A Move Against Growth

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

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With all the warnings that America is now at the start of a second dip in the great recession, one might have missed the decision of the Obama administration in respect of birth control. The Associated press is reporting that the administration not only will require health insurance companies to cover birth control but will prohibit them from even charging co-payments of the sort that an insured person might have to pay for most other services. It’s hard to recall such a harsh move against growth on the edge of a recession. Maybe the Smoot-Hawley tariff.

It happens that the federal government and the states in America are prohibited from outlawing birth control. This was established in 1965 by the Supreme Court, which, in Griswold v. Connecticut, blocked the Nutmeg State from denying Estelle Griswold* the right to disseminate birth control. This newspaper does not agitate for the return to a pre-Griswold America. We do, however, reckon that a lot of constitutional nonsense has followed from Griswold. It was the case in which Justice Douglas, writing for the majority of the court, found that “specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights** have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance.”

This gave us the right to privacy that makes it hard not only to ban abortion but even to regulate it. Leave abortion aside, though. If the penumbras formed by emanations from the guarantees in the Bill of Rights give us a right to privacy, what penumbras and emanations give the government the power to require insurers to cover birth control free of charge? The way the Obama administration is playing this issue, we are going to get in a fell swoop from the freedom to disseminate birth control to the prohibition on insurance companies to charge for birth control so much as an ordinary a co-payment.

A dispatch in the New York Times quotes the panel that recommended this course as saying the reason that insurers should be forbidden from charging co-payments for “contraceptives and other preventive services” is that even small charges could deter their use. The Times quoted the panel as saying “that nearly half of all pregnancies in the United States were unintended, and that about 40 percent of unintended pregnancies ended in abortion. Thus, it said, greater use of contraception would reduce the rates of unintended pregnancy, teenage pregnancy and abortion.”

The Times quoted the chairwoman of the panel, Dr. Linda Rosenstock, dean of the School of Public Health at the University of California, Los Angeles, as saying the panel “did not consider cost or cost-effectiveness in our deliberations.” The Times quoted the panel’s report as insisting nonetheless that “contraception is highly cost-effective.” The idea seems to be that contraception averts unintended pregnancies that would be far more expensive. So it looks like a government that by law is prohibited from funding abortions is nonetheless requiring insurance companies to cover birth control with no co-payment and to include in the plans emergency contraceptives including pills like ella and Plan B.

One senator, Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, was quoted recently by the Times as saying that the panel’s report on coverage of birth control puts us “one step closer to saying goodbye to an era when simply being a woman is treated as a pre-existing condition.” It also quoted a spokeswoman of the Pro-Life Secretariat of the Catholic Bishops, Deirdre McQuade, as saying, “Pregnancy is not a disease, and fertility is not a pathological condition to be suppressed.” The Times quoted one panel member, Anthony Lo Sasso of the University of Illinois at Chicago, as saying the committee did not have enough time to conduct “a serious and systematic review” of the evidence. The administration acted anyhow, imposing yet another deterrent to growth as we teeter on the edge of another recession.

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* Griswold was executive director of Planned Parenthood in Connecticut and had been fined $100 for operating a birth-control clinic.

** One of the articles of the Bill of Rights mentioned by the court majority in Griswold was the Third Amendment, which reads: “No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.” Getting from there to the notion that Connecticut did not have the right to regulate birth control prompted Justice Stewart, who wrote a dissent in which Hugo Black concurred, to protest: “No soldier was quartered in any home.”


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