Heard on WNYC this afternoon
In a promo for an upcoming discussion, an Ohio congressman stated that Obama's proposed legislation to require all health insurance providers to cover contraceptives and abortions "flies in the face of religious freedom," referring, I surmise, to the religious practices of Catholics and other Christians which prohibit sex for any reason other than procreation and between any people who are not husband and wife.
This is approximately equivalent to saying that beauty magazines with instructions on how to style one's hair fashionably fly in the face of the religious freedom of Muslim women who wear headscarves.
Just because health insurance covers something does not mean everyone who is covered by that insurance plan must use it. My family's insurance plan, for example, covers $100 toward glasses or contacts annually. This is crucial for me because, at -8.0 in each eye, I am very nearly legally blind without the contact lenses for which my health insurance helps to pay. My sister, on the other hand, has near perfect vision. Aetna does not, as this congressman seems to be suggesting, REQUIRE that she order a pair of glasses every year. The help is there should she ever find that her eyesight diminishes. Say this happened but she had joined a sect of a little-known religion that believes vision-enhancing instruments to be blasphemous. She would still have the religious freedom to refuse the pair of glasses covered by her insurance plan and simply have a really tough time reading the chalkboard in math class.
Identically, if my health insurance plan covers abortion (incidentally, I don't know if it currently does) and I get pregnant, I am not required to get an abortion. This is, plain and simply, a ridiculous conclusion to draw. All that this means is that if I get pregnant and I decide, after careful consideration of all possible options, that aborting the pregnancy is the right course of action, my insurance provider will help me pay for it so that I can have the procedure done in a legal clinic instead of in a dark back alley somewhere. If my insurance plan covers contraceptives, this does not mean my insurance provider is forcing me to have promiscuous sex because it is forcing me to lower my risk of pregnancy. It simply means that if I decide that sex is something I am ready for now (which is MY decision alone to make, no matter what my religious beliefs, although my religious beliefs may very well influence that decision), or even if I'd just like to regulate my menstrual cycle, I can have easier access to pills that will help me take ownership of my very complicated body.
Freedom of religion does not mean telling all Americans that they must be subject to Catholic ideas of what a woman should do with her body. Freedom of religion means allowing all Americans to make their own decisions based on their own religious beliefs or lack thereof. And just as it is an incredibly powerful statement for a Muslim woman to choose to wear a headscarf in a culture where hairstyles are such a fashionable form of expression, it would become a powerful (but PERSONAL) decision for a Catholic woman to choose not to use "the pill" even if it were covered by her insurance plan; to make her own decision to follow what she believes is right in God's eyes instead of simply following what is convenient based on what the patriarchal WASPS of government and business have decided is right in God's eyes. Insurance coverage of these services does not restrict religious freedom. Allowing religious beliefs to influence what services are covered by insurance, does.
