"Women have the right to
contraception (and any other product) in the sense that they have a right
to spend their money on it or to try to persuade someone else to do so.
There can be no right to force (or have the government force) others to
pay. This controversy is not about contraception. It’s about freedom
versus compulsion."
The Goal Is Freedom
It’s Not about Contraception
Negative versus positive
Sheldon Richman
Posted February 17, 2012
When you bake a bad ingredient into a cake, no matter how nicely you
decorate it, the cake will still be bad.
That’s the lesson to take from the controversy over Obamacare,
Catholicism, and contraception. To recap, under Obamacare all employers
will be required to arrange for “health insurance” for their employees.
Coverage must include various disease-preventive health services and
women’s contraception at no charge to employees. No
premium-sharing, no copays -- nothing.
The Department of Health and Human Services, which has ominous
rule-making power under Obamacare, exempted Catholic churches (as
employers) from this rule because Catholicism teaches that contraception
is sinful. However, HHS did not exempt Catholic institutions whose
mission (the government says) extends beyond religion, namely, colleges,
hospitals, and charities. Those institutions would have to pay (nominally
at least) for their women employees’ birth-control products and
services.
That seemingly arbitrary distinction set off a political firestorm
intense enough to force the Obama administration back to the drawing
board. Under President Obama’s so-called “accommodation,” all Catholic
institutions would be exempt from paying for contraception after all,
but their insurance companies would have to provide the coverage
at no cost.
Top Catholic officials are still unhappy, though other prominent
Catholics are satisfied. The matter isn’t settled yet. (Aside: Is there a
significant difference between a Catholic institution’s being forced to
pay for employees’ birth control and its being forced to arrange the
match between its employees and the insurance company that will pay for
it?)
In announcing his “accommodation,”
Obama said that religious liberty has been squared with a “core
principle”: “a law that requires free preventive care will not
discriminate against women.” We need not “choose between individual
liberty and basic fairness for all Americans.” Since men’s contraception
is not mandated for free coverage, Obama’s remark about discrimination is
puzzling.
Competing Liberty Interests?
Washington Post column
E. J. Dionne, a Catholic and an enthusiast for Obamacare, put it this
way: “There were legitimate liberty interests on both sides of this
debate.” He is satisfied that both “liberty interests” have been
served.
What exactly are the two liberty interests? One is clear: an institution
wishes not to be compelled to facilitate what it regards as morally
abhorrent. (The validity of that moral judgment is irrelevant.) But
what’s the other one? One infers from the discussion that it’s women’s
liberty to use contraception. (A third liberty interest -- an insurer’s
wish not to be forced to give away its services -- is strangely
overlooked.)
How exactly was the liberty to use contraception jeopardized by the
Catholic exemption? In no way would a woman’s freedom in this
respect be infringed simply because her employer was free to choose
not to pay for her contraceptive products and services. (See
last week’s TGIF on why volitional acts such as using contraception
and other preventive measures are neither free nor insurable.)
Yet advocates of Obamacare insist on conflating these issues. They
repeatedly portray opposition to forced financing of contraception
as opposition to contraception itself. (Alas, some conservatives have
encouraged this conflation.) Must the difference really be spelled
out?
This sort of argument is nothing new, of course. In
The Law
(1850), Frederic Bastiat noted that advocates of government-run
schools accused those who opposed them of being against education
itself.
Prohibitive Expense
When pressed, proponents of “free”
employer-provided contraception will claim (as though this were
responsive) that many women can’t afford birth control and that insurance
companies would save money by giving it away. (Why haven’t the insurers
thought of that?)
Taking these in reverse order, the second argument begs the question.
Insurance companies allegedly would save money because they wouldn’t have
to pay for medical services associated with having children. That assumes
that if the insurer were not providing free contraception, women
would have to do without. But that is precisely what is in
dispute. Why assume that?
As for the claim about the allegedly prohibitive expense, one may
properly ask how that could justify forcing others to pay. It’s
amusing to watch advocates of free contraception cite as evidence for
their position polls showing that women overwhelmingly support no-cost
contraception. Since when have people not wanted free stuff? Women have
managed to obtain birth control up until now (we’re repeatedly told that
nearly all women, including Catholics, have used it), and low-income
women can resort to Planned Parenthood if necessary, which already gets
taxpayer money (which is not to say it should).
When a “Right” Is Not a Right
What we have in this debate is a clash not
between two liberty interests, but rather between two rights-claims – one
negative (genuine), the other positive (counterfeit). All that is
required for the exercise of a negative right (to life, liberty, and
one’s legitimately acquired belongings) is other people’s
noninterference. But the fulfillment of positive rights requires that
other people act affirmatively even if they don’t want to say,
by providing products or paying the bills. If one person’s freedom
depends on the infringement of someone else’s freedom, the first claim is
illegitimate. To hold otherwise is to reject the
principle of equality.
Women have the right to contraception (and any other product) in the
sense that they have a right to spend their money on it or to try to
persuade someone else to do so. There can be no right to
force (or have the government force) others to pay. This
controversy is not about contraception. It’s about freedom versus
compulsion.
As long as that bad ingredient -- the principle that government may
coerce people to buy things for others -- is baked into the cake, it will
be rotten no matter how it’s nicely decorated.
http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/tgif/its-not-about-contraception/
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