shes-stunned-by-gops-rebuke/
http://www.politicker.com/2012/02/17/sandra-fluke-discusses-being-rejected-from-house-contraception-hearing/
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/02/rep-darrell-issa-bars-minority-witness-a-woman-on-contraception-2/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/meet-sandra-fluke-the-woman-you-didnt-hear-at-congress-contraceptives-hearing/2012/02/16/gIQAJh57HR_blog.html
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Comments
I agree with the sentiments
I agree with the sentiments of your post, that women should be free to make their own decisions regarding their bodies.
However, I disagree that this is relevant in the wider context of the current birth control debate. I believe that people have inviolable freedom of conscience, and that it is not proper for me to decide what others ought to believe.
So if private Catholic institutions want to exclude birth control from their health plans, that is their right, and the government has no right to impose upon them. Women (and men) must make their own decisions on how to provide for themselves given their resources and priorities. Nobody is entitled to free birth control, food, cars or whatever, if another party was forced to give it to them by the government, against that party's consent and in violation of their freedom of conscience.
The only problem that I have
The only problem that I have with this argument is that birth control (pills) are sometimes medically necessary. My sister, for instance, has polycystic ovarian syndrome, and could become infertile (or worse) if she is not treated. The treatment is birth control pills. There are certain medications where it would be extremely unethical, and probably even malpractice, to not provide birth control with, because there are known birth defects caused by the medication (and, let's face it, the rhythm method isn't the best at preventing pregnancy).
So while I understand that Catholic organizations do not want to provide birth control for patients due to their conscience, the fact that they aren't covering it at all when it is sometimes medically necessary really bugs me.
Why not call it "hormone therapy"
When I quit smoking about 12 years ago I was prescribed a great drug (I can't remember the name) which worked great. I took it for about a week and it made the craving for a cigarette just disappear. Great stuff.
About the 2'nd time I went into fill my prescription, the pharmacy was out of stock so the pharmacist gave me a drug with a completely different name as a substitute. He explained to me that the two drugs were identical and that the only differences were the name and the packaging. The substitute drug was marketed as a treatment for depression and it had been on the market for years before they renamed it and started using it to help people quit smoking. As I recall, it was much cheaper too which was an eye-opener.
I guess my point is that I very much doubt that the Catholic Church would have a problem with your sister receiving a drug that happened to contain hormones if it was prescribed for a legitimate medical purpose other than birth control.
But what if it was for birth
But what if it was for birth control? If you receive a prescription for Vitamin A for acne, you have to be on two forms of birth control in order to prevent pregnancy, because if you get pregnant on that drug, there are a ton of really, really bad birth defects that can result.
In this case, there is a legitimate medical purpose for prescribing the birth control, but that purposes happens to be birth control.
Why not call it acne treatment
It sounds like the regime of drugs used for acne treatment includes some hormones.
The condition being treated is acne so why not call it acne treatment?
Very true. Many folks forget
Very true. Many folks forget that birth control isn't just for birth control. It can be for serious health issues as well. It's a stigma that high school girls who aren't sexually active have to go through, because if her peers find out she on BC, suddenly she's labeled as a ('scuse the term) slut.
Institutions don't have rights.
Hold on there. Institutions don't have rights. Only INDIVIDUALS have rights. And in this case, the greatest burden seems to be placed upon the individual women who are seeking healthcare. Why should an institution be able to tell a woman what medical procedures will or will not be included in HER insurance coverage? Don't HER rights matter? If the recipient of the healthcare doesn't have a religious objection to the coverage, then I don't see where the opinions of a bunch of men in Rome have anything relevant to say, here.
"It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for something you are not." ~ Andre Gide
Really?
I thought the Supreme Court had recently settled this issue when they ruled that corporations were people and that they DID indeed have a right to free speech?
And are you suggesting that labor unions should not have the right to COLLECTIVE bargaining? Unions are institutions. And it would be oxymoronic to have the right to collective bargaining limited to individuals.
I know that there are people that have their own individual personal religions. But most religious people are organized into institutions that are often called churches and I believe there is ample precendent that these religious institutions do indeed enjoy a collective right to freedom of religion.
Not really...
Citizens United is a very misunderstood ruling. Have you actually read it? All that it really says is that "associations of citizens" may collectively engage in "political speech" which is therefore protected by the First Amendment as free speech. In fact, I would suggest that Citizens United actually emboldens the assertion of collective bargaining rights, rather than suppressing it.
But that case really doesn't speak to THIS issue, in which an association of citizens PRESUMES to represent the rights of its employees in a collective fashion, when in fact they do not. Employers may legally limit the speech of their employees while they are on the job, and may prevent employees from engaging in non-work related speech while they are on the clock. They may even terminate employees who engage in private speech that renders them unable to do their job effectively. But nothing in this equation fits into this legal framework.
In this case, the actual OWNER of the health insurance is the employee, and the relationship being controlled is really between the insurance provider and that employee. The institutions involved (which in the context of the recent public debate are NOT ACTUALLY CHURCHES AT ALL) have only a very minor interest in that relationship. The employee has the primary interest that needs protecting, and I would suggest that if the Obama administration would have ultimately won the argument had the issue been raised in court. But instead they chickened out and chose to retreat before the power that the church has over public opinion. The law was on Obama's side, but the political calculus was not.
