How you connect the dots determines the picture that emerges.
How you connect the dots determines the picture that emerges.The recent chronology of events provides a startling snapshot of abortion extremism in this country.
The Supreme Court ruled on the Hobby Lobby lawsuit on June 30th, upholding free exercise rights established in the Constitution but more specifically, the bi-partisan Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993.
Then Democrats in Congress reacted with outrage. And a reactionary legislative bill.
"Women across the country and men are outraged by a decision by five Supreme Court justices that all of a sudden says your boss has an opportunity to decide for you what your health care choices are," Sen. Patty Murray, the bill's sponsor, told MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell on Wednesday.
"That outrage is being transmitted to everyone, and I think we have a very good chance of rewriting the law so that the justices can't take away women's ability to make their own health care choices."
So wait…what?
To reset, as politicians are fond of saying, it was "all of a sudden" that this administration announced in January 2012 that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) mandated certain drugs and procedures to be provided by employers in their health insurance coverage, decided by government with no choice for employers.
And now that such government overreach has been found excessive and in violation of RFRA, a Supreme Court decision is going to be rewritten in law? So "the justices can't take away women's ability to make their own health care choices"? When was the last time something so audacious was undertaken by politicians, even after the Supreme Court wrote abortion into law and swept away the separate and enumerated power to make laws for all 50 states in one fell swoop?
This is surreal. Even the liberal Washington Post did a fact check on congressional Democrats claims and found them demonstrably false, calling it all " overheated rhetoric ."
"Really, we should be afraid of this court. The five guys who start determining what contraceptions are legal. Let's not even go there."
That was House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, with what WaPo called "a very odd statement", which her office tried to walk back, though foot dragging along the way.
Then the WaPo article cited this quote:
"The one thing we are going to do during this work period, sooner rather than later, is to ensure that women's lives are not determined by virtue of five white men. This Hobby Lobby decision is outrageous, and we are going to do something about it."
- Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), remarks to reporters, on July 8
Spoken by a white man who wields power in the Senate with potentially less considered reasoning on a daily basis than justices on the Supreme Court on occasion. And by the way…
The Hobby Lobby decision was written by Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas. That's certainly five men, but Thomas is African American.
Reid's office said he realized the mistake after he made it, and reverted to citing this decision as having been made by five men.
And so on. The fact checking goes on at the WaPo site .
Into the fray comes legal scholar Helen Alvare with her calm, clarifying and poised voice.
Prior to the 2012 HHS Mandate, there were no "runs" on birth control suppliers, nor were there demonstrations in the streets by women demanding free birth control. Nowhere was there observed a dearth of women willing to work for businesses informed by a religious conscience on matters of contraception or abortion.
This should come as a shock to those predicting the end of women's freedom as a result of the Supreme Court's decisions in Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood. It should also shock those protesters screaming about women's ovaries on the steps of the Supreme Court. It should even shock the president of the United States, who took time away from his deliberations concerning Ukraine, Iraq, and Syria, to tweet cleverly against this win for religious freedom. And perhaps it will deliver the biggest shock to Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whose dissent in Hobby Lobby spoke of the "harm," the "havoc," and the threat to women's "ability to participate equally in the economic and social life of the nation" posed by the decision. Media reaction has been predictably similar.
Helen goes on to enumerate "myriad reasons that many women won't be joining Justice Ginsburg in the panic room post-Hobby Lobby", aptly describing the current environment.
One…
Justice Ginsburg, like so many feminist activists of her generation, has a tendency to claim to speak for all women when she frames a grievance on women's behalf. But relatively few women are actually affected by the majority opinion in Hobby Lobby. Poor women, and even women at several times the poverty level, already have free or subsidized birth control available from the state. Since 1970, they have been served by the National Family Planning Program ("Title X").
She lists other ways access to birth control has been widely available to women for low or no cost.
Also, generally speaking, the Centers for Disease Control report that cost does not even make the list of "frequently cited reasons for nonuse" among the 11 percent of sexually active women not using contraception. A Guttmacher source claimed that only 3.7 percent of the total sample of women seeking abortions listed cost as a barrier to contraceptive usage.
And then…
There is also a sizable cohort of women who dislike (or even hate) the side effects of some forms of contraception - especially those of hormonal methods such as the pill, Depo-Provera, and IUDs. Ironically, these are the more costly methods that Justice Ginsburg and other activists hope the mandate will most promote. You can find women hating hormonal birth control for decidedly nonreligious reasons in books like Holly Griggs Spall's Sweetening the Pill, or in articles on popular news sites.
Then there is the significant group of women who have suffered some alarming health effects from their birth control. Think of the 10,000 women suing Bayer Pharmaceuticals for blood clots or strokes related to the Yaz pill (Bayer has paid more than $1.6 billion in settlements so far), or the 3,800 women suing Merck & Co. for the blood clots, strokes and heart attacks related to the Nuva-Ring. Even birth-control cheerleaders like Vanity Fair, the Washington Post, and the New York Times acknowledge the serious or fatal effects of some methods for some women, or their role in increasing AIDS/HIV transmission. Not to mention the World Health Organization or the American Cancer Society, organizations that label some forms of the pill carcinogenic to some parts of the body, while noting that some forms might mitigate the risk of cancer in others.
Click on the link to this article for all the links Helen Alvare provides for these references. It's outstanding. Here's more:
What about women who are just sick and tired of the obsession with contraception and abortion - women starving for concrete policies allowing them to manage the costs of education and the demands of work, and also to marry and have kids?
