Yet another tragic chapter in our political landscape, and this one is a hot ticket: I haven't seen so many ignorant ridicules of the Catholic faith on Facebook since, well, since two weeks ago. The Philosopher Mom hasn't had a political commentary in a while, and I thought it was time to give it a go.As I scratched my head and tried to think charitably about Washington's debt ceiling wrangles, the Obama's Health and Human Services yesterday announced mandatory copay-free contraceptive drugs and counseling for all new healthcare plans:
"The Affordable Care Act helps stop health problems before they start," HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a statement announcing the guidelines. "These historic guidelines are based on science and existing literature and will help ensure women get the preventive health benefits they need."
Oooh! Preventive care! That sounds great: women will now have free access to preventing the Fate Worse Than Death, pregnancy.
But wait, Philosopher Mom, Sibelius promises that these guidelines are historic, because they are based on (1) science! and (2) literature! (by which she means scientific literature). New benefits will include:
• Well-woman visits (Great!)
• Screening for gestational diabetes (Good!)
• Human papillomavirus (HPV) DNA testing for women 30 years and older (Wonderful!)
• Counseling for sexually transmitted infections (I'm still on board.)
• Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) screening and counseling (Yes.)
• Breastfeeding support, supplies and counseling (Breast is best!)
• Domestic violence screening and counseling (Yes. Absolutely.)
• FDA-approved contraception methods and contraceptive counseling (Wha...)
Everything sounds good: Preventive care for STD's, HIV, HPV, and domestic violence. Breastfeeding is one of the best preventive measures against obesity, so science tells me.
But that third-to-last item doesn't fit in this list. Contraception is intended to prevent one thing, and one thing only: pregnancy. The assumption that pregnancy is a condition requiring prevention is barbaric, to say the least. The further assumption that it is in the state's interest to protect its citizens from pregnancy is totalitarian. These are philosophical objections, but medical appeals can also be made: even when approved by the FDA, the side-effects of some of the most common forms of hormonal birth control are, at best, sketchy.
Put philosophy and medicine aside, however. These measures are hardly a surprise, but are only a predictable symptom of our culture's general attitude toward female fertility (where are the calls for co-pay free vasectomies?).
The new guidelines are especially disturbing in their disregard for the public role played by religious institutions and devoutly religious members of society. The bottom line is here: “[U]nder the new rule, our [Catholic] institutions would be free to act in accord with Catholic teaching on life and procreation only if they were to stop hiring and serving non-Catholics,” says Cardinal Daniel DiNardo.
That is, in order to decline to provide contraceptives, an institution must prove that it (a) exists primarily to prosletyze; (b) employs primarily Catholics; and (c) serves only Catholics. While I have no illusions that most Catholic institutions will close en masse, the thought of even one such hospital or home for women being forced to turn out all non-Catholics is a tragic thought. Whether you ascribe to the Church's teaching on contraception or not, there is no doubt that these guidelines purposefully quarantine the Catholic (and Orthodox Jewish and devout Muslim) conscience. And that is a cause for concern to every American, fertile or infertile, sterilized or unsterilized.
But there is hope.
Because this has happened before. And we have the witness of those who stood firm in their conscience, without threat and without insult to their persecutors. They were mocked and misunderstood, by their co-workers and their families. But they remained faithful. They were more than faithful to a tenent: they allowed their hearts to break out of love for their country, their city, their friends. They did not condemn, but allowed themselves to be condemned by the world.
I will learn to love and to forgive. I will beg for the mercy of Christ. Because if I cannot love Kathleen Sebelius or Barack Obama, then my fidelity to any moral teaching is worthless.
4 comments:
Hey, sorry I did not comment before after reading this, I just did not know what to say. I agree that contraception is not in line with the rest of the preventative care. I also think our culture surrounding femininity, marriage, motherhood, birth and childhood is broken. This broken culture is the cause of so much suffering it is hard to know where it begins and ends.
We have 4 children, and we are not financially stable by any standard. I am young- 30- and still desiring another child. Even this very innocent situation is corrupted by the broken cultural view of children. I hear the voices of everyone around me, that I should not want another, that I have too many as it is, how will I buy them all cars/ send them to college, they are too much work, too much strain on our marriage which should come first, etc.
I wonder if this is part of a Medieval legacy of seeing women as defective men? I definitely see a lot of this in mainstream feminist discussions of reproductive healthcare, where a woman's fertility is usually viewed as a form of biological discrimination that needs to be corrected via contracteption (and abortion as a "safety net") in order for women to be able to compete like men, who are still taken as the "default" human being.
Tabitha, We are currently in the same, heartbreaking situation. We too are young (30) and would love to have more children (they're all so sweet and, well, themselves), but some "grave" circumstances right now make that imprudent. And the comments I get in the store and playground are always, "Wow! You've got your hands full!" or "Gee, too bad you never had your boy." Very few people ever say, "I hope you can have more kids someday--the ones you have are so fantastic!"
I guess my main point in this post was intended to be more about the threats in these guidelines to the individual conscience. The administration is failing to protect doctors, nurses, and administrators--individuals--from being forced into this choice: either serve only their own religious communities OR quit healthcare OR violate their faith.
I think that--logically--no matter how you stand on contraception for yourself or your own family, this threat is cause for serious concern, prayer, and fasting.
I'm not sure what the Orthodox consensus is on contraception: I guess that would be the stuff of another post. I've heard that there is no consensus because of the nature of Orthodox doctrine--there just haven't been any authoritative councils since hormonal, FDA-approved contraceptives were developed. But I've also heard that, since the earliest Christians obviously did not practice hormonal contraception, then today's Christians do not either. If you have any resources about this question, please let me know!
Kathleen, It's definitely a legacy of something! Seriously, a broken idea of the feminine seems to be universal to human philosophies. In the Timaeus, Plato talks about how women are, in fact, a degeneration of the perfect human form--the man. Some Medievals did carry on this tradition... I think it's really only in the Judeo-Christian traditions that we're offered any sort of escape from it: "In the image of God he created him... Male and female he created them." AND "In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female." Of course, most Christians have some serious cultural and philosophical baggage: not many of us can claim a pure heart for divine revelation!
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