President Barack Obama and his deputies are using the demeaning language of disease and green-eyeshade accounting to establish free birth control as a government-backed right, and also to downgrade the value of human lives, say social conservatives.
“They’re claiming that children are like a disease and increase health costs,” said Wendy Wright, the interim executive director of the Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute.
Unborn children, however, “are humans beings and that’s what Obama and the abortion crowd refuse to recognize,” she told The Daily Caller.
The Catholic Church’s opposition to the new Obama administration regulations is heavily influenced by its ideological and religious support for human life, and its twinned opposition to birth control, including contraception, and abortion.
That ideological point was prominently displayed in the Feb. 10 response to Obama’s announcement from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
“First, we objected to the rule forcing private health plans — nationwide, by the stroke of a bureaucrat’s pen — to cover sterilization and contraception … [but] pregnancy is not a disease,” said the response.
Obama’s unsympathetic language was showcased in his Feb. 10 announcement that he would require health insurance companies to offer free birth-control services to the employees of religious groups, despite the congregations’ constitutional protection from state regulation. (RELATED: Full coverage of Barack Obama)
“It’s a lot cheaper to prevent an illness than to treat one … [and] preventive care should include coverage of contraceptive services such as birth control,” the president said in brief remarks in the White House press room.
Even when Obama championed the claim that women have a moral right to use birth control, he talked about biological health, not of moral freedom. “Every woman should be in control of the decisions that affect her own health,” he said.
White House officials also justified the far-reaching policy by saying it would cost nothing, and therefore would impose no real burden on religious organizations.
“Covering contraception saves money for insurance companies by keeping women healthy and preventing spending on other health services,” said a White House statement released Feb. 10.
White House and Democratic officials also cited a 2006 report from an advocacy group, the Business Group on Health, which said companies could cut their health-related expenses by providing free birth control services to their employees.
“The average cost of adding coverage for all reversible methods of contraception,” the report said, “is $25.31 per employee, per year. … Researchers estimate that over a 5-year period, employers can save $9,000 to $14,000 (in year 1993 dollars) by providing comprehensive contraceptive coverage.”
Some members of Obama’s progressive base use the same dollars-and-cents language. On Feb. 3, for example, a poster on Obama’s campaign website said that a lack of contraception causes many additional births, and the “cost of those births, and the potential gross saving from helping women to avert them, is estimated at $11.1 billion.”
Many religious denominations have decried Obama’s effort to establish free birth control as a government-created right. Some oppose contraception and abortion drugs, but many more oppose the new order because they fear progressives will use the regulations as a legal precedent to justify ever-greater regulations of churches.
In 2010, for example, progressives at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sought to impose the full panoply of federal hiring rules on religious groups. In response, the Supreme Court voted unanimously against that proposal, and instead established a “ministerial exemption” that shields most religious groups from a laundry list of employment-related regulations.
The Catholic Church’s advocates have reserved their strongest condemnation, however, for the White House’s description of pregnancy as a disease.
The administration believes “pregnancy is some sort of health care anomaly… [and] to be pregnant is some sort of illness,” said Cardinal Donald Wuerl, the Catholic archbishop of Washington, D.C. They believe, he said, that they “must prevent that illness. … A pregnancy becomes the problem.”
“Kids aren’t commodities — they’re humans beings and that’s what Obama and the abortion crowd refuse to recognize,” added Wright, who is now advocating for socially conservative policies at the United Nations.
“The extra value they produce benefits society and individuals by paying into big ticket items like national security, health insurance, Social Security and scientific research, and by providing personal and emotional care that governments cannot supply,” she said.
Children need a lot of care, she said, but “after age 18 to 21, for the next 60 years or 80 years, they’re producing and they put more into society than they take.”
“Children give parents a reason to live. … Children give intangible benefits like joy and wanting to better oneself,” she added. For example, she explained, “an overweight man won’t go on a diet because Michelle Obama preaches fitness, but he’ll do it to dance at his daughter’s wedding.”
“Children motivate us to make a better future. … [but Obama] believes America is declining and his policies would create that reality,” said Wright.
Those extra children could also become a demographic advantage, allowing the U.S. to overcome population-related problems that will cripple China, Europe and other regions, said Susan Yoshihara, author of an forthcoming book, “Population Decline and the Remaking of Great Power Politics.”
Europe’s average age is rising, Japan is retiring modern warships because it does not have enough sailors, and China is already seeing its workforce shrink because of its population control policies, she told TheDC. Chine government leaders “know they will not have the manpower in a couple of decade” to keep growing, she said.
In the United States, she said, the data shows that the “lowest fertility is in the places that are the most liberal… [while] conservatives tend to have more children.”
Because of that productive birthrate, “the U.S. has enough children to replace itself … [and] that’s good news for the U.S.,” she said.
In contrast to the rest of the world, “the U.S. is the exception to the rule … [and it] has a demographic advantage,” Yoshihara added.
However, conservatives’ societal and individual enthusiasm for children isn’t shared in the White House.
“We know that the overall cost of health care is lower when women have access to contraceptive services,” Obama said in his Feb. 10 remarks.
He did not not use the words “child” or “children,” but he did promise that women “will have access to free contraceptive services … [and] they’ll no longer have to pay hundreds of dollars a year that could go towards paying the rent or buying groceries.”
