Reproductive Politics

Yesterday, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops released a statement about the latest HHS contraceptive mandate rules. While they are still opposed to what they see as a grave threat to religious liberty, the overall tone of the statement is measured, and they waited one week to officially respond while they considered the new rules. In the post-2008 world of hyper-partisanship and hyperbole, I think we are entitled to label that a kind of progress. The bishops still find inadequate the Obama Administration's attempts to create a wall between religiously-affiliated employers and the provision of free birth control to their employees. I think that the firewall is in fact adequate and consistent with norms in American political culture and the current and past relationship of the Catholic Church with the U.S. government and the flow of taxpayer money to the Church (see my prior posts on the subject). For that reason, I don't think that the Church is going to win the ba...

The New York Times  published   a good article  a few days ago that provides an overview of the storm of lawsuits over the contraceptive mandate. When I read and think about this issue, I keep coming back to three things that seem to me quite salient but do not get as much play as I'd like: First, before the ACA's contraceptive mandate, almost 30 states had similar mandates under state law. The Catholic Church and other organizations have already been living with this. Several Catholic  colleges and universities have supplied-- and supply-- coverage for birth control.  This idea that religious organizations and their followers can't live lives of religious freedom under a contraceptive mandate is clearly false! I don't understand why this fact does not get more attention-- and is not advertised more by the Obama Administration. Second, the Catholic Church is fine with government involvement in religion when it swings their way. Did you know that in G...

The debate in the Philippines continues over a proposal for government-subsidized contraception and sex education. The Catholic Church is going all out to prevent the government from approving the program. Kathy Zeh, writing in The Huffington Post , discusses and refutes the argument of a Catholic archbishop that the legislation would spell doom and gloom for the country. In an earlier post , I noted that Church representatives in the Philippines argued that increasing the population is the key to reducing poverty, a rather counterintuitive argument. In the most recent speech discussed by Ms. Zeh, the Catholic representative argues that government corruption, not lack of access to family planning, exacerbates poverty. This theme-- that there is nothing wrong with a large family, per se , only in the context of poverty that is caused by something else, namely, bad politics-- is one promoted by population control skeptics, like the Population Research Council. For a review of their ar...

The European Union Parliament approved a controversial choice for their top health official: The European Parliament backed a devout Catholic as EU health commissioner on Wednesday, brushing off critics who fear the Maltese politician could row back on EU policies on stem cell research, abortion and gay rights. Greens, Liberals and Socialists in the European Parliament had said they would vote against Tonio Borg, a former foreign and justice minister in Malta, saying his beliefs could influence EU policy. As commissioner, Borg's remit would include access to healthcare and contraception and the control of sexually transmitted diseases. Borg, who was in Malta on the day of the vote according to an EU Commission official, told EU lawmakers before the vote that his personal views wou...

The Associated Press (via  The Washington Post ) reports that the composition of the panel that is investigating Dr. Savita Halappanavar's death in Ireland has changed: Prime Minister Enda Kenny told lawmakers he hoped the move — barely 24 hours after Ireland unveiled the seven-member panel — would allow the woman’s widower to support the probe into why Savita Halappanavar, a 31-year-old Indian dentist, died Oct. 28 while hospitalized in Galway.   Kenny’s U-turn came hours after her husband, Praveen Halappanavar, said he would refuse to talk to the investigators and would not consent to their viewing his wife’s medical records because three of the Galway hospital’s senior doctors had been appointed as investigators. Kenny said that the three doctors would be replaced by other officials “who have no connection at all with University Hospital Galway. In that sense the investigation will be completely and utterly independent.”   This makes sense. Why conduct an ...

The death of Dr. Savita Halappanavar in an Irish hospital is provoking a great deal of analysis and argument. The editor in chief of RH Reality Check , Jodi Jacobson, wrote two insightful articles. Among her observations: The unwillingness of Irish politicians to create clear legal guidelines for abortion in life-threatening situations is unacceptable. In Dr. Halappanavar's case, however, the primary problem was that she was a patient in a Catholic hospital. Given the clear medical needs of Dr. Halappanavar, Catholic doctrine , and not Irish law, was the primary culprit in causing Dr. Halappanavar's death. This is not an isolated case: In other countries with restrictive abortion laws (and cultures), women have died as a result of being denied an abortion. Could this happen in the United States? One would think, "no," given our relatively open laws and high public support for life-saving abortion care. But consider Jacobson's suggestion: This might have...