This adds up to a lot of women who are not nodding their heads in agreement over the "you can take my free contraception out of my cold, dead hands" tone of the Ginsburg dissent, or other frenzied post-Hobby Lobby laments.
Read the whole article. It's brilliant. And in her professorial mind, she sums up well:
The all-too-brief summary is as follows: when birth control and abortion separate sex from kids, non-marital sexual encounters increase as the perceived "risks" (children) appear to decline. Sex easily becomes the "price" of obtaining a romantic relationship, and "shotgun weddings" following a pregnancy disappear because women have the right of access to abortion. But because there are so many more uncommitted sexual encounters, and because contraception regularly fails, and because of continuing aspirations for children and relationships, cohabitation skyrockets, nonmarital births and abortions increase, and marriage is delayed or forgone (despite women's fertility patterns and persistent desire for children). Single parenthood by women (and therefore poverty) becomes far more common.
It wasn't just the "technology shocks" of the pill and abortion that shaped this marketplace; the law cooperated. The feminist legal establishment of the latter part of the twentieth century argued (and the Supreme Court agreed) that children imposed serious disadvantages on women. Contraception and abortion were thus achieved as constitutional rights. At the same time, leading feminist voices glamorized paid work and failed to pursue policies harmonizing motherhood with work outside the home. They played down differences between women and men, allowed the "ideal male worker" model to dominate women's work lives, and let birth control and abortion policy constitute nearly the entire "women's agenda."
In sum…
We must clearly draw attention to the nature and workings of the marketplace of relationships today. Ask women to honestly confront the question whether it is to their advantage to participate according to this market's current terms. In particular, point out the good of renewing female solidarity toward relinking sex, commitment, and children for the benefit of women, children, and men as well. Finally, vocally offer to cooperate on public and private policies enabling women to manage the demands and costs of education and employment, in harmony with their aspirations to marry and have children.
How I wish this work were as simple as parroting the simplistic claim that Hobby Lobby harms women. It isn't. But the alternative - allowing Ginsburg to stand unchallenged - is unacceptable if we are to be fair to women and to preserve religious freedom for both women and men.
However, the Senate stayed in the "panic room" and worked on some draconian legislation. One was a bill to overturn the Supreme Court ruling on Hobby Lobby, upholding religious freedom. That one was called the "Protect Women's Health from Corporate Interference Act." another was written to undo a host of state abortion laws, as many as 200 of them nationwide, laws that set common sense limits like sex-selective abortions, fetal pain limits at five months (extremely liberal even at that duration), abortion clinic health regulation ordinances for the safety of women, informed consent laws for the sake of truly informed choice, and so on. That bill was called the "Women's Health Protection Act", which stood for the opposite of what it was called. One was called the 'Not My Boss's Business Act', which is more true than drafters realized. It's not the business of the employer to provide no-cost birth control pills and morning-after pills and other drugs mandated by the HHS. Especially when they're not mandated to provide essential vaccinations, or many other preventive health services.
National Review Online got it right in this editorial . Unfortunate for longtime purists, but true today.
Democrats hold one thing - and one thing only - sacred, and that is abortion. Our diplomats may be murdered abroad, the rule of law may be grossly violated at home, the First Amendment may be written off as just another roadblock on the freeway to utopia, but abortion will always have for them a uniquely holy status - even if that means employing unholy methods to facilitate it. Thus Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut has introduced a bill, cosponsored by a majority of Senate Democrats, that would purport to strip states of their ability to impose even the most basic of health and safety regulations on the grisly procedure, a bill that David French has rightly suggested should be titled the Kermit Gosnell Enabling Act of 2014.
How horrifying. But how aptly named.
Senator Blumenthal proposes to apply the Philadelphia model to the nation at large. Under his bill, states would have effectively no power even to ensure that abortions are performed by licensed physicians - surely the most minimal standard of medical responsibility that there is. Laws covering grisly late-term abortions would be forcibly overturned and fetal viability would be redefined according to the subjective whim of the abortionist. While the Democrats are bemoaning a fictitious war on women, their bill would provide federal protection to sex-selective abortions - the barbaric practice under which generations of girls have been decimated in such backward jurisdictions as China and Azerbaijan, a practice The Economist describes as "gendercide." Laws restricting taxpayer funding of abortion would be overturned. Laws protecting the consciences of physicians who choose not to perform abortions would be overturned.
So here we are. The Senate voted on one of these bills Wednesday, and it failed in this first go-round.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid lamented that this pro-abortion bill only gained 56 of the 60 votes needed to invoke cloture (end debate), and promised another vote "before the year is out" (read: before the November elections). In other words, Sen. Reid is signaling to his pro-abortion allies that he will make the abortion-pill mandate a central issue of the fall elections.
That's clarifying. That they had 56 votes today on something so draconian is a warning. More Americans are self-identifying as pro-life. But they and others may not realize how comprehensive this bill is in covering "extremism we've never seen before", as an Alliance Defending Freedom legal counsel explained to me today. He said, flatly, that the bill covered even physician assisted suicide drugs under the terms of its wide and mandated coverage.
From the NRO piece :
Morally literate people, including those who generally support abortion rights, understand that abortion is fundamentally unlike anything else doctors are commonly called upon to do, and that it is morally significant in a way a tonsillectomy is not. People of good will may disagree to some extent about the moral significance of what is maturing in a woman's womb - but it is not an ingrown toenail, and all the Senate proclamations in the world will not change that fact.
Right. Let's be clear on the proclamations and the reality. Reactionaries are reaching for the 'war on women' declaration again, which denigrates and demeans women. Let them speak for themselves .