Obama Punks the GOP on Contraception
Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images
Update, July 8, 2014: This two-year-old post has been getting a lot of attention the past few days. Here is a followup on what's happened with the contraception mandate since this post was originally published.
After two solid weeks of Republicans rapidly escalating attacks on
contraception access under the banner of "religious freedom," Obama
finally announced what the White House is proposing: an accommodation of
religiously affiliated employers who don't want to offer birth control
coverage as part of their insurance plans. In those situations, the
insurance companies will have to reach out directly to employees and
offer contraception coverage for free, without going through the
employer.
Insurance companies are down with the plan, because as Matt Yglesias explained at Moneybox, contraception actually saves insurance companies money, since it's cheaper than abortion and far cheaper than childbirth. Because the insurance companies have to reach out to employees directly, there's very little danger of women not getting coverage because they are unaware they're eligible.
Insurance companies are down with the plan, because as Matt Yglesias explained at Moneybox, contraception actually saves insurance companies money, since it's cheaper than abortion and far cheaper than childbirth. Because the insurance companies have to reach out to employees directly, there's very little danger of women not getting coverage because they are unaware they're eligible.
That's the nitty-gritty. The fun part of this is that Obama just pulled a fast one on Republicans. He drew this out for two weeks, letting Republicans work themselves into a frenzy of anti-contraception rhetoric, all thinly disguised as concern for religious liberty, and then created a compromise that addressed their purported concerns but without actually reducing women's access to contraception, which is what this has always been about. (As Dana Goldstein reported in 2010, before the religious liberty gambit was brought up, the Catholic bishops were just demanding that women be denied access and told to abstain from sex instead.)
With the fig leaf of religious liberty removed, Republicans are in a bad situation. They can either drop this and slink away knowing they've been punked, or they can double down. But in order to do so, they'll have to be more blatantly anti-contraception, a politically toxic move in a country where 99% of women have used contraception.
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