Tag Archives: Topic: Contraception

Turtle Bay and Beyond: The White House blog in a post called “Health Reform, Preventive Services, and Religious Institutions” addresses women’s preventive services required under the Affordable Care Act by religious institutions.

Center for Reproductive Rights: Seeking immediate relief that would allow emergency contraception over-the-counter access for women of all ages, today the Center for Reproductive Rights asked a federal court to reopen the Center’s 2005 lawsuit against the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for imposing unnecessary age restrictions on the drugs, also known as the “morning-after pill.” | Tummino v. Hamburg

Reuters: Birth and abortion rates among U.S. teens fell to record lows in 2008 as increased use of contraceptives sent the overall teen pregnancy rate to its lowest level since at least 1972, a study showed on Wednesday.

LifeSiteNews.com: Dr. Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC), told LifeSiteNews.com “we will not comply” with the Dept. of Health and Human Services’ mandate requiring religious institutions to cover abortifacient products such as Plan B, Ella, and the IUD.

CBS New York (includes video): “The federal government should do what it’s traditionally done since July 4, 1776, namely back out of intruding into the internal life of a church,” Dolan told CBS 2’s Marcia Kramer.

The Hill: The White House struggled Wednesday to contain the growing uproar over its birth-control mandate, with Democrats peeling off one by one in what has become an increasingly divisive election-year controversy.

LifeNews.com: “I’m not a Catholic but I stand in 100% solidarity with my brothers & sisters to practice their belief against govt pressure,” Warren said. “I’d go to jail rather than cave in to a govement mandate that violates what God commands us to do. Would you? Acts 5:29.”

LifeNews.com: In a new interview with Greta Van Susteren of Fox News, “pro-life” former Democratic congressman Bart Stupak of Michigan says he is opposed to the controversial new Obama mandate that forces religious employers to pay for birth control and abortion-causing drugs in employee health insurance plans.

NewsOK.com: Religious groups that oppose President Obama’s mandate that they provide contraception are using the right to religious liberty as a way to discriminate against women, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said in an email opposing congressional repeal of the mandate.

Catholic Culture: A state law in Hawaii may form the basis for a compromise between the Obama administration and the US Catholic bishops on the mandate to include contraceptive coverage in health-care plans.

Daily Caller carries the video.

Nikolas T. Nikas and Dorinada Bordlee at National Review Online: While a much longer treatment is called for, here’s three quick facts that everyone should know . . .

LifeNews.com: Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning is coordinating a legal challenge against the controversial Obama mandate requiring religious employers to cover birth control and drugs that can cause abortions.

Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops of North and Central America – Record of Protest Against the Infringement of Religious Liberty by HHS: . . . We, the Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops, call upon HHS Secretary Sebelius and the Obama Administration to rescind this unjust ruling and to respect the religious freedom guaranteed all Americans by the First Amendment.

POLITICO.com: The advice coming from Biden and Daley also represented a division among the president’s top advisers, with a group of top women all urging the president to not create an exemption for religious organizations.

News from The Associated Press: Romney has accused Obama of an “assault on religion” over the issue. But Carney says a virtually identical policy is in place in Massachusetts, where Romney served as governor, and that it’s ironic for Romney to criticize Obama over it.

Hot Air:The ACLU protests this perception, pointing to a number of controversial clients they have defended and insist that their mission is only to preserve the civil liberties enshrined in the Bill of Rights and the rest of the US Constitution. I think this puts the ACLU argument to rest once and for all . . .

WSJ.com: The political furor over President Obama’s birth-control mandate continues to grow, even among those for whom contraception poses no moral qualms, and one needn’t be a theologian to understand why. The country is being exposed to the raw political control that is the core of the Obama health-care plan, and Americans are seeing clearly for the first time how this will violate pluralism and liberty.

LifeNews: Boehner Pledges Congress Will Overturn New Obama Mandate (includes video)

In today’s broadcast, Rush Limbaugh read from this report –  LifeSiteNews, December 9, 2005 by Gudrun Schultz: In a shocking turn-around, Massachusetts’s governor Mitt Romney announced yesterday that Roman Catholic and other private hospitals in the state will be forced to offer emergency contraception to sexual assault victims under new state legislation, regardless of the hospitals’ moral position on the issue . . .

