Mandatory coverage of birth control

I was listening to a debate on mandatory coverage of birth control for religious institutions that employ people of various religions (the Presbyterian science teacher at the Catholic school, the agnostic doctor at the Catholic hospital)

It was my favorite kind of debate.  Every time a new person spoke, they presented a new argument and changed my mind back and forth and back and forth.  I am big on freedom of religion.  I am also a big libertarian.  I also believe in health and choice.  So the arguments really pulled me in all directions.

So here is where I ended up.  It turns out that providing birth control reduces the cost of the insurance because of the high expenses associated with unintended pregnancy.  So the argument that the religious institution has to pay for the birth control turns out not to be the case.  And they don’t provide the birth control, they just have to include it in the insurance.  The women go to a health care provider assigned by the insurer that doesn’t have a problem providing the service.  And of course the employees of the religious institution who do share the belief against birth control have no obligation to use it and since it doesn’t raise costs they aren’t paying for it either.

All it does is require these institutions to add some words to a page that allows their employees who do believe in birth control to have it provided by a medical practitioner who also believes in it paid by an insurance company that also believes in it because it reduces their costs elsewhere.  And an extra benefit is that it reduces the demand for abortion because it reduces unwanted pregnancies.  I think that most religious institution (Catholic, Muslim, Evangelical or whatever) would agree that abortion is “worse” than birth control. So this seems to be a good tradeoff even for the religious institutions.

This combination of arguments is what won me over to support the policy, even though the Libertarian in me doesn’t want to force any private institute to do anything it doesn’t want to do and the freedom of religion advocate in me doesn’t want to force a religious institution to support, even passively, something it doesn’t believe in.