They didn’t quite come right out and say it, but they kind of forgot to check their privilege and do some, you know, research before proclaiming a bunch of untruths about the birth control pill as a medication. And they don’t just want you to hear the untruths; they want to restrain your insurance coverage based on alleged facts that are both untrue and incomplete.
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops is once more trying to flex its muscles. Not happy to have simply pushed to remove all abortion coverage from health care reform, they now have a new target: making sure birth control isn’t covered, either.
An organization representing U.S. Catholic bishops is asking federal regulators not to classify contraceptives and sterilization as preventive services, thus entitling them to full coverage under the health care reform law, in final rules.
Quite a few types of preventive care are to be covered, but they don’t want birth control on that list. The most obvious reasons why this is both stupid and misogynistic have to do with pregnancy: it would mean that women who can’t afford birth control or abortions can’t afford to have sex. Now, as repugnant as you may find that stance, it is actually a sound perspective – insofar as it goes. But when you combine this with the fact that Catholics encourage people to marry het-style, and the Bible says a wife can’t deny her husband sex, and that sex shouldn’t be enjoyed in any form but the reproductive kind, and it shouldn’t be with someone of your own gender so as to avoid the whole pregnancy issue, and you’re not even allowed to kill yourself, then one could also infer they are saying poor women who can’t afford birth control shouldn’t get married. What is this? A way to force women into the convent?
But I digress. Because there’s a less subtle reason why what the bishops are urging is sick: it could result in deaths for women. And I’m not talking just about pregnancy complication deaths, though those are important (but everyone’s already decided whether or not they think women should have to die to have babies, so I’m not getting into it just now). The bishops say, incorrectly (they’re trusting “correlation=causation” pseudoscience), that the pill causes a bunch of health problems:
Cancer is not the only problem. Contraceptive Technology cites numerous studies in which estrogen in contraceptives has been associated with increased risk of heart attacks, strokes, blood clots, and hypertension.
Now, read that carefully, and then read the following carefully. One in four women have Polycystic Ovarian Symdrome, or PCOS. It is not so thoroughly understood at this point, and is probably actually a collection of several quite different disorders, all of which result in irregular or non-existent menstruation and infertility. Interestingly, it seems that menstruating gives women some protection against heart attacks and various other things that contribute to why men don’t live as long on average as we do. Having PCOS renders that protection moot, and raises a woman’s risk for heart problems and so on. Additionally, PCOS seems to cause (or at least be strongly associated with) ovarian cancer, which is one of those cancers that’s typically not found until it’s too late to save the patient’s life.
Guess what simple medical treatment restores to a woman with PCOS her protection against heart attacks and all that jazz, and significantly reduces her chances of ovarian cancer? C’mon, guess! That’s right – birth control pills. And this is why OB-GYNs routinely prescribe the pill to women with PCOS who are not currently looking to get pregnant. Yes, folks: the birth control pill is saving the lives of not only stinkly ol’ women, but wholesome virgins and pious wives, like, you know, Mary, Mother of Jesus. But ultimately, I guess we must infer this group would rather those women die than some disgusting sex-haver get the benefit of birth control. Wow. Harsh.
It’s not exactly difficult to phone an OB-GYN’s office and say, “What all is the pill prescribed for, other than the obvious?” Go ahead, I’ll give you thirty seconds to try it yourself and see.
Or, maybe if you’re not a doctor, you should shut up, get back in your little confessional booth, and enjoy your tax-free status while you still have it because it’s about time somebody launched a massive campaign to get government-interfering churches to pay massive back taxes. If separation of church and state is only protecting the church, then the church can start coughing up some income taxes.
The Bishops certainly aren’t the only group that needs to shut up and let doctors practice medicine. I’m sure they aren’t even the only religious group pressuring politicians into making their concept of morality into law. All of these people need to tend to their own business and their own morality morasses and let the government focus on what’s practical instead of one powerful group’s oddball definition of morality.
And in closing, here’s a promise: if I ever get it in my head that some men-only medication should be made harder for men to get their hands on, I will phone up a doctor and make sure it doesn’t have any other healthful uses instead of assuming I know everything because I know the obvious.
God, save us from Your followers.
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That’s promising. I have this terrible feeling it will never take in the States. Maybe someday Pakistan will send our kids carepacks with Gardasil shots they can give themselves. /dry humor
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
@ Miss Gradenko: “the Church teaches that a woman who will/could die by giving birth can take a treatment that will save her life and as a side effect result in the death of her unborn baby. ”
You mean treatments other than abortion that will result in fetal death? I did find this quote: “The Catholic Church forbids abortion in all circumstances and allows the termination of a pregnancy only as a secondary effect of other treatments, such as radiation of a cancerous uterus. ” (http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/2010/05/15/20100515phoenix-catholic-nun-abortion.html). Otherwise, the Catholic church has shown clearly that they do not approve of abortion even to save the mother’s life:
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126985072
To quote, the tagline of that story is “A nun at a Catholic hospital in Phoenix has been excommunicated for allowing an abortion to be performed on a woman who doctors say would otherwise have died.”
Honestly, I think it’s hypocritical. If you aren’t going to allow life-saving abortions, why are you allowing other life-saving, but pregnancy terminating, treatments?
