The Objective Standard Blog » Health Care

Not Only Catholics Should be Angered by Birth Control Mandates

Ari Armstrong — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 01:34:43 +0000

Conservatives and Catholics have lambasted President Obama over his plan to force insurance providers, including Catholic ones, to cover birth control.

Wayne Laugesen explains for the Colorado Springs Gazette:

President Barack Obama’s administration finalized orders last week that will force all Americans, with few exceptions, to buy health insurance plans that cover sterilizations and abortion pills without the burden of fees or co-pays. Obama is not merely ordering all Americans to accept abortion and contraception, he is demanding their support with mandatory purchases.

Colorado Attorney General John Suthers told the Gazette, “This extends telling Americans they must buy health insurance to telling them they must buy products that are contrary to their religious beliefs.” Laugesen added, “Freedom of religion is under siege.” Republican Presidential candidates Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum harshly criticized the president on similar grounds. House Speaker John Boehner vowed to overturn the policy by Congressional action.

True, the government should not force Catholics to fund birth control against their religious beliefs. But the government should not force anyone to fund any type of insurance coverage against their wishes. The government should not force people to buy insurance that covers birth control, acupuncture, maternity leave, or any other good or service. Such mandates violate the rights of insurance companies and their clients to freely negotiate terms, and they drive up the costs of premiums.

Insurance mandates not only violate Catholics’ freedom of religion; they violate everyone’s freedom of conscience and everyone’s freedom to use their own resources as they judge best. To be genuinely “pro-choice,” one must respect people’s choices across the board—including their choice of religion or philosophy, their choice of whether to buy insurance and if so what kind, and their choice of how to dispose of the fruits of their labor.

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Image: Wikimedia Commons via Kancelaria Prezydenta RP

Texas Anti-Abortion Law Violates Rights to Liberty and Freedom of Speech

Ari Armstrong — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 21:32:03 +0000

Earlier this month, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a Texas law that forces women seeking an abortion to obtain a sonogram and wait 24 hours before being able to act according to their own judgment. The law also requires doctors to present information and claims that neither doctor nor patient may regard as relevant.

Though praised by some conservatives, the law violates the rights of doctors and patients and opens the door to similar attacks on all our rights.

The Texas law violates freedom of contract by restricting consensual, voluntary agreements between women and their doctors. Conservatives who support such restrictions on abortion can offer no principled resistance when leftists wish to use government force to restrict freedom of contract in medicine in other ways, as by imposing myriad costly insurance mandates.

The law violates rights of trade and self-determination by forcing women to wait 24 hours to get an abortion in most cases. By the same logic, the government could force people to wait to enter any other controversial economic transaction. No doubt other activists would love to use government force to make people wait to buy a gun, buy unhealthy foods or drinks, trade certain stocks or other financial instruments, or even read or publish “sensitive” materials (such as that denying human-caused global warming).

The law also violates the free speech of doctors who, under the law, must discuss what politicians dictate rather than what their professional judgment demands. By the same standards, politicians could impose rote speech on marriage and divorce counselors, sellers of controversial magazines, etc. (The argument that the Texas law merely ensures informed consent is an obvious pretext to make abortions costlier and more difficult to obtain; the idea that women seeking abortions don’t already understand what an abortion entails is ludicrous.)

The choice is stark. We can have either economic liberty or laws that restrict freedoms of contract, trade, and speech; we can’t have both. Those who act to restrict economic liberties in the realm of abortion should not be surprised when other sorts of transactions fall prey to the same types of controls.

Regarding the broader case for why women have the right to seek an abortion, and why fetuses don’t have rights, see Diana Hsieh and my recent Objective Standard article, “The Assault on Abortion Rights Undermines All Our Liberties.”

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Image: Creative Commons

Gingrich Seeks to Violate Rights of Women and Doctors to Engage in Fertility Care

Ari Armstrong — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 21:39:13 +0000

The spectacle of Newt Gingrich—of all people—trying to dictate the family planning of others is ludicrous.

Yet Gingrich’s recent call for more rules controlling in vitro fertility treatments raises an important issue: Under the proposed anti-abortion “personhood” laws that Gingrich endorses, common fertility treatments would be outlawed. The result would be that many women who wish to have children would be legally barred from getting pregnant.

“Personhood” laws would arbitrarily declare eggs at the moment of fertilization to be the legal equivalent of a born child, conferring full legal rights to zygotes. Among many other things, such laws would ban common fertility treatments that involve harvesting multiple eggs from the woman, trying to fertilize those eggs, and then implanting one or more of the resulting zygotes in the woman’s uterus. Because these procedures typically produce extra zygotes that are later destroyed, “personhood” laws declare them to be murder.

If doctors were forbidden from fertilizing more than a single egg at a time, that would dramatically increase the cost of fertility treatment and dramatically reduce the chances of success. As a result, many women who wish to have children would be legally prevented from doing so. (For details, see a 2010 paper on the subject by Diana Hsieh and me.)

Thus, “personhood” laws would violate the rights of women and their partners to seek fertility care as well as the rights of doctors to administer it—a violation of the founding rights to liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

And yet, even though they would prevent many women from having children of their own, the “personhood” laws are preposterously called “pro life” by their advocates. They are in fact profoundly anti-life, and it it time for Americans to recognize them as such.

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Image: Creative Commons by Gage Skidmore

Santorum Stands for Big Government because He Stands for Collectivism

Ari Armstrong — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 20:15:59 +0000

Might Republicans select as their presidential candidate someone who wants even more government controls over our lives than Mitt Romney, father of Massachusetts’s health-policy fiasco Romneycare? Their sudden embrace of Rick Santorum, who won a close second in the Iowa caucuses, threatens just that outcome.

