Contraceptive Controversy

The Obama administration was surprised by the degree and intensity of resistance to the Health and Human Services regulations that refused to exempt all religious organizations from the general requirement to buy insurance policies that provide contraceptive coverage. This led to some backtracking, or at least a show of it. The White House fact sheet explained the supposed concession: “Contraceptive coverage will be offered by their employers’ insurance company directly, with no role for religious employers who oppose contraception,” and “insurance companies will be required to provide contraceptive coverage to these women free of charge.” Bottom line: Religious employers who offer insurance to their employees are still required to provide (and pay for) policies that are required to provide contraception.

Time will tell whether this difference that makes very little difference defuses the political uproar. But for now I find myself mystified. Why is the administration so determined that women get contraceptives for free? The current arrangements are not financially burdensome, at least not for middle-class women who have jobs that provide the health insurance that the contraceptive mandate targets. The Planned Parenthood website tells us that the pill can cost somewhere between $10 and $50 per month. That’s less than a cable subscription or a monthly cell-phone bill. It’s less than ten or twelve lattes per month. So why push the mandate?

Feminism probably plays a role. Women have come to realize that contraception is almost entirely their responsibility. It no doubt galled the generation of women now in the White House that as college students they had to plan ahead for”and pick up the cost of”the pick-up culture. For them, free contraceptives are a matter of justice, an imperative of gender equality. Men need to pay as well, which is precisely what will happen when everybody’s insurance premiums go toward subsidizing the “free” contraceptives now mandated by the administration.

The abortion license also may be exercising its malign influence. The administration defends the contraceptive mandate as “preventive health care,” which presumes that pregnancy is an affliction to be prevented. This reinforces the mentality that thinks of abortion as a necessary part of “women’s health.” Contraceptives are essential for preventing the disease of pregnancy, and abortion is the necessary “cure” when prevention fails.

But perhaps the most important reason has to do with the prevailing liberal view of sexual freedom, which is that it is a basic human right because it serves the fundamental good of ensuring that we can enjoy the conclusion of what John Haldane calls in this issue the argumentum ad consummationem . If one adds the liberal premise that rights are empty if we suffer any financial limitations or social impediments”and that government is positively obliged to remove those limitations and impediments”then contraceptives become like decent housing and food for children. They are among the bottom line, basic necessities that a just society must provide if men and women are not to live in a dehumanized condition, which is to say are not able to have sex without worries.

Perhaps I’m over-interpreting this strange episode in American politics. But perhaps not. How else can we explain why the Obama White House is willing to spend so much political capital to subsidize the sexual choices of middle-class American women?