It was
perhaps inevitable that following the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision which solidified the claims of
corporations to “enjoy” rights that liberal democracy has been trying to bestow
upon people, that some such person-like entity would claim that his (or her?)
right to practice religion is violated by government’s efforts to make sure all
people are treated equally and fairly.
Indeed this has happened, as Ian Millhiser reports
on ThinkProgress¸and a US Court of
Appeals has lent credence to her (or his?) case. The effort to help insure that people are
treated fairly in question is the provision in the Affordable Care Act (the
ACA, which I’ll pass on referring to by its pejorative name even though I think
it’s bad legislation) that employers of more than 50 people must provide health
insurance to all their full-time employees, and that said insurance needs to
meet a number of various criteria so that people need not worry excessively
about their inability to pay for basic healthcare, and among these criteria is
a mandate that certain forms of birth control that are commonly administered as
health care service be included.
There
are many good, sane reasons why this provision makes sense: birth control is commonly utilized by a vast
majority of Americans, particularly women who, because of biology, bear the
consequences of not using it; the cost of birth control is much higher for
women than for men and women are generally more reliable users of it when it is
available; alternatives to providing birth control outside of the medical
system are there, but tend to be less reliable and more dangerous; easy access to birth control is the simplest
and most cost-effective way to minimize unwanted pregnancies and abortions;
birth control for women is inextricably linked to many facets of health care in
addition to preventing pregnancy. There
are more, I’m sure, but these alone constitute some very compelling reasons why
the people, acting through the state, are justified in making sure that access to birth control, for those who
choose it or need it, is available to as many people as possible – especially
women.
