On abortion and breast cancer.
Let’s talk about abortion. The subject underlies too many of the hot issues these days.
Last week, it was the decision by the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure organization to stop its grants for breast cancer screening to Planned Parenthood.
This week, the discussion is back to the Obama administration’s decision that Catholic hospitals should, despite their faith’s opposition to birth control, nevertheless provide coverage for contraceptives in their employee health insurance.
The factor that is behind all of these controversies is the pro-life vs pro-choice argument surrounding abortion, birth control and sex education, which I maintain are all part of the same phenomenon or mind-set on the part of the religious right.
In my view, and it is, after all, my view that is expressed here, this set of issues arise from the hang-ups and preoccupation of people who either are afraid of or insecure about their own sexuality, or have been taught from their childhood that there is something bad or wrong about sex, both of which are false. They manage to view everything that has any connection to sex, including marriage and reproduction, through a sick religious lens.
Which is OK, so far as it goes. They have a right to believe whatever they want to believe.
However, they have shown that they think they have a right to enforce their views on everyone else, and that is where I draw the line.
I am an American. As such, I am a strong believer in individual freedom.
So if a person of a particular faith wants to practice birth control or not practice birth control, or have an abortion, or not have an abortion, because of or notwithstanding his or her particular religious beliefs or lack of religious beliefs, that is that person’s individual decision.
What I object to is for that person to attempt to impose his or her religious beliefs on me or on anyone else.
Now the usual argument from folks on the right against abortion, or against birth control, or against sex education for children, is that they object to paying taxes and having their taxes used to fund any government programs that provide these particular services. They also don’t want schools to teach about birth control, or provide contraceptive supplies for those students who may be making the decision about whether or not to engage in sexual activity.
Both of these arguments are, in my view, red herrings to conceal their real religious motivations on the subject.
The opponents to those services argue that children at that age should “just say ‘no’”. Never mind that the “just say ‘no’” programs have been repeatedly shown not to work. And never mind that the presence of HIV/AIDS in our society means that unprotected sex can result in contracting an incurable and potentially fatal illness.
So what is the real reason given for keeping kids in the dark about sex? Or for not providing contraceptives, whether birth control pills, or condoms, or supplies for other methods for young people (particularly girls) who may be considering sexual activity?
It is because the opponents’ religious beliefs don’t find those approaches acceptable.
Let’s get one thing out right now. No one I have ever met “likes” abortion. Every person I have ever asked, without exception, would like abortion to be as rare as possible, with the goal of having no abortions at all. There are two ways to achieve this. One is to impose on everyone, both all women and all their doctors, and anyone else who might perform an abortion, an absolute ban on any abortion, any time, for any reason. There are, out there today, people who actually believe this is the proper position. Why do they believe this? Because their religion tells them it is the only acceptable position. Remember that reason. It results in many children being born into single-parent families and who end up poorly cared for, unhealthy, and poorly educated. Children should be loved and cherished and able to maximize their potential. The children who are born to single mothers who were so poor that they couldn’t afford to pay for their own abortion are much more likely to have the worst of lives.
The other way to achieve a zero abortion rate is to educate young people, particularly young women, about sex, family planning, and birth control, and provide them the tools to make the necessary decisions about pregnancy and carry out those decisions. Now the people in the previous group come forward, and say, “Oh, by the way, we also don’t want anyone to teach young people about sex and pregnancy.”
For the past thirty or forty years, the people who think like this have been getting their way, in Congress, in state legislatures and in local school boards.
What has been the result?
In America today, a large percentage of the children born are born to poor, unmarried, teenage mothers. The demographic change that is resulting from this fact means that America is fast becoming a land where an increasing number and percentage of children are poor and poorly educated.
It is a race to the bottom and is one of the reasons why our society is becoming increasingly polarized into rich and poor.
The American Constitution is a wonderful document. It encapsulates the best ideas of the intelligentsia of the 18th Century. And the Bill of Rights, which was added after significant debate, spells out some of the foundational principles of the Constitution.
When the Bill of Rights was being debated, some of the framers of the Constitution opined that it was unnecessary, because the points it contained were so basic that they didn’t need to be stated and were already inherent within the Constitution itself.
Fortunately for us, the advocates for a separately stated Bill of Rights prevailed, because we have seen that many people can’t understand those fundamental principles, even when they are spelled out for them.
The foremost among these is the First Amendment, which says, in part, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,…”
Over the years, this simple statement – sixteen words – has been interpreted and reinterpreted, and now is understood to mean, “neither Congress, nor the Executive branch, nor any state or local government, shall act in way as to favor or interfere with the exercise of any religion, nor to use public resources to benefit any religion.
Because of those interpretations, we recognize that proponents of particular beliefs are not allowed to place objects symbolizing their religion, such as the Ten Commandments or crucifixes, on public property in such a way as to suggest that their particular religious perspective is any more worthy or acceptable than any other.
By the same token, members of the military are prohibited from making public appearances in uniform at religious events, because such an appearance might be interpreted as an endorsement by the government of a particular religion.