Rasmussen Reports.

CNN.com Blogs: But O’Malley, who identified himself as a Catholic, noted Sunday that 28 states already enforce such a policy.

ADF President and General Counsel at National Review Online: If the federal government can succeed in forcing people to violate their faith, it will have the power to force anyone to do anything. It is therefore sad but not surprising that Health and Human Services secretary Kathleen Sebelius took to USA Today this week to spin rather than explain her boss’s decision to force people and entities all over the country to fund abortifacients, contraception, and sterilization against their consciences.

LifeSiteNews.com: Even as the United States’ Catholic bishops have launched an all-out campaign against the Obama administration’s birth control mandate and urged their flocks to resistance, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has invoked the support of “fellow Catholics” to justify her position in favor of the mandate.

News from The Associated Press: A political adviser to President Barack Obama said Tuesday the administration didn’t intend to “abridge anyone’s religious freedom” with its regulation requiring church-affiliated employers to cover birth control for their workers.

News from The Associated Press: Students at Shippensburg University in central Pennsylvania can get the “morning-after” pill by sliding $25 into a vending machine installed at the request of the student government.

ADF Attorney Matt Bowman appeared on The Victoria Taft Show to discuss the situation. | MP3 audio 6:41 mins

Telegraph: Girls as young as 13 have been fitted with contraceptive implants at school without their parents knowing.

CBS New York: Catholic leaders upped the ante Monday, threatening to challenge the Obama administration over a provision of the new health care law that would require all employers, including religious institutions, to pay for birth control.

Rosss Douthat at the NYTimes.com: But there are trade-offs as well, which liberal communitarians don’t always like to acknowledge. When government expands, it’s often at the expense of alternative expressions of community, alternative groups that seek to serve the common good.

Associated Baptist Press: “Our religious liberty is being similarly subverted and attacked,” Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, said of the Obama administration’s inclusion of pregnancy in “preventive services” that health insurers must provide.

LifeSiteNews.com: s a formidable tide of Christian opposition began rising this week, including at least 115 U.S. bishops, the nation’s leading abortion lobby is leaping to defend the Obama administration order that will force religious institutions to provide free birth control next year.

Religion Clause: Q What about the constitutional right to freedom of religion?…
MR. CARNEY: I don’t believe there are any constitutional rights issues here, but I would refer you to others to discuss that. … I understand that there’s controversy … and we will continue to work with religious groups to discuss their concerns. But on the other side of this was the important need to provide access to women to the preventive services that they require….

LaTimes.com: The healthcare law’s mandate to require religious-affiliated employers to pay for contraception for their workers has prompted two lawsuits. If the matter gets to the Supreme Court, it will go before justices who recently affirmed — in a 9-0 ruling — that the 1st Amendment gives special leeway to religious employers.

News from The Associated Press: South Africa is recalling 1.35 million condoms given away at the African National Congress party’s centenary celebrations amid charges some broke during intercourse and others were porous, an official said Tuesday.

LifeNews.com: At least three Catholic bishops have said they will not comply with the mandate the Obama administration put in place recently in Obamacare that will force religious employers to pay for birth control, contraception and drugs that may cause abortions in their health care plans.

Pat Buchanan at Townhall: Now, not only is this a battle the Church must fight, it is a battle the Church can win if it has the moral stamina to say the course. In forcing the Church to violate its own principles, Obama has committed an act of federal aggression, crossing the line between church and state to appease his ACLU and feminist allies, while humiliating the Catholic bishops.

The letter form Bishop Thomas Olmstead, dated Jan. 25, 2012 is here.

National Catholic Reporter: A week after the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services told individuals and institutions who oppose contraception “to hell with you,” as one bishop put it, members of the U.S. Catholic hierarchy were mobilizing their followers to fight.

NY Archbishop Timothy Dolan writes at the Wall Street Journal (full access via Google): Religious freedom is the lifeblood of the American people, the cornerstone of American government. When the Founding Fathers determined that the innate rights of men and women should be enshrined in our Constitution, they so esteemed religious liberty that they made it the first freedom in the Bill of Rights.

