Feminists Shouldn't Make Coverage For Oral Pills Their Holy Grail: Shikha Dalmia in TIME

Feminists were up in arms last week when the Supreme Court
agreed to hear a challenge against the Obamacare mandate requiring
employers to provide contraceptive coverage as part of a standard
insurance package (along with pediatric dental coverage to
childless couples; fertility treatment to 60-year-olds and drug
rehab to teetotalers). But explains Shikha Dalmia in TIME today, by
forcing employers against their religious beliefs, feminists are
using unsympathetic means to promote a sympathetic cause. She
says:

Men everywhere can walk into a store and buy as many condoms as
they want, no questions asked. Likewise, women in Mexico, India and
44 other countries can buy oral contraceptives when they wish. Not
so in the United States, even though
99 percent of all sexually experienced American women — and

98 percent of Catholic American women — use some form of birth
control. This seems downright bizarre.

Despite such overwhelming demand, a Rasmussen
poll released Monday found that only 38 percent of Americans
support forcing employers to cover contraceptives— and 51 percent
oppose it.

Feminists claim that such attitudes stem from “sexism,”
“misogyny” and a “fear of women’s sexuality.” But if that were the
case,
90 percent of Americans wouldn’t say that birth control is
“morally acceptable.” What feminists don’t seem to get is that
there is something problematic about making one person’s access to
contraception contingent on trampling on another person’s
religion…

The only reason American women need insurance coverage for
contraception is because they can’t buy birth control pills without
a prescription—which doctors won’t hand them without an annual
exam.

Doctors don’t require the exam because the pill is unsafe or
requires medical supervision. No. It is a way to keep their clinics
busy and their bank balances flush — and use women’s own biology
against them to make them do the medical establishment’s bidding
because, you know, women are too stupid to be trusted with their
own health. That’s the real sexism.

So if feminists were smart, they wouldn’t cast this issue in
terms women’s rights versus religious rights.

That’ll turn it into a lose-lose proposition. Medical
paternalism is a far bigger threat to women’s reproductive choices
than religious zealotry. Focusing on the first will do more to give
women control over their bodies— including the female employees of
Hobby Lobby — than a pitched battle against the second.

Go
here to read the whole thing.