The New York Times reports that the Affordable Care Act might require insurers to provide coverage for birth control and other reproductive health services:
The law says insurers must cover “preventive health services” and cannot charge for them. The administration has asked a panel of outside experts to help identify the specific preventive services that must be covered for women.
Administration officials said they expected the list to include contraception and family planning because a large body of scientific evidence showed the effectiveness of those services.
Predictably, social conservatives are outraged:
But the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and some conservative groups, including the Family Research Council, say birth control is not a preventive service in the usual sense of the term.
“Pregnancy is not a disease to be prevented, nor is fertility a pathological condition,” said Deirdre A. McQuade, a spokeswoman for the bishops' Pro-Life Secretariat. “So birth control is not preventive care, and it should not be mandated.”
Here are the facts. According to the Guttmacher Institute, the medical costs of unintended pregnancy range from increased likelihood of infant and maternal illness, to a greater likelihood of abortion. Women with unintended pregnancies are more likely to expose the fetus to tobacco or alcohol, and as mothers, are less likely to breast feed. Children of such pregnancies are at greater risk of low birth rate, abuse, poor development, and death in the first year. Fertility isn't a "pathological condition," but the problems of unintended pregnancy are so significant that, as Guttmacher notes, the Centers for Disease Control cites its own work to prevent unintended pregnancy as "one of the top 10 public-health achievements of the 20th century.
While many women will carry an unintended pregnancy to term, many others won't, and the data bears this out. When asked their reasons for having an abortion, three-quarters of women cited concern or responsibility for other individuals, three-quarters said that they couldn't afford a child, and three-quarters said that another child would interfere with work, school, or the ability to care for dependents. Indeed, among women who have obtained abortions, about 61 percent had one or more children. The implications are clear: You can't help families and you can't lower the abortion rate without ensuring access to affordable reproductive health care.
Of course, everyone knows this. But for some reason, we rarely note the doublespeak of social conservatives who oppose abortion and every effective method of preventing it. Last year, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops opposed health-care reform for its abortion funding (which didn't exist), and now it opposes the bill for its efforts to reduce the abortion rate. The same is true of the Family Research Council and will be true of other conservative groups, like the Heritage Foundation.
This is a common point, but it's worth repeating: Given their complete unconcern for policies that reduce abortion, it's safe to say that this opposition has less to do with "life" and more to do with women and their sex lives.
