Why My Employees Dont Want Free Birth Control (Even if
Sandra Fluke Does)
By Steven W. Mosher
In violation of the First Amendment President Obama has ordered all Catholic nonprofits to provide their employees with so-called modern methods of birth control."
Even the openly abortifacient Morning After Pill is supposed to be included. It is preventative health care" he claims and must be free" for the asking.
We at Population Research Institute reject this unlawful mandate." Not only does it violate our deeply held religious beliefs it also violates our mission: to protect and defend innocent unborn life.
You see the pill along with all its injectable and implantable counterparts is abortifacient.
Most American women dont know that the pill they swallow with their morning orange juice can cause early-term abortions. They dont know that while on the pill they (1) may still ovulate (2) may still conceive a child and (3) may then abort that child.
This is one of the ways that the pill works.
This hard truth would probably give even Sandra Fluke pause remember she is the law school student who whined last week to Barbara Boxer that GeorgetownUniversitywont give her free" birth control
if she knew about it. She probably doesnt.
Our employees
are informed about the abortifacient action of the pill and they want nothing to do with it.
Odds are that PRIs employees also grasp something else that Sandra Fluke doesnt: That the powerful steroid-based drugs that she is so eager to ingest may negatively impact her health. Not that this ignorance is her fault. How many American women have had the downside of contraception explained to them?
The pill is not a warm little fuzzy harmless object" Dr. Rebecca Peck notes but causes significant harm to women. As a practicing physician I see the fallout every day young women with blood clots in their legs strokes early breast cancer HPV and cervical cancer. But women arent told. Informed consent provisions are simply ignored."
We at PRI helped to get Norplant taken off the market some years ago after thousands of women became ill after having the drug-laden capsules implanted under their skin. How many women know this? How many women know that there are currently a number of class action lawsuits going forward in theU.S.against various contraceptives because of the harm they have caused women?
We prosecute athletes for using steroids we warn elderly ladies about the dangers of Hormone Replacement Therapy and then we deceive young women like Sandra Fluke into thinking that taking megadoses of powerful steroid-based drugs to chemically disable their reproductive systems is completely harmless. How could it be?
Of course the master deceiver in this ongoing drama is President Obama himself who claims against all reason that birth control is simply preventative care."
Really? Every day doctors across theU.S.perform true preventative care examining patients for diseases of the reproductive system. They perform pap smears looking for cervical cancer perform breast exams looking for breast cancer refer for mammograms order colonoscopies looking for colon cancer and give immunizations to prevent pneumonia and influenza.
These time-tested measures are totally different than surgically sterilizing someone or prescribing a pill to prevent a child from being conceived or developing. Is fertility a disease? Is pregnancy a disease state? Or is the gestation of a child a normal physiological process of the human body? As Peck and Norris have convincingly argued birth control simply does not qualify as preventative care.
1
Ever the politician President Obama is now trying to have it both ways. On the one hand he has not only promised the Sandra Flukes of the world that they can have all the drugs and devices they want for free" he is now also trying to convince upset Catholics that their Catholic health care and educational institutions like Georgetown wont have to pay for them either. I have ordered the health insurance companies to cover the cost" he airily assures us.
Of course the insurance companies will carry out this mandate by simply passing the cost through to their policyholders including PRI. The result is that not only PRI but
all Catholics and Christians will wind up paying extra insurance premiums for things that they find morally objectionable.
Such an uncompromising compromise leads me to seriously wonder whether the current occupant of the White House thinks that we are all idiots. More likely he believes that most Americans dont pay that much attention to his misdeeds and that those that do dont matter because we wont vote for him anyway. Political calculations are never very far from the surface where Scary Barry is concerned.
A real compromise would remove free birth control sterilizations and other abortifacient drugs from the preventative care mandate completely. Of course American women would have the same access to them that they have always had. They would just not be free" they would not be part of preventative care" and Catholics would
not have to pay for them.
There is a final reason that PRI employees are not interested in free" birth control. It has to do with a cheap easy and healthy method of family planning that involves no powerful steroid-based drugs or invasive procedures and is in fact promoted by the Catholic Church. Modern methods of Natural Family Planning or NFP such as Dr FehringsMarquettemethod or Dr. Hilgers Creighton method or Dr. Billings method have no unhealthy consequences at all. Instead they empower women strengthen marriages and allow couples to express their sexuality in the natural way that nature and natures God intended.
All it requires is a little self-control for a few days a month.
At this point the Presidents circle probably dissolves into mocking laughter. It is simply inconceivable to them that anyone could or would practice self-control in matters of sex.
But what human activities dont require at least a modicum of self control? Most of us voluntarily abstain from food from time to time whether we do it for spiritual reasons (it is Lent after all) or because we dont like how we look. We work hard to quit smoking and admire those who succeed. We put warning labels on food packages and danger signs on cigarette packages. (Maybe we should put pictures of stroke victims on the covers of birth control pills?) And even those of us who fail in diets and workout regimens admire those who succeed or at least we pretend to.
Even Barack Obamas beloved condoms and birth control pills require a certain amount of self-control. How many condoms fall victim to overeager fumbling? How many pills languish in their packets forgotten in the lust of the moment. Such failures explain why contraception invariably leads to abortion.
We at PRI understand that despite taking a few days off each month happily married couples who practice NFP have more and better sex than singles in lifelong monogamous relationships that are both open to Love and Life
and free from disease.
These are lessons that Sandra Fluke along with all students at Catholic universities need to be taught. In Flukes case maybe one of her Catholic professors could also mention to her that she shouldnt expect others to pay for her recreational sex.
