In the midst of what has already been a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad summer, the Obama administration last week appeared to stumble into the kind of culture war skirmish that nearly shut down the government earlier this year. The Department of Health and Human Services announced that under the new health care law, insurance companies will be required to cover birth control without the co-pays that most women currently fork over on a monthly basis. Any new health mandate would be sufficient to draw ire from Republicans committed to opposing the implementation of “ObamaCare.” But this one came with a religious exemption that was immediately blasted by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops as “so narrow as to exclude most Catholic social service agencies and health care providers.” Even the Catholic Health Association, which broke with the bishops conference to support health reform last year and was a key Catholic ally of the White House, expressed its disappointment and opposition to the rule. And yet what was the response from congressional Republicans? Silence. So, what could possibly cause Republicans to clam up when handed an opportunity to bash Democrats for mandating birth control coverage? Well, for starters, birth control itself is extremely popular. A Centers for Disease Control study of women’s sexual activity from 1991 to 2008 found that 99% of women who are sexually active have used birth control. While opposition to contraception remains a teaching in the Catholic Church, moral opposition among the public in general is so tiny that polling organizations long ago stopped asking questions about it. Even mandating that insurance companies cover the cost of birth control doesn’t faze most Americans. An NPR/Thomson Reuters poll earlier this year found that 77% of Americans thought private insurers should pay all or some of the cost of oral contraceptives. The result was virtually unchanged when pollsters asked about people who get help from the government to buy private insurance–74% of respondents said those women should have their birth control covered. According to another survey byImage may be NSFW.
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