Sunday, February 19, 2012

Abortion: Women's Rights and Freedom of Religion

The debates surrounding freedom over one's body vs. rights of the unborn just wont go away. Two weeks ago the debate centered on the Obama health care legislation's clause requiring employer health care insurance to cover the birth control pill. Catholic church officials refused, and would not extend coverage to the many women employed and covered by catholic hospitals, citing freedom of religion. Which is supreme: freedom of religion or women's rights to control their body?

The truth is the two principles need not be in conflict. Women can have the right to control their body and the Catholic church need not pay for it. Both can win. While I do not agree that a medical institution can withhold services based on their faith (imagine women dying in labor because religious hospitals won't terminate a pregnancy or give blood transfusions or do other life-saving measures because it violates their beliefs), I don't think the contraceptives mandate is appropriate either.

I find it even more repulsive that the health care legislation requires any employer--religious or not--to pay for birth control. Since when did a women's right to control her body mean that somebody else (employer) has to pay for her to have recreational sex? If you do not want to get pregnant then abstain or buy a your own contraception. Government should not require that health coverage include this anymore than it should require coverage for the consequences of other personal indulgences (that's right - private companies should be free to make lifetime smokers pay for their tracheotomy, alcoholics pay for their own liver transplant, and the grossly obese to pay for their own diabetes medications).

In the case of the Church vs. the pill, the Obama administration caved to conservative demands and says it will strike out the provision. He is trying to win over moderates while Republicans are still fighting to win the base during the primaries. At any rate, this particular battle seems to have been a conservative victory (except in the eyes of Obama haters who will never be happy and the Conservative News propaganda machines that benefit from stirring something out of nothing).

Still, the issue of women's rights and abortion may not be over yet. Virginia and Oklahoma are now considering laws that would extend "personhood" to all ages, even embryos, in an effort to outlaw abortions. It seems to me that this would not prohibit abortions conducted to save the mothers life (murder in self defense is usually acceptable), but it would make it illegal to abort products of rape and incest--situations I am personally divided on. I hate to make such abortions illegal, but under our current laws we seem way too casual about permitting people to use abortion as a form of contraceptive. Consider that there are between 1 and 1.5 million abortions conducted in the US each year. It might be time to swing the other way and error on the side of saving life instead of extinguishing too many.

Current laws are tied to the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling, where in the court ruled that abortions fell within the rights of women to control their body up until the point that the fetus was "viable" to survive on its own. This tends to be about 24 weeks (or six months) into the pregnancy. Consequently, women are free to abort anytime before then and boy do they. In the United States we hand out abortions like candy with no justification except that the mother requested it. One website reports that 1% of US abortions occur following incest or rape, 6% due to health problems, and that 93% occur for social reasons (the birth of a child would be inconvenient). I'm no math wizard, but even know that 93% of 1.25 million is a lot of dead embryos/babies each year. The numbers are sickening.

With all this talk about abortion, women's rights, and freedom of religion, we may find that family values makes an unexpected rise in the political bargaining as conservatives and liberals face off in the general election. I'd like to see a socially conservative wave augment the current conservative economic reaction and help boost the GOP into the White House.