Contraception and Healthcare

I was raised Roman Catholic and when I was growing up going to Mass at St. Patrick's every Sunday, it wasn't uncommon to see families of 10-12 kids taking up an entire pew. They usually had one in every grade in school, meaning that mom was pregnant at least once a year to have them spaced a year apart in age. Until my cousin Terry died of cancer several years ago, I had 22 first cousins on my mom's side. She is the middle of five children and her siblings all had fairly large families. That was the norm during the Baby Boom years, I suppose, but the moreso in Catholic families where birth control has been a big no-no since, well, I don't know when. Now that the Obama health care plan includes contraceptive care for women, Catholic bishops are raising the red flag and saying that it's a violation of religious liberty to make religious employers provide contraceptive care when it violates their moral belief. The Obama administration has had to do some delicate side stepping in order to cool the fires, but the bishops are still displeased and think that anyone working for a Catholic organization should be exempt from access to birth control, Catholic or no. Part of what caused me to leave the Catholic Church decades ago was my disagreement with their stance on women's reproductive issues.

When I reached my reproductive years, and I was late in coming to them, I considered using birth control pills to ameliorate miserable monthly symptoms that were nearly incapacitating. The Catholic Church wouldn't even allow it in cases where someone's health was at stake, and I began to realize that there was nothing at all in the Bible that said you couldn't exercise birth control or even take it as medication to alleviate severe pain like I was having. I also saw the effects of lack of birth control in Central America when my older sister went down to Nicaragua in 1974 after the terrible earthquake down there that ravaged that country. She returned home with pictures of wrenching poverty caused by overpopulation and I knew then that the Church in which I was raised was wrong and should do something about that. Overpopulation due to lack of access to birth control is a health care issue. It's wrong and it's unsustainable in the long term. It ticks me off that the bishops are using this as a political tool against the President of the United States, an office that seems to have lost a great deal of respect in recent years. The issue of birth control has now become a political football that will continue to be kicked from now until the elections in November. It's interesting how 98% of American Catholic women use birth control and how much smaller families are now than they were 50 years ago, when it was common to see a brood of 10-12 kids in a single family. By and large, American Catholics tend to be far more liberal than their European or Latin American counterparts. I just wonder how people will respond to the firestorm being brewed by the bishops. Will Catholics side with them while taking the pill behind their backs, or will they realize that this is a women's health care issue and that when push comes to shove, nobody is forcing anybody to take birth control pills if they truly don't believe in doing so? And that's what is at the crux of all this. It isn't as if the Obama administration is mandating that women take birth control. It's merely the idea that if a woman wishes to do so, her insurance carrier should provide her with access to it IF SHE WANTS TO DO SO. Now, why the bishops are making such a kerfuffle over this, I don't know, but it strikes me as odd that the loudest voices against women having control over their own bodies is men. That just goes to show that while women have made great strides, we have so much further to go yet. We don't really have the control over our bodies that we should have. At the end of the day, insurance and government tell us what we can and cannot do and I regard that as a crying shame.