Contraception and Religious Freedom (and related issues)

[Primula Baggins]

This is a interesting and thought-provoking article about why there may be so much bro-ha-ha about contraception. I agree with most of it.

Why Patriarchal Men Are Utterly Petrified of Birth Control -- And Why We'll Still Be Fighting About it 100 Years From Now

I read that article yesterday. It forcefully makes some very interesting points. It's kind of unfairly hard on men, at least the men I know (I doubt that any of them would glory in keeping women down), but it does describe the importance of birth control in changing human history.

[Nin]

Yet a different country and yet a different practice: In Switzerland Health care is compulsory (everybody has to have a health insurance), but you have the choice which one you want - the basic minimum coverage has to be the same, whatever insurance you choose. Every year, tarifs, which are different for different regions (Geneva being the most expensive) are adapted and published and you can change your basic insurance every year, if you want to. No health inquiery and nobody can be refused. If you want more than this basic coverage, you have to take complementary insurance which is private and subdued to health inquiery (and can only be resigned from both sides under conditions).

Basic health care (like the one I have) does not cover contraception. However, it covers the medical visits to control your IUD or to get a pill prescription. The pill is quite cheap (and the other option is to buy it in France which is easy from here on and where it is cheaper). When I was on the pill, before the kids, it was around 20 francs per month and that's still the case. (The dollar is now a bit lower than the Swiss Franc) IUD is a lot more expensive - 250 francs - but it lasts five years... Many pharmacies offer discount on the pill for students.

There is no public discussion about this question. Being a wealthy country, the sum you have to pay for contraception is abalaible for most - and those for whom it is an issue get social aid. Legal and prescrided abortion is paid under basic helath insurance. Recently, religious groups gathered enough signatures to have a popular referendum to exclude abortion from the basic health insurance. They suceeded just in time and just got the numbers of signatures necessary, it was not a very popular initiative, but they suceeded. It should eventually be voted this year, but I am not too worried about the issue. 72% of the Swiss voted for the legalisation of abortion during the first trimester and its paiment through the basic health insurance in 2002.

Personally, I would advocate for free contraception. Not paid by healthinsurance, but paid by gouvernement. Birth control is one of the basis of our society, which could not function if every woman had, like in previous generations, a "natural" number of children. Our natural ressources would implode. If we want a modern, capitalist society, birth control is a part of it. Anything else is a way of closing your eyes.

Switzerland has the lowest abortion rate in Europe and one of the lowest rate in teenage pregnancies too, despite contraceptifs not being paid.

[Erunáme]

I'm about to find out how the Dutch system works for this. I have a feeling it's going to be similar to the Swiss system as health care is compulsory and I believe you have to pay a bit for prescriptions. Hoping it's cheaper than 20euros a month though. I have a feeling I'm really going to miss the English system. Your visits to the doctor to get the prescription are covered through your NHS taxes (the initial visit to discuss which contraception to use was with the doctor, but refill prescriptions could be given by a nurse) and whilst normally you had to pay £7 for prescriptions, birth control was completely covered.

Sure I don't have to be on the pill but I greatly prefer it as it makes my periods much lighter and much less painful. Honestly I'd still want to be on the pill even if I wasn't sexually active.

[nerdanel]

This is a interesting and thought-provoking article about why there may be so much bro-ha-ha about contraception. I agree with most of it.

Why Patriarchal Men Are Utterly Petrified of Birth Control -- And Why We'll Still Be Fighting About it 100 Years From Now

I read that article yesterday. It forcefully makes some very interesting points. It's kind of unfairly hard on men, at least the men I know (I doubt that any of them would glory in keeping women down), but it does describe the importance of birth control in changing human history.

IAWP, in that I don't think that most men - even most men who hold religiously paternalistic ideas - consciously cherish an ethos of male domination/female subjugation that the article describes. I was reading an article today about a Massachusetts priest who forcefully advocates for the Catholic teaching on birth control, laying out the necessity of embracing every aspect of one's spouse, including their reproductive potential -- and viewing contraception and sex for pleasure as objectifying one's spouse and using them as a "means to an end."

