LETTER: Sex without pregnancy? Oh, horrors!

Until Dr. Barry Carpenter’s recent column, I didn’t realize how bad Obama’s new healthcare policy really was.

Carpenter explains that by requiring many Catholic employers to cover birth control in employee health-insurance plans, Obama “forces a culture of contraception” on us, and what could be more horrible? My god, what a nightmare if sexually active couples actually have the option to decide when, or if, they’re going to conceive …

Wait a second. That’s actually a good thing.

Not in the eyes of the Catholic Church of course, or, it seems, Carpenter. In addition to his apparent revulsion at the thought of more women being able to afford contraception, he objects that it violates both Catholics’ freedom of conscience and the First Amendment; that it declares “pregnancy a disease”; forces businesses owned by the church to provide “abortifacent” drugs; and gives “no exemption at all for individual citizens or private businesses.” All but one of his arguments are wrong.

His First Amendment argument is valid: Like laws that ban landlords from discriminating against gays or Jews (to take two examples), this does infringe on religious freedom.

I think it’s one of those cases where the intrusion is justified (given that churches and businesses catering to church members are exempt — it’s only secular church-run businesses that it affects). An employee’s ability to get necessary medical treatment shouldn’t depend on whether their employer is Catholic or Scientologist (“Psychiatric drugs are wrong and I will not have them covered by our health plan.”) or beliefs like Baptist Pastor Steve Anderson that it’s morally objectionable to take painkillers during childbirth (because God laid the curse of pain upon women).

Taking the other objections one by one:

• There’s no need for an exemption for individual citizens because the rule doesn’t compel individual citizens to buy or use contraceptives. Businesses have to offer the option; individual employees are free not to exercise it. So it’s not as if Catholic employees or workers are at risk of having their conscience violated.

• Birth control drugs stop fertilization. They’re not “abortifacents.”

• Providing insurance coverage for birth control — or using it for that matter — doesn’t make “pregnancy a disease,” it treats it as a medical condition. That’s why insurers also cover doctors to treat pregnant women, or isn’t Dr. Carpenter aware of that fact? Or the fact that pregnancy, while not a disease, does in fact have health risks? For some women, the risks are quite severe: Is he suggesting it’s wrong for such women to take steps to prevent pregnancy?

Of course, some women, faced with severe health risks, choose to have a child anyway. Other women find sex more special when becoming pregnant is an option. Nothing in the new policy takes that choice away from them.

But I think women who don’t want to conceive, who prefer sex without worrying about a child, are making just as valid a choice.

That’s not to say the Obama policy is the ideal solution. A “Washington Post” article on the controversy points out that Hawaii has one interesting alternative: Employers don’t have to offer contraceptive coverage, but the insurer does, and it has to be the same rate the employee would pay if the workplace plan had offered coverage.

I suspect a large number of people who oppose Obama’s new rule would find the Hawaii version just as objectionable. The very idea that a woman can have sex without “consequences” seems to curdle some conservatives’ very blood (right-winger Sandy Rios, for example, complained on Fox News that access to contraception allows women to have “unlimited” and “unrestrained” sex. She considers this a bad thing).

Me? I think a culture of contraception sounds like a world of win.

Fraser Sherman was a longtime Log writer and columnist.