February 23, 2012
In last week’s issue of The Spectator, polemist Chris Delacruz ’13 penned a laughably illogical piece concerning the recent brouhaha over the Obama administration’s plans to force all insurance policies to cover contraception (“Obama administration’s contraception policy: Womyn’s rights trump all else” 2/16). However, since Mr. Delacruz’s misunderstandings of the definition of rights, the nature of religious freedom and the purpose of insurance are endemic to the political left, I feel I must offer a rebuttal, lest this maleficence further infect rational discourse.
To begin, there is no right to free, artificial contraception in this country. This is for the simple reason that contraception is not free; despite the wishes of Mr. Delacruz and others, people do not and cannot have the right to help themselves to other people’s money. In his article, Mr. Delacruz fails to recognize the differences between such protected rights as speech, religion and privacy and such manufactured “rights” as “free” education, “free” healthcare and “free” contraception. To quote a wise adage, there is no such thing as a free lunch; every time a Hamilton student takes a “free” condom from the Health Center, he is raising everyone else’s tuition. Whether there exists a right to purchase contraception is another matter, but Mr. Delacruz is not addressing this point. Instead, he asserts that under the umbra of women’s rights there exists a “right” for women to force the government (and, hence, the taxpayers) to pay for their contraception decisions. Sorry, but women do not have a right to my wallet.
Sadly, Mr. Delacruz’s flagrant hostility against the Catholic Church displays an utter contempt for logic. “Refusing to give… employees birth control” is not tantamount to “forcing one’s beliefs on another,” since one is always free to use one’s paycheck as one wishes. (Indeed, one could argue that the converse—covering employee’s birth control, irregardless of his opinions—is forcing one’s beliefs on another, since the cost of the birth control coverage is deducted from one’s salary whether one chooses to use that service or not). Even if this were the case, however, Mr. Delacruz conveniently forgets to mention that no one is forced to work for a religious organization. The Catholic Church’s opposition to contraception is no secret; if one freely chooses to seek employment at an institution affiliated with the church, one should expect to abide by the church’s worldview. And yes, Mr. Delacruz, religiously-affiliated institutions can “be exempt from the rules that apply to public institutions”—in fact, they must be treated differently, thanks to the First Amendment. Mr. Delacruz should note that the first amendment does not merely forbid the church from gaining hegemony over government, it also forbids the government from regulating moral teachings of the church.
Finally, Mr. Delacruz, and the rest of the liberal echo chamber, completely ignores a fundamental flaw in their premise that insurance policies ought to cover contraception: Insurance is designed to cover unlikely, large expenses, not predictable, regular costs. That is why homeowner’s insurance policies cover tornado damage but not new siding every 20 years, and auto insurance policies pay for accident damage, not tire rotations. Contraception is a predictable expense; people make the conscious decision a priori whether to use birth control, rather than adopt a contraception regimen in response to a change in health status. Given this predictability and choice on the part of the user, there is no rational reason for health insurance policies to cover contraception at all. Indeed, insurance companies will simply raise their premiums by the predicable amount to cover this additional expense and pass the cost on to all consumers, thereby forcing the entire public, whether they support contraception or not, to subsidize the birth control of others.
Of course, this is exactly what Mr. Delacruz demands when he insists that “not providing birth
control discriminates against womyn [sic] of lower classes.” However, is it parsimonious to demand that people purchase their own contraception (the pill costs about $15 a month)? After all, if the poor wish to exercise “their right to choose when to have a family” and cannot afford 50 cents a day, they can merely pursue a much more effective method of birth control that happens to be completely free: Abstinence.