Separation of religion, state in dispute
The Affordable Care Act is back in front of the Supreme Court this week, this time with its “contraception mandate” under fire.
In short, the Affordable Care Act requires employers above a certain size to offer health care plans and pay some of the costs. Those health care plans include coverage or partial coverage of up to 20 different kinds of contraception.
The act, as originally written, allows for some non-profit organizations (churches, for example) to be religiously exempted from paying for contraceptives that they feel violate their beliefs. However, there is currently no exemption for “regular,” for-profit companies.
The Hobby Lobby case is named after the larger of the two companies bringing suit: a national arts-and-crafts chain that employs over 13,000 people nationally that is owned by a deeply religious family. This family (and thousands of others across the country) feels that many of these contraceptives are forms of abortion, which they view as murder.
They point to the 2010 Citizens United decision, which ruled that businesses have First Amendment freedom of speech rights, as a basis for extending First Amendment religious freedom rights to corporations as well.
The main problem with argument that none of the methods of contraception covered by the Affordable Care Act are abortions (the bill specifically prevents public funds to be used to pay for abortions); rather, they all prevent fertilization in the first place.
In fact, by definition, contraception only includes the “prevention of conception or impregnation.” Any methods of terminating a pregnancy (that is, abortion) that has already begun are therefore not contraception.
That said, there are some people whose beliefs prevent the use of birth control of any kind, abortive or not. There are also religions that do not believe in blood transfusions, others that do not believe in chemotherapy and still others that don’t believe in any medical treatment at all.
If the Supreme Court finds that companies can exempt themselves from paying for some medical procedures on the grounds of religious objections, how do we draw the line between which of those objections are “legitimate” versus those that are not without breaching the separation of church and state?
Do businesses owned by people who subscribe to these beliefs get to exempt themselves from covering basic (i.e. life-saving) medical treatments for their employees, even if the employees do not share those religious convictions? Alternatively, do employees compel these business owners to do things they believe will doom them to eternal damnation? Neither of these options is particularly appealing, and they are an inevitable result of the “one size fits all” solution that is the Affordable Care Act.
This is but one bioethical dilemma that once was decided on a case-by-case basis between individual employers and employees that, under the Affordable Care Act, the Supreme Court must make for everyone. Thanks, Obama.
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