"It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for something you are not." ~ Andre Gide
Owner vs Beneficiary
If the employee was the owner of the policy they could take it with them when the employment relationship stopped. Except for the limited COBRA provisions, that is not the case.
I think you are confusing owner with beneficiary. The owner is the one paying for the policy. The beneficiary is the one who gets benefits. It is a very real distinction. Consider life insurance. The owner never benefits (except perhaps peace of mind) because the policy does not pay until the owner is dead. The beneficiary who was not the owner gets the benefit of the coverage in the form of a death benefit payment.
The church is not presuming to speak on behalf of their employees. They are not in anyway preventing them from using birth control. They are speaking on behalf of themselves when they say it offends them morally to PAY for it. Many of them self-insure which means regardless of the previous or current semantics of the policy formulation, that Obama is forcing them to directly pay for it. In that situation they are not only the owner of the policy but also the insurer.
By "they and them" I mean people who have joined a religion and explicitly put the Pope in charge of speaking for their religion and defining the religion's dogma. I fail to see how that sort of collective association is different than the speech coming from a corporation or the collective bargaining coming from a union. It is protected by the same amendment as protects speech.
That's not how it works in the industry...
I know its been a while, so I will remind you that I actually work in the healthcare insurance industry, and your knowledge of the subject is lacking. The industry (and the law) divides the players up into four categories: the provider (the doctor or hospital that provides a service), the payer (the insurance company), the payee (the policy holder) and the patient (who is not necessarily the payee). The insurance policy is a contract between the payer and the payee. The payer has SEPARATE relationships with the providers and with the companies that provide coverage to their employees as a BENEFIT. That's the key point in ownership. Insurance that is provided through a company is a benefit, and benefits, once provided, belong solely to the employee. It is exactly the same as the money they pay you, the vacation that they provide your, and so forth. It is a part of your compensation package.
"The church is not presuming to speak on behalf of their employees. They are not in anyway preventing them from using birth control."
Horsepuckey. That is clearly the church's motivation, and really they don't make any bones about that fact. But, you seem to be dodging the fact that NONE of the institutions that were actually being affected by the birth control issues were "churches." Churches were exempt from the policy as it was originally written and proposed. We're talking about subsidiary busnesses which claim a relationship to the church, but which in fact are (and always have been) legally considered to be secular institutions that are subject to all of the same employment laws as all other businesses.
"They are speaking on behalf of themselves when they say it offends them morally to PAY for it."
Actual churches are constitutionally permitted to make this kind of argument. Everyone else has to play by the secular rulebook. Like it or not, insurance coverage is a regulated industry in this country, and even self-insured payers have to abide by most relevant regulations.
"By "they and them" I mean people who have joined a religion and explicitly put the Pope in charge of speaking for their religion and defining the religion's dogma."
You are aware, I hope, that not all of the employees of these supposedly "religious" institutions are actually members of the religion to which these institutions associate themselves. I would also point out that as a foreign head of state, the Pope has no real relevance (legally speaking) in the religious beliefs of individual citizens in this country. In fact, MOST catholics in the United States actually support this mandate (http://content.usatoday.com/communities/Religion/post/2012/02/contracept..., http://www.newser.com/story/139192/catholics-back-obamas-birth-control-m...). It was tge catholic heirarchy that opposed it, not the citizens that they CLAIM to represent.
"I fail to see how that sort of collective association is different than the speech coming from a corporation or the collective bargaining coming from a union."
It seems rather obvious to me. The traditional (and legally the most relevant) relationship here is the relationship between the doctor and the patient. Compentent adults have a basic right (founded in the basic constitutional right of privacy) to control their own healthcare. That relationship is remarkably different than groups (corporations) using money as speech in political campaigns.
"It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for something you are not." ~ Andre Gide
I need clarification. What
I need clarification. What part of your explanation implies that the payee/patient (regardless of whether they are the same person) gets to choose what treatments the payer will cover for them? That seems to not be the case, especially considering payees/patients don't even get to choose what doctors their payer will cover (at least under the HMO model). If birth control (or any other type of coverage) was never a part of an insurance package, why should a payee/patient force the payer to start providing it via government coercion?
You would be more knowledgeable about this than I would be, but the underlying problem here seems to be the HMO system, which decreases the number of health insurance options (options which would include, for example, plans that cover birth control) available to a person. Of course, the HMO system was created by government intervention in the market, so I'm hardly surprised it needs continuous government mandates and patches to (barely) work.
Healthcare is a regulated industry...
...and those regulations, generally speaking, require policies to cover basic preventative healthcare plus "medically necessary" procedures. (It's really a lot more complicated than that, but that's the jist.)
"It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for something you are not." ~ Andre Gide
Thanks for writing about this
Thanks for writing about this. From my vantage point, this is just the latest articulation of the conservative backlash to feminism's gains in recent decades. Anti-feminism has become increasingly visible and virulent in the mainstream, and this political power play is just one of its current manifestations.