Patrick J. Reilly at the Washington Times: Many religious liberty analysts agree that HHS has overstepped its authority. Attorneys from the Alliance Defense Fund have written that the HHS exemption “violates the right to religious freedom protected throughout federal law,” including under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the First and 14th amendments to the Constitution.

William McGurn at WSJ.com: Less predictable—and far more interesting—has been the heat from the Catholic left, including many who have in the past given the president vital cover.

Kaiser Health News: he United States Conference of Catholic Bishops is promising a legal challenge to federal rules the Obama administration reaffirmed Friday requiring health insurers to provide women with a range of preventive health services, including birth control, without charging a co-payment, co-insurance or deductible.

Grace-Marie Turner at National Review Online: The Obama administration announced today it will wait for a year (coincidentally until after the elections) before requiring religious organizations to comply with an Obamacare mandate that they provide coverage for contraception — including controversial drugs that can abort an early pregnancy.

Michael A. Walsh at NYPOST.com: Friday’s ruling by the Department of Health and Human Services proved yet again that ObamaCare’s critics are right. It’s a breathtaking attack not only on the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious freedom, but also on the separation of church and state.

CBS Los Angeles: he Los Angeles City Council approved a new law Tuesday that will require adult film stars to use condoms.

Doug Farrow at Touchstone: Why fight same-sex marriage? Even in America, where the outcome is not yet decided, there appear to be good reasons not to. The optics are poor and the mandate seems uncertain. Prospects for victory appear slim. Resources that might be reserved for more important fronts—abortion, for example—are squandered in defense of an institution to which our modern urban society is no longer committed. Industrial economies, reprogenetic technologies, and new ideas of autonomy—not to speak of new moralities—have called into question many of the assumptions on which that institution has always been based.

Business Week: An ordinance that would require porn actors to wear condoms during film shoots was tentatively approved by the City Council on Tuesday. The council voted 11-1 for the proposal.

LifeSiteNews.com: The book, titled “Godly Seed: American Evangelicals Confront Birth Control, 1873-1973,” by Dr. Allan Carlson, comes at a time when some American evangelicals are rethinking their position on birth control.

News from The Associated Press: People sterilized against their will under a discredited North Carolina state program should each be paid $50,000, a task force voted Tuesday . . .

CBN.com: North Carolina is considering compensating sterilization survivors, providing between $20,000 to $50,000 to each verified living victim.

FOX19 News: “He goes, ‘The reason we don’t sell it to men is because they are using it for rape victims,’” said Melbourne.

ADF Attorney Michael Norton at Townhall: But now Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains (PPRM) has a put a new twist on this, and perhaps unintentionally demonstrated that those simpler times are gone. They’ve done this by showing that the way to a teen’s heart is through his or her cell phone: literally through texting about sexual issues and answering questions teens might have about their sexuality.

Findlaw: Employment law and OSHA compliance become infinitely more interesting when applied to California’s pornography industry. This week, a Los Angeles city clerk certified more than 70,000 signatures for a ballot initiative to require condoms in porn.

Religion Clause: The Becket Fund announced this week the filing of a lawsuit by Colorado Christian University (CCU) challenging on free exercise, free expression and other grounds regulations issued under the Affordable Care Act that require health care plans to cover all FDA-approved contraceptive methods and sterilization procedures.

Steven Aden at Townhall: Last week, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius overrode the Food and Drug Administration and limited the over-the-counter availability of Plan B, the abortifacient sometimes called the “morning after” pill, to girls 17 and older who can prove their age. In short, this means Plan B pills, which are essentially a double dose of birth control pills and are already as accessible as aspirin for girls who just started driving months ago, will continue to be available for girls who are still but kids in society’s eyes.

LifeSiteNews.com: Use of the abortifacient morning-after pill in Spain has risen by 83% in 2010, the first full year of over-the-counter availability of the dangerous drug, according to a report by ANSAmed news service.

Reuters: As reproductive rights advocates regroup after a U.S. directive denying girls under 17 over-the-counter access to the morning-after pill, their best legal recourse may lie in a dormant 6-year-old lawsuit in federal court in Brooklyn, New York.

