The Catholic Bishops vs. the Contraceptive Mandate
Journal Title: Religions - Year 2015, Vol 6, Issue 4
Abstract
The Roman Catholic bishops of the United States have publicly opposed artificial contraception since they first issued a public statement condemning it in 1919. Thereafter, the bishops were generally unsuccessful in persuading the public that contraceptive access should be restricted. Recently, however, the bishops succeeded in a campaign to restrict access to contraceptives for Catholic and non-Catholic women alike. Their lobbying and public criticism of the contraceptive mandate of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which requires employer health plans to offer preventive reproductive care coverage, forced Obama administration officials into a series of accommodations that gutted portions of the law intended to provide contraception to employees without copayment or cost sharing. In contrast to their earlier efforts to restrict reproductive freedom, the bishops successfully characterized their efforts against the ACA as a battle for religious freedom rather than against reproductive rights. This successful strategy may lead to future setbacks for women’s reproductive liberty.
Authors and Affiliations
Leslie C. Griffin
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP25495
- DOI https://doi.org/10.3390/rel6041411
- Views 353
- Downloads 8
Reading Religiously across Religious Borders: A Method for Comparative Study
Oliver Freiberger has done us the great service of drawing our attention to how comparativists do their comparative work. Issues of method—the “methodical aspects”—of course matter greatly in the actual doing of compar...
Religious Knowledge, Ineffability and Gender
The issue of ineffability constitutes a significant challenge in the philosophy of religion. In this paper, I first argue that it is difficult to see how the traditional approach, which I call ‘the metaphysical approac...
Ifa Fuyu’s Search for Okinawan-Japanese Identity
This paper focuses on the crucial role played by Ifa Fuyu, the “father of Okinawan studies,” in ¯ articulating ideas related to Okinawan-Japanese identity. Starting with a brief overview of Ifa’s life and work, especia...
Interrogating the Comparative Method: Whither, Why, and How?
This essay seeks to illuminate the problematics, methods, and dynamics of comparison by interrogating how certain analytical categories in the study of religion, such as scripture and the body, can be fruitfully reimag...
Buddhist Ritual from Syntax to Cognition: Insight Meditation and Homa
The concept of “ritual syntax” is developed by relating it to cognitive studies of ritual, providing a fuller theoretical basis. Developing theoretical grounding requires differentiating between the members of five pai...