THE STATE of the Union — On Hormones
February 9, 2012 • Posted in Blog
By D. Joy Riley, M.D., M.A.A few days ago, I received an unsolicited e-mail from “Stephanie Cutter, BarackObama.com” <info@barackobama.com>. It read in part,
Here’s some big news that’s going to affect millions of women.
On Friday, the Obama administration announced that soon women
won’t have to pay out of pocket for birth control: Starting August
1st, many insurance plans nationwide will be required to fully cover
contraception without co-pays or deductibles. Thanks to the Affordable
Care Act, more women can make health care decisions based on what’s
best for them — not their insurance company — all while saving
hundreds of dollars every year.
Think about how different that is from what the candidates on
the other side would do. They’ve all vowed to repeal the Affordable
Care Act, and Mitt Romney even said he would have signed a
constitutional amendment in Massachusetts to define life as beginning
at conception, similar to the notorious state-level ‘personhood’
amendment that could ban many forms of contraception, and even IVF. . . .
I wish to be clear: contraception is not a new subject to me, as a physician married to an obstetrician/gynecologist, or as a woman. What is new is the involvement of the state to such a degree.
Consider that in 1965, the United States Supreme Court heard a case against contraception. That was the case of Griswold v. Connecticut, in which Griswold, the Executive Director of the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut, and Dr. Buxton, a Yale Medical School professor as well as New Haven’s Planned Parenthood Medical Director, brought suit against the state of Connecticut. Griswold and Buxton contested the constitutionality of the Connecticut law under which they were arrested and fined for assisting married couples in preventing conception. In that decision, they questioned
Would we allow the police to search the sacred precincts of
marital bedrooms for telltale signs of the use of contraceptives? The
. . . very idea is repulsive to the notions of privacy surrounding
the marriage relationship.
In that decision, in which the Connecticut law was struck down, the Court had this to say about marriage:
We deal with a right of privacy older than the Bill of Rights —
older than our political parties, older than our school system.
Marriage is a coming together for better or for worse, hopefully
enduring, and intimate to the degree of being sacred. It is an
association that promotes a way of life, not causes; a harmony in
living, not political faiths; a bilateral loyalty, not commercial or
social projects. Yet it is an association for as noble a purpose as
any involved in our prior decisions.
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