There is a popular myth that is seeing lots of traction recently. That is that America was created to be a “Christian” nation. That’s incorrect. The founders of this country were preponderantly “Deists”. They believed that God created the world and left it up to man to take it from there.
Here is what Wikipedia says about Deism.
“Deism (i/ˈdiː.ɪzəm/[1][2] or /ˈdeɪ.ɪzəm/) in religious philosophy is the belief that reason and observation of the natural world, without the need for organized religion, can determine that the universe is the product of an all-powerful creator. According to deists, the creator does not intervene in human affairs or suspend the natural laws of the universe. Deists typically reject supernatural events such as prophecy and miracles, tending instead to assert that a god (or "the Supreme Architect") does not alter the universe by intervening in it. This idea is also known as the clockwork universe theory, in which a god designs and builds the universe, but steps aside to let it run on its own. Two main forms of deism currently exist: classical deism and modern deism.
The earliest known usage in print of the English term "deist" is 1621,[3] and "deism" is first found in a 1675 dictionary.[4][5] Deism became more prominent in the 17th and 18th centuries during the Age of Enlightenment — especially in Britain, France, Germany and America among intellectuals raised as Christians who found they could not believe in supernatural miracles, the inerrancy of scriptures, or the Trinity, but who did believe in one God. Deistic ideas also influenced several leaders of the American and French revolutions.”
One will note the lack of belief in the “inerrancy of scriptures”, for example. It is that inerrancy that many religious leaders use today as the primary argument for their anti-abortion positions.
Among the leaders at the time of the American Revolution who were Deists are Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Alexander Hamilton, and Ethan Allen. Thomas Paine’s book, “The Age of Reason,” helped popularize deism throughout the United States and Europe. I urge anyone who thinks America was created to be a “Christian” nation to read the Wikipedia posting on Deism.
The latest controversy, about the administration’s requirement that Catholic hospitals be required to provide as part of their employer-provided health insurance, contraceptive services, falls, at least in my mind, clearly into the First Amendment’s prohibition against any law respecting religion.
In 2010, Congress passed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. As part of that act, employers will be required to provide health insurance for their employees. There are, or will be, minimum standards for the coverage that such insurance will have to provide. And there is a provision for an employer, whose coverage does not meet the technical requirements of the act, to be exempted from its provisions after a showing that their approach nevertheless provides their employees with adequate coverage. I have heard, but not confirmed, that McDonalds has sought an exemption under this provision.
Twenty-eight states, who are already regulating insurance coverage within their borders, already require employer-provided health insurance to include contraceptive coverage. The administration’s latest announcement says that the requirement to provide contraceptive coverage extends to all employers (with specific exceptions), including hospitals operated by organizations that oppose contraception, such as Catholic hospitals.
My belief is that the Constitution required the administration to make the decision requiring the Catholic hospitals to include coverage of contraception. To have decided otherwise, i.e., to have exempted Catholic hospitals from the requirement to provide contraceptive coverage because of their religious beliefs, would have been, in my mind, a clear violation of the prohibition of “laws respecting religion.”
Several factors are at work here. The administration’s decision only requires employers to include contraceptive coverage in their insurance packages. It does not require the individual employees to use that coverage, nor to use any kind of contraceptives. It also recognizes that Catholic hospitals are large employers, sometimes the largest employers in their communities, and that many employees may not be Catholics, or even if Catholics, may not share that aspect of the Catholic belief regarding contraception.
Catholic hospitals, or groups of Catholic hospitals, have significant bargaining power with insurance companies and may be able to obtain discounted rates because there is a lower rate of use of that particular coverage by their employees, if that is in fact so after a few years. On the other hand, pregnancy (and childbirth) is an expensive and medically dangerous activity. Some health insurance companies already include contraceptives free for women of child-bearing years because the cost of providing such coverage is less than the cost of pregnancy and expenses related to childbirth. It is in the insurance companies’ financial interest to provide that coverage. It could potentially work out that Catholic hospitals, because their observant Catholic employees don’t use contraception, could have higher medical costs and therefore be charged at higher rates than a non-Catholic employer whose employees all were using contraceptives.
It is worthwhile, I think, to distinguish the decision regarding health insurance and Catholic hospitals from other government policies that relate to religious freedom.
The US Supreme Court recently ruled that labor rules, generally applicable to employers and their employees, would not apply to a church-run school and its teachers. In that case, the Court held that how the religious organization ran the internal functions of its schools, particularly since the teachers were considered “ministers” as part of their function, was outside of the authority of the government to regulate, because of the First Amendment.
There has been no suggestion that all the employees of Catholic hospitals are treated or considered to be “clergy” in the performance of their duties, so, at least in my mind, there is no parallel between the church school situation and the Catholic hospital situation.
The other recent situation that merits discussion is the decision by the Susan B. Komen Foundation to suspend its grants to Planned Parenthood. This decision was taken soon after the Foundation added a new Vice President for Policy, Karen Handel, who had run (and lost) for governor of Georgia, on a platform of opposition to Planned Parenthood, because it is a provider of abortion services.
