Birth control: is administration backing down -- or not?

Mike Leavitt, secretary of Health and Human Services, said he never meant to create a stir over birth control. In proposing a new HHS regulation last month, he said, he only meant to protect the "right of conscience" of federally funded healthcare providers whom he wants spared dismissal because of their objections to birth control or abortion. In a new post on his blog, the secretary said:

An early draft of the regulations found its way into public circulation before it had reached my review. It contained words that lead some to conclude my intent is to deal with the subject of contraceptives, somehow defining them as abortion. Not true.

The Bush administration has consistently supported the unborn. However the issue I asked to be addressed in this regulation is not abortion or contraceptives but the legal right medical practitioners have to practice according to their conscience and patients should be able to choose a doctor who has beliefs like his or hers."

Leavitt added that if the department does now issue a regulation, "it will be focused on the protection of practitioner conscience."

Pro-choice groups weren't buying it.

"Secretary Leavitt's vague comments on the draft HHS rule do nothing to reassure Americans that the administration is not considering redefining abortion to include forms of contraception, thereby jeopardizing women's access to basic healthcare," said Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America. "The administration needs to stop playing word games with women's health and state clearly they will reject any regulations that will undermine women's access to basic healthcare."

"Bush and his political appointees have a long, long record of attacks on contraception," agreed NARAL Pro-Choice America President Nancy Keenan. "So Secretary Leavitt's claim that the department never intended to target birth control isn't believable."

As Countdown to Crawford and others reported, the proposed regulation stirred up a furious debate, with more than 20,000 letters sent to Congress in opposition. And Keenan promised more to come.

"We will continue to engage our activists and work with leaders in Congress to stop this administration from pushing a last-ditch attack on birth control as Bush prepares to leave the White House," she said,  adding, "In the face of growing public outrage over this attack on birth control, the Bush administration is trying to backtrack."

-- Johanna Neuman

Photo: Associated Press

Comments

[Julie LaBomascus]

Contraception has many non birth control uses.Rape survivors need EC to avoid becoming pregnant by the creeps who assualted them. The administration should not shield those who would hide behind religious beliefs to avoid doing their jobs.It is insulting to assume the "conscience" of a pro-life ER nurse, or an anti contraception pharmacist is magically more valid than that of a rape survivor or a women with scrip for BC. For someone to use religious idealogy to condemn a rape survivor to carrying her attacker's child or a woman with endometriosis to unbearable pain is beyond cruel.

[Bryan Taylor]

Where's the Business Lobby on this? I would think they would HATE the idea, and not just because of the paperwork involved in assuring compliance with the rule to HHS every year. The Business Lobby always objects to extra requirements of this kind, rightly or wrongly. Moreover, this will put business at risk for lawsuits about religious discrimination from employees, and resolve the alleged problem of interfering with employee religious freedom by requiring employers to support their employee's personal religious belilefs.

This strains any definition of common sense, putting a medical provider's employee rights above the rights and needs of patients and patrons.

It also violates a reasonable understanding of separation between church and state, by involving the government in the provision of medical services.

It is not a religious freedom issue to expect employees in health care to, well, provide health care. It's a public accommodation, right-to-treatment, access to care issue. People who go into health care work, whether as pharmacists or their techs or nurses or doctors, ought to know what's involved and then make their decisions about entering (or remaining in) that line of work. They should make those decisions according to their conscience. They should not expect the government to meddle in the nature of that work by imposing legal rules or laws that change that line of work to make it suit their spiritual sensitivities. THAT amounts to the promotion of one set of religious beliefs over all others, and over those of nonbelievers. That violates the "establishment" clause of the First Amendment. Either they find a way to live with their consciences doing that work, or they should get out of it.

The present rule on the books already interferes with this natural (and marketplace-oriented) understanding of what those jobs are. Working in a particular field or at a particular workplace is not a right that should be seen as greater than the right of access to services by the general public.

It also is likely, ironically, to increase discrimination of the very sort it is said to want to prevent. Now employers will have far more motivation to screen out Catholics and others from ever being hired in the first place, using subtler cues (appearance, dress, names, etc.) to avoid hiring such employees (workers who don't want to do some of the work of that business) in the first place. Indeed, this may be going on already: employers do their best not to hire someone for whom they will have to make such accommodations. As anyone familiar with discrimination law knows, it's far more difficult to prove discrimination in hiring than in any other aspect of employment.

This idea is bad, bad, bad.

Bryan Taylor
Christian and retired social worker

[Anonymous]

Unfortunately, coming from a very religious part of Texas, I know quite a few people who insist that rape victims get what they deserved - they must have been leading the man on in some fashion. It's really sick, and infuriates me to hear that kind of language, but that may be the mentality of the Bush administration - all the people who say that kind of stuff to me are Bush supporters, that's for sure. I am definitely not buying Leavitt's story, because the Bush administration has tried to rid women of various contraceptives many times this year alone through bills.

[Owen]

If this, then why not, giving an accountant a pass on recording transactions for their company's investment in a health care company that distributes IUD's? The whole matter is absurd. Let's move on and solve the real problems of the day!

[Person A]

These new rules are a step in the right direction. I want to know when they'll be expanded to other industries...like liquor stores, for example. Shouldn't employees at a liquor store have the right to refuse to sell someone alcohol if that employee is opposed to drinking? Or, movie store employees - they should be able to refuse to rent people movies if they think the plot is immoral or maybe the movie has a person of another religion that they don't agree with in it, right? Oh, I forgot, it's called doing your job, defined as a way to earn money doing things that sometimes you maybe don't like to do.