From the perspective of this radical feminist, the whole "religious freedom vs. contraception" characterization is a false dichotomy, because I don't see any curtailing of religious freedom going on here; all I see is the misogyny of god-bags.
Churches are exempt from the dictate to provide birth control to their female employees. Only their affiliated institutions are bound by the HHS rule to provide contraceptives to their female employees without a co-pay. And Obama's compromise has taken even those affiliated-entities out of the birth-control equation, instead requiring the insurance company itself to be involved in the religiously-offensive business of providing contraception.
The church-affiliates are players in a secular marketplace, they receive federal funding, and there's no logical reason why they should not have to play by the rules the federal government sets out for all other players in the secular marketplace. And with Obama's compromise putting the onus on the insurance companies rather than the affiliates themselves, I really don't understand how it's even still an issue, or why the religious establishments are still up in arms.
The First Amendment is not implicated. The HHS rule places a limitation on the affiliated-organizations' ability to contract, i.e., an affiliated-organization cannot contract with an employee in such a way that would provide her with healthcare benefits that do not include access to contraception without a co-pay. That is all.
Such a contract limitation does not affect the organizations' rights of free association or speech. The juridical entity that is the church-affiliated organization does not have a violable religious conscience; it is a legitimate, legally protected entity to be sure, but as a creature of the state it is not imbued with all the liberties of a natural citizen.
Meanwhile, the citizens whom act as the officers and directors of such an organization are not, by the tenets of their religious faith, bound to serve in such a secular, corporate capacity. If they choose to do so, however, they are bound to follow the law as are all other participants. When the law conflicts with their religious beliefs, it rests with those individuals whether to obey the law or their conscience, and if they choose the latter, they are free to not participate in the secular, corporate world. It is not as if any of these men are actually being persecuted as a result of their religious beliefs.
The entire fiasco, so far as I can tell, is simply a way for the control of women's reproductive capacity to be legitimized as a matter of public policy; calling a religious foul is merely a way of obfuscating the fact that the issue is, in fact, a matter of personal liberty.
-IA
How can you use the phrase
How can you use the phrase "personal liberty" in the same breath as "government dictates," "regulations," and "limitations"? The latter are antithetical to the former. If the government didn't interfere in the health care market as it currently does, we wouldn't have had this national contraception debate in the first place. Contraception isn't something that should be debated nationally and as a part of national insurance policy, I agree. It is a purely personal matter, and the only way to ensure it stays personal is to end government interference in the free market.
Easily
Easily, because sometimes government dictates, in the form of regulations and/or limitations, are necessary to protect personal liberty. This stems from the notion that one of the purposes of government is to protect against the tyranny of the majority.
Not true: contraception has been the subject of national debate since the late 1800s, when the Comstock Act was passed. The Comstock laws prohibited the advertisement of, dissemination of information about, and distribution of contraception. It was only in 1965 that the Supreme Court held that States could not prohibit married couples from using contraception, and not until 1972 that the Court extended that right to unmarried women. (http://is.gd/QhW8zl)
Use of contraception is indeed a purely personal matter, but that doesn't mean there's no place for government in the equation. I submit that government must be able to intervene to ensure that contraceptive choices are available, because there are powerful groups and individuals working to make contraception wholly inaccessible to the majority of women.
--IA
Well said.
Well said.
I have to say, it's nice to see so many comments and opinions on the issue as a whole. It's showing that people are paying attention--and that's a good thing
Now if only the stigma of "birth control is for sluts" could be erased, we could make some forward momentum for women's rights.
I wonder sometimes, if the role were reversed, would men be facing the same issue? Perhaps it's a silly thing to even bring up, but I'll wonder all the same.
Birth control is now a days
Birth control is now a days one of the very big Women health issue taking place in many of the countries. Paying for women's birth control was wrong but birth control is our need and for that people should be aware of this problem and they should personally take a initiative to control the birth rate. There are Birth Control Methods are there which are safe and beneficial.
a germane bit of news...
"Last week, as the nation paid rapt attention, the Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius. ... That same day, the Supreme Court made a second decision about the ACA to a much quieter reception. The Court declined to hear Seven-Sky v. Holder, a case alleging that the ACA’s individual mandate provision violates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), a statute that precludes federal laws from placing a “substantial burden” on religious exercise unless the government has a compelling interest in enacting the law. Here, the plaintiffs argued that they “believe in trusting in God to protect [them] from illness or injury,” and therefore did not “want to be forced to buy health insurance coverage.”
Both the district court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, in an opinion authored by conservative judge, Laurence Silberman, resoundingly rejected this argument, concluding that there was no substantial burden. The Supreme Court, in turn, determined that there was no need to review that conclusion. That’s bad news for groups hoping to radically redefine the meaning of religious liberty and overturn longstanding principles regarding the freedom of religion by challenging the contraceptive coverage rule under RFRA. If a law requiring an individual to acquire insurance coverage for herself despite claims that it’s contrary to her beliefs doesn’t trigger RFRA, the even more tenuous connection between an employer’s contribution to an insurance plan for its workers and the health services accessed by workers under that plan should certainly be on safe ground."
[from http://is.gd/EcxfY9]