Today’s New York Times reminds us that the Jesuits haven’t gone entirely off the rails. Their exposé exposes the fact that Fordham has resisted compliance with a New York state law that requires insurance coverage that pays for birth control pills. Nice to know that on this issue they’re keeping the C in Catholic up at Rose Hill in the Bronx.
Of course this conflict between Planned Parenthood Jihadists and Catholic institutions is now going national. The HHS mandated health coverage requires birth control as a “preventive service.”
The absurdity of all this has united Catholics, as Fordham demonstrates. It’s hardly a hard line institution, but the strange notion that birth control is an essential health care imperative is something any intelligent liberal, Catholic or otherwise, should reject.
Put plainly, whatever one thinks of the morality of contraception, as a drug or device, it’s a consumer good, not a kind of medicine. Like season tickets to the Mets games, it’s something you spend money on to have fun. The overwhelming majority of people don’t suffer from conditions or diseases that REQUIRE them to have sex. They choose to do so, for the obvious reasons that, again, don’t have anything to do with health and everything to do with pleasure.
Of course the New York Times and the Obama administration—and for that matter a big sector of liberal opinion—doesn’t see it that way. Birth control is not a luxury; it’s a necessity, something without which normal, healthy adult life would be quite simply impossible.
The Pill is so fundamental to human flourishing for the New York Times that the article empathizes with the suffering students at Fordham, especially graduate students, who “have found the restrictions on birth control coverage onerous.”
Onerous? We’re not talking about anybody preventing women from buying birth control. Apparently it’s onerous because nobody is paying for it.
Let’s look at this terrible burden. According to the Planned Parenthood website, to get a prescription for the pill a woman needs an exam that may cost $35-$250. A monthly prescription runs $15-$50.
OK. The exam is roughly the cost of whatever the latest hot fashion in women’s shoes, and the prescription less than the cost of buying a regular cup of coffee at Starbucks.
So there you have what’s at stake in for liberalism today: raise taxes on cigarettes, fret over fatty foods, and subsidize sex (or make it into a civil right). Good for Fordham for resisting.
