U.S. Supreme Court Upholds Religious Objections To Contraception

An anonymous reader writes In a legislative first, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Monday that for-profit companies can, in essence, hold religious views. Given the Supreme Court's earlier decisions granting corporations the right to express political support through monetary donations, this ruling is not all that surprising. Its scope does not extend beyond family-owned companies where "there's no real difference between the business and its owners." It also only applies to the contraception mandate of the health care law. The justices indicated that contraceptive coverage can still be obtained through exceptions to the mandate that have already been introduced to accommodate religious nonprofits. Those exceptions, which authorize insurance companies to provide the coverage instead of the employers, are currently being challenged in lower courts. The "closely held" test is pretty meaningless, since the majority of U.S. corporations are closely held.

Comments

Re:A win for freedom

[Eddi3]

Further, Hobby Lobby still provides coverage for more than a dozen kinds of birth control. Just not the ones that can induce abortion of an already fertilized fetus.

Re:Gee Catholic judges

[compro01]

We had it before the ACA's mandate. 85% of group health plans provided it. Non-profits in all 50 States and many local governments make it available to those who can't afford it. The cost is not prohibitive even for those without insurance who don't wish to avail themselves of the aforementioned options.

You're assuming all birth control methods are created equal. They aren't.

The pill is a comparatively poor method in terms of success rate (roughly 9%/year failure rate and needs to be taken religiously every day) compared to more recent methods, such as IUDs (0.2-0.8% failure rate, depending on type. Basically foolproof as they're insert-and-forget for 3+ years) and implants (0.05% (this is actually better than the success rate for tubal ligation), insert-and-forget for 4 years).

The mandate expanded the state of things from "Oh, you're poor, so you get the failure-prone pill because it's cheap" to "Take your pick of any method, they're all covered", which is a good thing. Saddling people who can least afford a child with the most failure-prone method for preventing that is a recipe for disaster.

Re:Gee Catholic judges

[compro01]

Yes yes, No True Catholic.

If you started expunging all the insufficiently devout Catholics, there probably wouldn't be much left of the church when you were done.

Though that may not be a bad thing.