Legal change on contraception and sex education may be arriving in the Philippines, which has a birthrate almost double that of the United States: After years of discussion in the Philippine Congress, the House of Representatives finally decided in August  to end debate on a reproductive health bill  that would subsidize contraception and require sex education in the  Philippines , a country with one of the highest birthrates in Asia. If it passes in the House, which returned to session on Monday, the bill will also need to be approved by the Senate. (Source: The New York Times ) The reasons for teaching women and men the basics of human reproduction and making contraception free and available are hard to dispute. First, women should have more control over the timing and spacing of pregnancies as a matter of personal autonomy and dignity. Second, a basic tenet of international development is that poor countries do better economically and developmentally when birthrate...

Mark Movesian, on a blog at First Things , examined the Fox News exit polls from the 2012 election, and found that voters who self-identified as Catholic voted for President Obama 50-48%. Mr. Movesian notes the seeming oddity of this, given that the Catholic hierarchy has done its very best to make life issues, especially the health care contraceptive mandate, the primary determinant of a Catholic person's vote. What explains the exit polls? Here are some possibilities. Movesian suggests that the exit polls do not necessarily mean that Catholic voters, by a narrow majority, reject the Church view of the contraceptive mandate and other reproductive issues. Instead, like other voters, they may have looked at the whole package offered by President Obama and the whole package offered by Mitt Romney and gone for Obama despite whatever reservations they have about life issues. Another explanation is that Catholic voters, while uncomfortable in general with abortion and contempo...

According to Angela Franks, it has. Dr. Franks is the director of theology programs for the Theological Institute for New Evangelization at St. John's Seminary in Boston. She is also the author of a (critical) book on Margaret Sanger. I saw her give a talk on October 15 at Clarion University of Pennsylvania, where she was hosted by Clarion Students for Life, the Newman Association, and the Clarion Muslim Students Association, among others. If you follow the pro-life movement and know something about the Catholic view of sex and relationships, much of what Dr. Franks said would sound familiar-- her views clearly track with Catholic doctrine. Her presentation, however, did not mention religion at all. Instead-- perhaps hoping to connect with an audience beyond people of faith-- her presentation was grounded solidly in what she referred to as "sociological" evidence. Focusing on young people (18-23), her primary observation was that casual sex and "serial monog...

Here's one! Unusual? I imagine so. I suspect many more pro- choice  Catholics will be comfortable supporting President Obama than pro-life ones. What is a little unusual is that the author of this essay, Charles J. Reid, Jr., is a professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Law, a Catholic institution. My impression is that strongly Catholic employers are not terribly happy about these kinds of public dissensions on abortion. Professor Reid is pro-life, but he argues that President Obama's attempts to address poverty and reform the health care system are more likely to save unborn lives than a single-minded focus on overturning Roe v. Wade , especially when coupled with a  political philosophy of "Randian individualism and the unfettered quest for riches above every human value." "Fight poverty, and you fight abortion. So, I am voting for life-- Obama-Biden 2012." Professor Reid also spends time describing President Obama's earlier lif...

Despite the Catholic Church's strong stance on abortion and contraception, American Catholics are not all that different from other Americans regarding these issues.  Polls tend to show that Catholics have a diversity of opinion on abortion and contraception that is not all that different from everyone else. The clarity and absolutism of the official Church position prompts heated fights between a) those that see the Church teachings on the family and sexual behavior as organically linked to all other social justice issues and central to what it means to be Catholic, and b) those who appreciate many other aspects of Catholic doctrine (like its teachings on social justice) and wish there could be less of an emphasis on abortion and contraception. Three recent news items illustrate this. First, a poll just released by the Public Religion Research Institute reveals that a majority of Catholics would like to see the Church focus more of its attention on social justice and povert...

This article, from Time , is an excellent short review of abortion conditions in Central and South America, in the context of Uruguay's modest attempts to liberalize its abortion laws and the recent difficulty of an Argentinian woman to obtain a legal abortion after being raped. When it comes to abortion, contraception, and family planning, Central and South American countries are a bundle of sorry contradictions. While strongly Roman Catholic in culture, this region has very high abortion rates compared to the U.S. and Western Europe and high numbers of unsafe abortions. Would this be, in part, because of cultural and socioeconomic conditions that make effective use of contraception difficult? Those that support total bans on abortion-- like American House member Joe Walsh -- should consider the experience of women in the countries that have 'no exceptions' laws: "El Salvador, Nicaragua,  Honduras, the Dominican Republic, and Chile." El Salvador perhaps go...