Denying health care to women is a First Amendment right.
It says so in the Bible.
Oh, for
Christ's sake:
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops recently released a 35-page comment (.pdf) to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services claiming that the agency’s recent decision to include birth control in its list of preventive care services violates the First Amendment’s religion clause.
Health and Human Services’ decision would allow women to receive insurance coverage for birth control without having to also make co-payments. The decision would be implemented through the Affordable Care Act. Catholic organizations have been the main opponents of this decision — despite a provision that “allows religious institutions that offer insurance to their employees the choice of whether or not to cover contraception services.”
There's really no part of the bishops' 35-page manifesto of bullshit that isn't wrong.
For example, they say that contraceptives "can operate to cause abortion." Well, yeah, if you subscribe to the "every sperm is sacred" belief. But otherwise, no. Wrong.
They say the exemption that clearly protects those with a "moral or religious objection" to providing health care to women doesn't go far enough. Because apparently, the First Amendment protects medical providers who hide behind their Bible from even having to be asked to provide medical care, even if it allows them to say, "Fuck you, lady, I'm not giving you those birth control pills because I just don't believe you should have them."
They say that contraceptives "are associated with adverse health outcomes." Nuh-uh. In fact, they're associated with improved health because, as people whose degrees are in actual medicine, not Bible-thumping, have found through something they call research, family planning, which includes use of contraceptives, actually improves women's health. So, fail again, padres.
They claim that taking contraceptives "increases the risk" that women will contract HIV, which is really their way of saying that access to contraception causes women to turn into uber-sluts, which in turn leads to disease. Which isn't true either.
Then there's the claim that mandating coverage of birth control "targets Catholicism for special disfavor." Because somehow, providing health care to women is really about picking on the Catholics. But hey, they've cited several legal cases to back up this "claim," so it's not totally insane. It's the law!
And the bullshit goes on and on and on. For 35 pages. I won't bother to pick apart the rest of it for you, but the letter closes with this nonsensical demand:
The HHS mandate should be rescinded in its entirety. If HHS refuses to do that, then it must address the most grievous and intolerable aspects of this misguided mandate by (a) excluding from the mandate those drugs that can cause an abortion, and (b) exempting all stakeholders with a religious or moral objection to contraceptives, sterilization, and related education and counseling.
Now, if the bishops believe that all contraception causes abortion, and they're asking that the mandate exclude "those drugs that can cause an abortion," what form of contraception is left? Prayer? That's right, ladies, your health care providers cannot offer you birth control pills, but they can offer you this shiny new Bible. Good luck!
Given the Church's own history of questionable morals and blatant law-breaking, it's pretty preposterous that the bishops have the nerve to claim their "right" to demand that all women stay barefoot and pregnant should trump women's rights to health care and their right to decide if and when to have children.
Which is why even most Catholics don't really pay much attention to this garbage—including the 98 percent of sexually active Catholic women who have used contraception because, regardless of what the Church says, they don't actually want to spend their lives as baby-making machines for Christ.
And according to the majority of Americans who support the new mandate that covers contraception, they shouldn't have to.