WSJ.com: Around the turn of the last century, researchers began to discover that the country’s best minds were not reproducing as frequently as they ought to. One study showed that members of the Harvard class of 1900 were spawning fewer than two children apiece, while another found the percentages of childless Harvard marriages skyrocketing. Harvard alumnus Teddy Roosevelt, himself a father of six, was concerned. “The worst evil,” he warned in 1899, was the infertility “of the old native American stock, especially in the North East.”

Washington Times: The bill doesn’t actually amend the 2007 law, but does prohibit the administration from spending any money to carry out the light bulb standards — which amounts to at least a temporary reprieve . . . The GOP tried but failed to attach restrictions on the Obama administration’s nuclear waste policy, its international family planning policy and major restrictions on the president’s environmental agenda.

Telegraph: The Health Survey for England found that men reported having 9.3 different partners on average, with a quarter of men boasting of more than 10 conquests.

Susan Brown Townhall : The Plan B pill debate has little to do with birth control and much to do with losing control. Parents, there is something strangely missing in this conversation. Shouldn’t we be talking about how 11 and 12-year- old girls are getting pregnant in the first place? Last time I checked, sex with a minor was a crime in every state in the union.

A federal judge Tuesday said that a last-minute Food and Drug Administration response to a citizen petition seeking to relax FDA rules regarding a birth-control product rendered moot a complaint to hold the agency in contempt of court.

NCRegister.com: Bridgette Dunlap says she expected Fordham University to provide students with “standard health care.”

William McGurn at WSJ.com: A zealous administration wants to require all health insurance plans to cover contraception, sterilization and drugs known to induce abortion.

News from The Associated Press: Leading Democratic senators are demanding that the Obama administration explain its decision to continue restricting access to Plan B, the morning-after birth control pill, for those under 17.

News from The Associated Press: A federal judge in Brooklyn is poised to hear arguments Tuesday over whether the federal government is acting constitutionally in its decisions over the access teenage girls are given to morning-after contraceptive pills.

LifeSiteNews.com: Contraception has been a “clear factor” in the steep decline of parishioners at Catholic churches across the United States, says Bishop Alexander Sample of Marquette, Michigan.

Lisa Correnti and Wendy Wright at C-FAM Friday Fax: The same week U.S. Secretary Hillary Clinton told a conference in Senegal that family planning is a “basic right,” the U. S. Congress was investigating the Obama administration’s rejection of a highly qualified group to receive a grant to help trafficking victims because it does not offer contraception and abortion. The grant was awarded instead to a group that “had no plan on how objectives would be met.”

This understanding no longer exists in our culture, and some argue that when Americans began divorcing in high numbers, redefined marital sexuality via contraception use, and reduced marriage to mere commitment, it set the stage for our current same-sex marriage debate.

In a rare move, the Health and Human Services Department overruled a decision by the Food and Drug Administration to make the morning after pill available to teenagers without a prescription.

The Obama administration is examining the possibility of selling the morning after pill to teenagers and the FDA has until Wednesday to respond to a request from the maker of the Plan B drug to sell it on the shelves and not behind the pharmacist’s counter.

LifeSiteNews.com: The Diocese of St. Petersburg, Florida will be forced to end health insurance coverage for its 2,300 employees if the Obama administration presses forward with its plan to force Catholic employers to cover contraceptives and abortifacients, insisted Bishop Robert Lynch on Wednesday.

OneNewsNow.com: Did you hear about New York City’s comprehensive drug education program for all students in middle school and high school? The teachers inform the students that abstaining from drug use is best, but since it’s impossible to stop them from doing drugs, the teachers give out cards that list the most common drugs, explaining which are the most dangerous. They also distribute needles to kids who are involved in shooting drugs to help them avoid getting contaminated needles, thereby reducing their chances of contracting or passing on communicable diseases.

Heritage Foundation: Sometimes the White House gets the easy questions wrong. On Tuesday, White House press secretary Jay Carney was asked about a controversial mandate stemming from Obamacare that would require religious employers to provide insurance coverage for birth control despite religious objections.