For the record, the amount of the Komen grant to Planned Parenthood was not large, compared to Planned Parenthood’s overall budget. According to recent news reports, the annual budget for Planned Parenthood, nationwide, is around $73,000,000. The amount of the latest Komen grant to Planned Parenthood had been something like $680,000, or less than 1% of the Planned Parenthood budget, according to several news reports.
And the accusation that Planned Parenthood would use the Komen money to provide abortion services was bogus too. Planned Parenthood provides a wide variety of services for women, including family planning, pre-natal care, HIV/AIDS prevention, screenings for various kinds of cancer (cervical and ovarian cancer being of particular concern to women) and breast cancer screenings, which the Komen grant helped to fund. Overall, it has been reported that abortions constitute only about 3 percent of the services provided by Planned Parenthood.
There was also an argument raised that Planned Parenthood wasn’t providing mammograms, so wasn’t an appropriate recipient of the Komen funds. This is also a bogus argument, because what it did provide was breast cancer screenings that women require prior to receiving a mammogram. For those women whose screening indicated that a mammogram was appropriate, it provided a way for the woman to get a referral to a mammogram provider. Without that screening, thousands of women might never have been able to obtain the mammogram.
One of the lame excuses given by Komen for their initial decision to stop funding Planned Parenthood’s breast cancer screening program was “that Planned Parenthood was ‘under investigation’ by Congress.” That so-called “investigation” is in fact a witch hunt promoted by an particular anti-abortion member of Congress, Rep. Cliff Stearns, (R-Florida), who charged that Planned Parenthood was using federal funds to perform abortions, in violation of federal law [a law that I consider stupid and malevolent].
Since Komen has apparently reversed its decision, another anti-abortion member of Congress, Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tennessee), has called for a “full scale” investigation of Planned Parenthood, alleging “fraud, waste and abuse” of federal funds. Of course, Congress itself wouldn’t survive an in-depth investigation of its own “fraud, waste and abuse,” but that’s an issue for another time.
The Komen statements leading up to and following the modification of its decision regarding Planned Parenthood are a circus in inconsistency. Even a week after the change was made, it still isn’t clear what Komen’s position is or will be about future grants to Planned Parenthood, which while allegedly the nation’s largest provider of abortions, is also the largest, or one of the largest, providers of women’s health care. The weasel-worded statement purporting to reverse Komen’s decision in fact was issued as a change in the policy under which it would cut off funding to its affiliates, changing that standard from “being under investigation” to “being under criminal investigation.”
I maintain that neither of those standards is a sufficient reason to cut off funding to Planned Parenthood. In the United States, the concept of “innocent until proven guilty” is fundamental to our society. In a case where the recipient of funds provides health care services to millions of women, cutting off funds merely because it is the subject of an investigation, even a criminal one, potentially impacts all of the clients of the agency being investigated, with no proof that there is either guilt on the part of the agency or any likelihood of the prosecution prevailing.
What the Komen organization (which I notice is headquartered in Texas, where conservative thinking is known to proliferate) has done, is to cast a cloud over all of its activities. This is a shame for an organization that is allegedly targeting a disease that impacts large numbers of women, but the Komen board should have been aware that its decision regarding Planned Parenthood would be controversial. But then again, Komen’s board must have suffered a massive infection of bad judgment when it hired Karen Handel, a former candidate for the governorship of Georgia who ran on an anti-abortion, anti-Planned Parenthood (and I would argue, an anti-women) platform, to be its senior vice-president for public policy.
Did Handel influence the Komen decision to cut funds to Planned Parenthood? Perhaps.
Hopefully, now that she has resigned (or been forced out), that influence will not insinuate itself into Komen’s future decision-making, but that doesn’t solve the problem for the remainder of the board. What is clear is that millions of women, for whom the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure was the standard-bearer in the fight against breast cancer, are having second thoughts about where to put their energy and money to support the fight against breast cancer.
As for me, I am a man, and I have what my favorite author has called his “infantile prejudice” in favor of breasts. Guilty as charged. And I have lost way too many of my best women friends to breast cancer. So I have lots of reasons to want to see an end to breast cancer.
The US Postal Service has a Breast Cancer Stamp that costs a little more, eleven cents, than a regular first class stamp, but the difference goes to fund breast cancer research at the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Defense.
I am proud to say that the Breast Cancer Stamps are the only first class stamps I buy. I usually buy them 200 at a time, which the last time I bought stamps, when first class stamps were $0.44, cost $0.55 each. That meant each stamp had eleven cents for breast cancer research and my 200 stamps cost me $110.00. So each time I buy stamps, my purchase puts $22.00 toward breast cancer research. Since they were first introduced, sale of these stamps, as of November 2011, had raised $72 million for research.
I don’t know what they cost now, since the first class rates went up again, but it is a small amount to pay to be able to know that I am making a difference in the effort to find a cure to this terrible disease. I encourage anyone, who has read this far, to buy this stamp and use it for your regular postage.
And I strongly recommend also supporting Planned Parenthood.
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