Now, I think it is possible to believe this without enthusiastically supporting the subjugation, marginalization, and even to some extent necessary depersonalization of women that occurs without access to contraception (in that a woman who cannot control her own destiny because she is forced to remain abstinent or become involuntarily pregnant is, in my view, denied her full personhood). However, I think that it would be difficult for someone to hold that priest's point of view - without some degree of animus towards female autonomy and equality - unless they were extremely naive, probably sexually very inexperienced (something that is or technically should be literally true for priests), and completely unable to appreciate the practical consequences of unchecked fertility at a societal level (as Nin lays out very well).

And I suppose that is my view of the church's teaching on this subject. At some level, it is a very romanticized view of sexual intimacy: a complete joining of two spouses, without any physical or hormonal barrier, in a romantic, intimate act that can lead to the creation of new life. What's not to like? Only that it is divorced from every physical and practical reality of pregnancy, childbirth, global overpopulation, and messy human relationships many of which do not last for a lifetime (or through children's minor years). It becomes clear that it is an at-best naive, impractical teaching promulgated by a group of men who are very evidently romantically and sexually inexperienced (at least vis-a-vis adult women) and who, in my view, are utterly unqualified to advise adult men and women engaging in real-world romantic and/or sexual relationships on their behavior.

[Cenedril_Gildinaur]

The people objecting simply don't want the employees of religious institutions to have access to contraceptives.

But... but... they have had access. Maybe there is an issue here of who pays for what, and maybe lack of health insurance can function as a block to the more expensive contraceptives, but how expensive are condoms? (I truly don't know, not having had to buy them for a while.. )There is access to birth control, just not capitated access by these institutions, right?

BRAVO!

I thought I was the only one who had said that, now I see someone else saying that.

I even gave an example with numbers with regards to the cost of the pill.

My employer provided health insurance does cover birth control pills, but that's not the whole story. One medicine is covered, it costs $50, and the insurance pays $3. The other is a generic alternative, it costs $30, and the insurance pays $0. Seriously, I didn't use the insurance. I saved $20 by not using the insurance.

These religious employers are NOT saying "you cannot do this with your own money on your own time." They are saying "we're not going to pay for it." Whoop-de-doo. Yet everyone seems to be reacting as if they are saying "you cannot do this with your own money on your own time."

[axordil]

Yet everyone seems to be reacting as if they are saying "you cannot do this with your own money on your own time."

They'd love to.

[anthriel]

Yet everyone seems to be reacting as if they are saying "you cannot do this with your own money on your own time."

They'd love to.

But they can't.

[axordil]

Yet everyone seems to be reacting as if they are saying "you cannot do this with your own money on your own time."

They'd love to.

But they can't.

Have you read the morals clauses or similar apparatuses for enforcement in the employment contracts?

http://wcfcourier.com/news/local/articl ... 002e0.html

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/christi ... ty-pledge/

http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/ ... 03286.html

[vison]

Until very, very, very recently sex between husband and wife was seen as, at best, a nasty necessity by Christianity and the RC church in particular. The sexual "ideal" was chastity, for both men and women. Paul famously said, "It is better to marry than to burn" and he didn't mean, burn with unfulfilled desire.

The misty-eyed romanticism, the view of a Catholic marriage, that nerdanel describes is only decades old. For the luvva pete, it wasn't the reality when I was a girl and I'm still here in this vale of tears.

We're all here because of J. R. R. Tolkien. It might be interesting to see what the RC church taught when he was a young man. Remember how his relationship with his eventual wife was interfered with by the church.

The article linked to above is interesting and I don't agree with all of it, in that I know many men who don't fit the mould of an MCP. But enough men do, that it matters.

