Will Federal Government Mandate Birth Control Coverage?

Details: 05 August 2011

The federal healthcare law enacted last year requires all private health insurance plans to provide coverage of "preventive care for women." And, it requires that these services be covered without a co-pay. If this policy is carried out, every American will be forced to participate in a healthcare plan that pays for "preventive care for women."

So what will these "preventive care" services include? The healthcare law didn’t define them but instead left this determination to the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS). In turn, the DHHS tasked the Institute of Medicine (IOM) with providing recommendations on what should be included in "preventive services."

A couple of weeks ago, the IOM released its recommendations. Among the "preventive care" services it recommended for mandated inclusion in all private healthcare plans are surgical sterilizations and all FDA-approved birth control drugs and devices, some of which can cause abortions.

Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, Chair of the U.S. Bishops’ Pro Life Committee issued a statement condemning the recommendation saying: "Pregnancy is not a disease, and fertility is not a pathological condition to be suppressed by any means technically possible… Without sufficient legal protection for rights of conscience, such a mandate would force all men, women and children to carry health coverage that violates the deeply-held moral and religious convictions of many."

The Cardinal not only urged DHHS to reject the IOM’s recommendation, but urged Congress to pass the "Respect for Rights of Conscience Act" (HR 1179) introduced by Congressmen Jeff Fortenberry from Nebraska and Dan Boren from Oklahoma. This bill would permit a health plan to decline coverage of specific items and services that are contrary to the religious beliefs of the sponsor, issuer, or other entity offering the plan or the purchaser.

Please thank Congressman Fortenberry for introducing the Respect for Rights of Conscience Act. His phone number is 202-225-4806 and his website is www.fortenberry.house.gov.

The basis of the IOM’s decision is that unintended pregnancies, and the health-related problems they can produce, could be prevented by greater access to birth control methods. This old, tired argument may have some intuitive appeal, but the research substantiating the argument is very meager. The IOM report cites only two studies that supposedly show that greater access to birth control reduces unintended pregnancies. In reality, as even some birth control proponents acknowledge, most studies show that increasing access to birth control has little or no impact on decreasing unintended pregnancies or abortions.

For example, James Trussell, who originated the claim that easier access to emergency contraception could "result in a greater than 50% reduction in abortion rates," has conceded that 23 published studies from 10 countries disprove his claim. According to every one of the 23 studies, published between 1998 and 2006, easier access to EC fails to achieve any statistically significant reduction in rates of unintended pregnancy and abortion.

In the September 2006 British Medical Journal, Anna Glasier said: "[D]espite the clear increase in the use of emergency contraception, abortion rates have not fallen in the U.K. They have risen from 11 per 1,000 women ... in 1984 ... to 17.8 per 1000 in 2004." She adds: "Ten studies in different countries have shown that giving women a supply of emergency contraception to keep at home ... increases use by twofold to threefold ... but [has] had no measurable effect on rates of pregnancy or abortion."

A list of these and other studies is available on my website at www.nebcathcon.org (under "pro-life," "printed resources").

You can contact Greg at The Nebraska Catholic Conference, 215 Centennial Mall South Suite 310, Lincoln, NE 68508; This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.