On a completely different note, in addition to the aforementioned PCOS and endometriosis, I have another non-sexual reason for going on oral BC: my periods are excruciatingly painful, and the BC helps. I also used to have severe mood swings and outbreaks of crying and extreme fatigue. The symptoms aren’t gone, but they are definitely lessened by the use of oral BC. I once was admitted to our student health center on an emergency appointment just because of the pain, where they administered a shot of strong painkillers and prescribed that I take 4 ibuprofen at a time (twice the normal dose). Granted, the problem isn’t gone, but it’s stop interfering with my life so much. And you know what happened just recently? The price of my birth control WITH insurance DOUBLED. It was going to be 40 dollars a month, until I found out about the generic for $20 (which is what I was already paying). I’m a college student, and my single mother isn’t exactly rich. I have to have THIS birth control — I’ve tried others with disastrous results. And the generic, while it’s supposed to be exactly the same, isn’t — some things are better, some are worse. So, because they don’t like women having control over their sexuality, the Catholic Church is going to take away my access to PREVENTATIVE medical care? Great, thanks ever so.
Rose(Quote) (Reply)
Rose,
*nods* They’re definitely making another statement that I guess most of the public fails to catch: the lives of babies are more valuable than the lives of mothers. Really? Is that a Jesus-approved idea, that one person’s life is worth more than another’s? What if the mother in question already has kids – do those kids get a say in whether they’d prefer to keep their mother or gain a sibling? What if they’re in a position to try again to have another baby, but only if the mother lives?
Nope. The mother should die, and the father – well, women are plug and play. He wasn’t supposed to really love her or anything. At the funeral, he should meet several eligible women, and just pick one to mother his semi-orphaned kids. Jesus would’ve wanted it this way.
That, apparently, is what the Catholic church is saying. You can’t find another rational interpretation. They value a baby’s life over a mother’s. And why?
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
This reminded me of a powerful part in one of the Discworld novels. (Can’t remember which, unfortunately.) Granny Weatherwax is assisting in a farmwife’s labor, and it’s obvious she has to choose between the mother’s life and the baby’s. She chooses the mother. Another character criticizes her; how could she let an innocent babe die? She responds that for the farmer to have a baby but no one to care for it, he won’t be able to work as well and it’s likely the child would starve to death anyway. But with an adult, there is more potential and more options, and the couple can try again later.
Granted most of us on the internet have the privilege of not starving to death if we lose our jobs. But I think the point is still valid that for all we romanticize the potential of our next generation, in the here and now an adult is far more valuable to a household than a child. I see class privilege in valuing the baby first, “Oh just hire a nanny,” that ignores the reality for many of us in the working and even up to the middle classes, losing a parent would severely strain finances and quality of life.
(Ideally all lives would be equal, of course, but I haven’t figured out to bring about Utopia yet.)
Sylvia Sybil(Quote) (Reply)
Are you talking about the scene at the beginning of Carpe Jugulum? When the midwife starts to go ask the husband whether he wants Granny Weatherwax to try and save the baby or the mother and Granny stops her? That’s the only one I can remember at the moment, although it might be because I love Granny’s reasoning: “You don’t like him? You think he’s a bad man?” “No!” “Then what’s he ever done to me, that I should hurt him so?”
Another favorite Weatherwax quote from CJ seems applicable here: There are worse crimes, “but they starts with thinking about people as things…”
MaggieCat(Quote) (Reply)
It’s not JUST class privilege, though. Rural poor men have historically been expected to find another wife to raise their kids, and quick. And since patriarchy kept women dependent on husbands, there was always someone around desperate enough for the job. So the idea really is that a widowed father should just marry somebody already, and get on with things. That opportunity exists in every class of a patriarchal society.
And the reason it’s naive at best and evil-minded at worst is that it’s not that easy to find someone who will really be good to someone else’s kids. There are plenty of people out there who are happy to be the best step-parents they can be, but their overlap with your personal available pool of possibly new spouses can be awfully thin. Stability is good for kids. Losing a mother and gaining a baby to care for is very destabilizing.
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
MaggieCat,
Yes, that’s the one. The scene I’m thinking of comes a bit after that one, I think.
Jennifer Kesler,
True. But I still think that is class privilege because if you have wealth you can take your time with the new marriage. Your kids aren’t going to starve for lack of food or hurt themselves while being unsupervised. But if you’re poor, you have to hurry up and remarry because either you’re taking time off work or the kids aren’t being cared for properly.
In other words, both upper and lower classes need women’s labor (though neither is likely to value domestic work enough), but the upper class can afford to go without because they have the option of farming it out to the lower class, probably the female half of the lower class. So the upper class is more likely to ignore the reality of how much an adult contributes to and is necessary for the family’s stability.
Sylvia Sybil(Quote) (Reply)
Sylvia Sybil,
That’s true (and I wasn’t saying it wasn’t class privilege, just that there’s also a gender anti-privilege baked in to encourage men to see women as disposable, but babies as irreplaceable).
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
The Bible does not say a wife cannot deny her husband sex. There is a verse that says if a married couple doesn’t have sex, it should be my mutual consent and only for a short time, which could be seen as saying a wife can’t refuse her husband if he wants to have sex when she doesn’t, but considering that elsewhere it says the husband is to love his wife like Christ loved the Church (refers to believers as a whole, not any particular denomination), and Christ chose to die to redeem humans from their sins, a husband forcing his wife to do something she does not want to do is not Biblical.
The idea that sex is only for reproduction is something the Roman Catholic church came up with, because I’ve never seen any verse in the Bible that says anything like that and I’ve heard several Protestant pastors say sex is a wonderful thing we’re meant to enjoy. Oh, and if we’re not supposed to enjoy it, why does getting turned on feel so bloody fabulous and why do women have a clitoris?
Cheryl(Quote) (Reply)
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