As I said before, the Canadian system is for health insurance, meaning health care, not necessarily preventive care. The doctor's visit where you are prescribed The Pill is covered, but the prescription probably isn't. Hospitals, in BC at least, are funded not from the Canada Health Act (the act that requires each province to have health insurance) but from provincial taxes. (There are "transfer payments" from Ottawa, but that's a complicated deal and only confuses everyone.)

[Hachimitsu]

Yep, that is exactly it JewelSong.
Great article.

EDIT: Totally missed a bunch of posts, sorry

[Cenedril_Gildinaur]

Yet everyone seems to be reacting as if they are saying "you cannot do this with your own money on your own time."

They'd love to.

Even if true, that is outside the scope of this discussion.

[Primula Baggins]

C_G, I'm sure you've heard of the Overton window, right? (Wikipedia link)

Many of these actions that may seem irrelevant or like overreach do have a cumulative effect, one that the actors want to bring about. A month ago, birth control was not remotely "controversial." Now it's regularly referred to that way. Keep up the drumbeat long enough, and more and more of the public will accept the idea that birth control is controversial, so much so that access to it should rightly be subject to control by "conscience clauses" that supersede women's right to control their own health.

[Cenedril_Gildinaur]

Interesting idea, Primula. Does the direction society seems to be going at this time indicate that the transition from unthinkable to accepted is in the direction of the Roman Catholic Church arresting people for the crime of contraception, or in the direction of the U. S. Government ordering the Roman Catholic Church to pay for items they consider immoral?

Overton's Window does seem like a cousin of the Slippery Slope, and we can see which direction society is sliding.

[yovargas]

Hehe, I had the same thought, CG. Libertarian types have been using slippery slope-type arguments against government control laws for ages...

[Primula Baggins]

This is different: it's a deliberate political strategy, and I think those trying to move the window want to move it in the direction of birth control being widely accepted to be a dreadful thing (so Obama will get in trouble for promulgating a policy that facilitates access to it).

I am not at all sure it'll work, but I feel pretty sure at least some strategists are trying.

[axordil]

The Government isn't asking anyone to pay for anything, unless that individual or entity *chooses* to employ people. If someone thinks that the laws and regulations the government requires all employers, save churches proper, to follow are in some way immoral, they don't have to employ anyone. No one is holding a gun to the RC Chruch's figurative head and forcing them to run hospitals and charities.

[Cenedril_Gildinaur]

Are you actually suggesting that the RCC close all its hospitals and schools?

And to use your "gun to the head" argument, nobody is doing that to people who choose to seek employment at Catholic schools or hospitals.

[axordil]

Are you actually suggesting that the RCC close all its hospitals and schools?

And to use your "gun to the head" argument, nobody is doing that to people who choose to seek employment at Catholic schools or hospitals.

I'm suggesting they have a choice: employ people by the same rules the rest of us have to, no special treatment, or get out of the business of employing people.

I'm sure the free market would fill the void they would leave.

And while you're correct about no one being forced to work for them, that's not the point. Blacks didn't *have* to travel, or shop, or interact with society in ways that Jim Crow limited. That didn't make Jim Crow any less wrong.

Employees, or potential employees, shouldn't have to worry about their 14th Amendment right to Equal Protection going pfft because a potential employer wants to enforce their religious beliefs on them.

[Frelga]

Hehe, I had the same thought, CG. Libertarian types have been using slippery slope-type arguments against government control laws for ages...

Well, that first spoonful of yogurt in the morning is the start of the slippery slope toward 600lb obese body. Yet most of us have breakfast and retain non-spherical shape.

[JewelSong]

On the subject of choice - Quakers are morally opposed to war in all forms. Most Quakers pay taxes anyway...and quite a bit of federal tax goes towards preparing or actually fighting war.

I don't know personally any Quakers who have refused to pay taxes in protest and gone to jail (although some have in the past.) However, I do know some who deliberately live below the taxable income line so that they are not part of the mechanism that pays for war.

The RCC DOES have the choice of getting out of the employment business. The churches themselves are exempt and I think if their schools or hospitals hired only religious (nuns and brothers) as employees, those places would also be exempt.

IAWA.