By: Archbishop Thomas J. Rodi
A department of the federal government is seeking to force churches to violate their conscience. The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has recently issued a new regulation requiring almost all private health plans to cover contraception and sterilization as "preventive services" for women. The mandate even forces individuals and groups with religious or moral objections to purchase and provide such services if they are to receive or provide health coverage at all.
As described in a recent statement from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops:
The new rule would force insurance plans to cover "all Food and Drug Administration approved contraceptive methods, sterilization procedures, and patient education and counseling for all women with reproductive capacity." Never before has the federal government required private plans to include such coverage. The FDA-approved "emergency contraception" (EC) drugs that are covered by this mandate can work by interfering with implantation of a newly conceived human being. Also, the drug the FDA most recently approved for EC, "Ella," a close analogue to the abortion drug RU-486, has been shown in animal tests to cause abortion. Thus, the mandate includes drugs that may cause an abortion both before and after implantation.
The religious exemption from this law is very narrowly defi ned. It would only apply to church organizations which basically only hire members of their own religion and only serve members of their own religion. Thus, Catholic hospitals, Catholic colleges and universities, Catholic Social Services, and Catholic schools, among other Church ministries, would be forced to provide morally objectionable and even abortion causing drugs and procedures.
This action of the federal government would force Churches to act contrary to deeply held moral principles and to provide contraception and sterilization even though Churches consider this to be morally objectionable.
Voices across the country are objecting to this intrusion into religious institutions by the federal government. Helen Alvare, a law professor at George Mason University said:
This regulation breaks a long-held bipartisan understanding about who we are as a nation. We were founded on the basis of freedom of conscience, and that it’s an important part of our overall level of freedom, not to mention peaceful coexistence." She went on to explain that all levels of government have understood the need to protect religious providers who "take up work others fail or refuse to do." She added: "Their work is good or superior to other providers. At some level people understand that it is the moral commitment and views which undergird this.
Robert Garnett, associate dean of the Notre Dame Law School said:
The issue in this debate is not whether or not people should be made to live in accord with the Church’s teachings-of course they shouldn’t!- but whether Catholic institutions should be free to act in accord with those teachings." He added, the fact that many people including some Catholics, do not agree with the Church’s teachings on contraception should be "irrelevant to the question of whether we respect and protect the religious freedom of Catholic institutions to follow their own teachings on this matter.
Sadly, these voices have so far fallen on deaf ears in the federal bureaucracy.
What can you do? Please send an email to HHS by visiting www.usccb.org/conscience. Once you send you comments to HHS you will be automatically invited to send a message to your elected representatives in Congress, urging them to support the Respect for Rights of Conscience Act (H.R. 1179/S. 1467) to ensure that such federal mandates do not violate Americans’ moral and religious convictions.
Please send a message such as this: Pregnancy is not a disease, and drugs and surgeries to prevent it are not basic health care that the government should require all Americans to purchase. Please remove sterilization and prescription contraceptives from the list of "preventive services" the federal government is mandating in private health plans. It is especially important to exclude any drug that may cause an early abortion, and to fully respect religious freedom as other federal laws do. The narrow religious exemption in HHS’s new rule protects almost no one. I urge you to allow all organizations and individuals to offer, sponsor, and obtain health coverage that does not violate their moral and religious convictions.
Please act soon.
