Since the employees will have birth control distributed to them in any event, the burden imposed on the nuns by requiring them to state their own position about birth control is de minimis. It’s sophistry.
It is particularly aggravating since the Catholic church has shown little reluctance to impose their own religious views on others who do not share those views even when it costs those others their lives.
This is contrary to my understanding of the situation. I thought that if the religious institution doesn’t send in the form, the birth control is not distributed or they (the institution) incur some form of punishment. Is that not the case? Please explain?
If the birth control is not distributed that imposes a high burden on exercise of religious rights of the would be recipient.
Yes, under the current system it makes it more difficult for the government to see when they have agreed to use the alternate procedure but in the long run the government would find a way around the attempted obstruction by the nuns. In my first response to you I suggested a method for doing this: Require all the institutions to report whether or not they were willing to have birth control distributed to those who in the exercise of their own moral judgment wanted and to treat any refusal to respond as a negative response.
By the nun’s reasoning they can’t pay their workers for fear they are enabling birth control. What the employee chooses to do with the remuneration they have received is no business of the nuns.
It is all a fiction. As the judge noted, US law requires that the employees have health insurance and that the insurance includes coverage for certain reproductive-health services, including contraception. The actions of the religious groups will neither prevent nor “trigger” insurance coverage for those services.
If the institution sits on its hands, it will be fined for violations of ACA and the employees will be able to purchase ACA-compliant plans through the exchanges.,
Just waiting for that great sophist Scalia and his four other faithful ones to get ahold of this. I’m sure after Hobby Lobby they’ll have something to say about the difference between a religious practice and a religious accommodation.
That, too, is sophistry. While technically true that pregnancy is a normal part of life it is nonetheless dangerous for the woman and hence requires health insurance for the medical care required. For women in the prime child bearing years of 20-34 it is the 6th leading cause of death. It causes about 3% of the deaths that occur in that age group.
No it’s not sophistry. It’s a very important, bedrock reality. One that you should bring to the front of your mind if you care to understand the other side of this and similar issues.
Illness is something that we aspire to stomp out; pregnancy is not something we want to stomp out, we just want to eliminate the complications.
We weren’t really arguing the point but I wanted to call attention to it because it underlies an important difference that I suspect you have with the people on the other side of this debate. People on “my side” of the debate see through the prism of pregnancy being healthy and normal, although sometimes there are complications. And it seems that people on “your side” of the debate often speak as though people the pregnancy itself is the sickness that they want to stomp out.
No, we are interested in preserving the woman’s life above preserving the life of the fetus. Your side, as shown by its actions, is the reverse.
We view your side’s position as perverse and murderous.
A friend told me what his wife had undergone at a Catholic hospital in the 1970s in America. She was carrying a baby with a head too large for her birth canal. The standard of care was to perform a Cesarean immediately but the Nun who was the head of the hospital instructed the doctor that he was to have her deliver naturally because that would more likely preserve her fertility rather than requiring future pregnancies to also be Cesarean.No one in the family which was not Catholic was told about this decision let alone consulted about it beforehand. After 48 hours of labor the doctor performed the Cesarean but by that point the doctor was so tired that he told the my friend the husband to watch her closely because he was not sure he had stitched her up correctly. Sure enough she started to bleed out at home and was just barely saved. The Church clearly valued this woman’s fertility more than they valued the life of the woman herself. Nor did they see her as an independent moral actor with the right to make decisions for her self.
Further, in nature when the nutrition for the child is provided by nursing there is some limited protection from becoming immediately pregnant again. When nutrition is provided by the bottle there is no such protection and women become pregnant with a much closer spacing that is damaging to the woman’s health since woman did not evolve to face that particular problem.
What you are describing seeing “through the prism of pregnancy being healthy and normal” is seeing the reality of pregnancy through rose colored glasses. It take intelligent management to
make pregnancy as safe as possible and it takes intelligent management to realize when a pregnancy should be terminated to protect the woman and to prevent the production of a child facing a higher likelihood of suffering.
Put another way, we want to see all children born with the best prospects for a good life, whereas you want to see all children born whether or not that is destructive of life and the quality of life.