The past few weeks has seen an absolute explosion of emotions and arguments over the Health and Human Services mandate that Catholic institutions (not churches), cover contraceptions and abortifacients for their Catholic and non-Catholic employees alike.  The Catholic response has been swift, logical, impassioned, ecumenical, and sometimes from surprising sources.  Nonetheless, I feel like most of the responses fail to address the main case being made against the Church’s position.

To me, the strongest argument made against the Catholic Church’s position came from this simple statement by the always enjoyable (even if I tend to disagree as often as I agree with), Rachel Maddow:

“If you want to be a health insurance provider than you must abide by the rules of providing health insurance.  And in the United States that means covering contraception.”

Simple.  Clean.  To the point.  Yet ultimately, wrong.

To most, it’s certainly not a completely off-the-wall statement to claim that contraception should be a basic component of health insurance.  The Obama Administration has been touting the prestigious Institute of Medicine’s recommendation that preventative services for women such as contraception be covered.  The problem is, that doesn’t really mean anything.  Why?  Simply because nowadays women can’t imagine raising a family without it?

Supposedly this is what families would be like without contraception.

What’s really interesting for anyone who has been watching the healthcare debate unfold is that the same Catholic bishops and politicians who are currently decrying the HHS mandate were the ones most consistently rallying for universal healthcare for years. Setting aside Obamacare as a specific solution, the crazy thing is that the US bishops would be the first to say that the employees of their institutions, no matter their faith, deserve full healthcare coverage for any of their illnesses. They have that as a right and the Church is happy to help provide it. But what Rachel Maddow gets wrong is the assumption that simply because the Obama administration – or anyone else for that matter – has decided contraception is a necessary component of healthcare coverage, does not mean that is is necessary for one’s health. We are not talking about the Church threatening to withhold life-saving care from an employee a la the Church of Scientology. Nobody will die or live a painful life because they don’t have access to contraception. Besides, the fact is that this is America and pretending that if a Catholic university or hospital doesn’t cover contraception those employees won’t have affordable access to it is crazy.  If only we had organizations as devoted to providing services that actually impact people’s health as we do to providing free contraception!

So I would have agreed with Rachel Maddow’s argument if we were indeed talking about basic healthcare coverage that was truly necessary for the employees of Catholic institutions. The Church remains fully committed to providing coverage for any necessary healthcare needs. But if it is not a real need, then we have every right to exclude it from coverage and the White House has no right to mandate us otherwise.¹

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1.  Fight it by signing the White House petition here.