Santorum’s commitment to government controls is well-documented. Conservative Erick Erickson of Red State points out that, while in Congress, Santorum supported steel tariffs, more federal control of education, the welfare-ballooning prescription drug benefit, the ludicrous Bridge to Nowhere boondoggle, milk subsidies, and job-killing wage controls. As David Boaz summarizes, Santorum “wanted to be known as a porker, an earmarker, and Senator Pothole.” The Huffington Post reports that Santorum thinks states have the right to ban birth control. In a 2005 article, Jonathan Rauch quotes Santorum: “Some will reject what I have to say as a kind of ‘Big Government’ conservatism.” Let us hope so.

Santorum explained his motivating principles in a video interview released in 2006. He said, “I don’t agree that people should be empowered to do what pleases them the most. We have a responsibility beyond [ourselves].” Santorum characterized the “liberal view” as “anti-responsibility,” saying it holds, “I should be able to do whatever I want to do as long as no one gets hurt.” He continued:

Particularly in the area of sexual freedom and personal issues, this is the mantra of the left. Which is, “I have a right to do what I want to do.” And that is not the kind of freedom that our Founders envisioned, and it is not the kind of freedom that makes up a society that is devoted…to the common good. …The definition of liberty as our Founders understood it, was freedom with responsibility. Responsibility to who? To themselves? No. It was a responsibility to others. It was responsibility to your family, but not just your family. It was a responsibility to your neighbors and to your country.

Santorum complained that we have “an entire culture that focuses on immediate gratification and the pursuit of happiness and personal pleasure, and it is harming America.”

While Santorum claims to invoke the Founders, his views are diametrically opposed to theirs. The right to the pursuit of happiness is one of the “unalienable rights” the Founders sought to protect in creating America. That’s why it’s specified in the Declaration of Independence.

Santorum conflates the pursuit of immediate gratification with the pursuit of happiness. But that’s ridiculous. As every rational adult knows, the pursuit of happiness involves responsibly following through on one’s chosen commitments to one’s family, friends, businesses associates, and fellow citizens.

But Santorum does not advocate the pursuit of happiness. He wants to jettison this founding principle of America in favor of collectivism.

If the phrase “sexual freedom and personal issues” in Santorum’s statement were changed to “economic freedom and business issues,” Barack Obama could have made the same case in one of his speeches and everyone would have seen it as collectivism. Americans need to learn that all calls for sacrificing the individual to “others” or “the common good” or “your neighbors” or “your country” are variants of the same evil. Obama and Santorum differ only on the kind of collectivism each hopes to impose on America.

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Image: Gaga Skidmore

Newt Sides with Anti-Abortion Zealots

Ari Armstrong — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 15:57:58 +0000

As a matter of political strategy, scaring the hell out of independent women voters by threatening to ban the birth control pill and all abortions even in cases of rape and incest is an easy way to lose a high-level election, at least outside the south. Just ask Ken Buck, a Republican who narrowly lost a U.S. Senate seat in Colorado last year largely by strapping himself to the anti-abortion political anchor. Through the primaries, many thought the seat to be unwinnable by the Democrat.

And yet Newt Gingrich makes Buck look like the voice of restraint on the issue. In a year when Barack Obama gift-wrapped economic issues for the Republican campaign, a Gingrich-led GOP would place abortion in the forefront of many voters’ minds.

Far more important than the matter of strategy is the severe harm an abortion ban would impose on women, their doctors, and their husbands or partners. Gingrich’s anti-abortion zealotry threatens to cost him the election (if nominated), but more importantly it threatens to cost women their lives and liberties.

Gingrich wants to enact laws allowing “no abortions for any reason.” And he means it. After irritating anti-abortion leaders with a seemingly minor concession during an interview with ABC News, Gingrich quickly backpedaled, reaffirming his strict commitment to nationwide abortion bans with no exceptions.

Originally Gingrich said in response to a question regarding abortion, “I think that if you take a position when a woman has [a] fertilized egg and that’s been successfully implanted that now you’re dealing with life.” To quickly review the biology, after a male’s sperm fertilizes a woman’s egg, the resulting zygote moves into the uterus over a period of days. Implantation in the uterus traditionally marks the beginning of pregnancy. So Gingrich’s message is that he wants total abortion bans from the moment of fertilization.

To the anti-abortion movement, the span of days between fertilization and implantation matters very much. To the conservative site Red State, Gingrich’s statement during the interview “demonstrates a deficiency in Gingrich’s dedication to a pro-life [sic] agenda.”

In reply to such criticism, Gingrich confirmed, “I believe that human life begins at conception” as opposed to implantation, so conception is the moment at which he wishes to ban any act that could harm or kill a zygote.

To leave absolutely no confusion on the matter, Gingrich pledged support for the goals of Personhood USA, an anti-abortion group that explicitly wants to ban all abortion in the United States from the moment of fertilization, without even exceptions for rape or incest.

The total abortion ban that Gingrich advocates would severely harm women as well as their supporters, as Diana Hsieh and I discuss in a recent article for this journal.

If, as Personhood USA asserts, a zygote is a person with the same right to life as a born infant or adult, then any action that intentionally kills a zygote, embryo, or fetus constitutes murder, as a representative of the organization emphasized during a November news conference. By the logic of the position and in accordance with existing murder statutes, abortion would be legally prosecuted as murder. Any doctor or husband who assisted in an abortion would be prosecuted as an accessory to murder. A Canadian anti-abortion group forthrightly argues that women who get abortions should face severe prison sentences. A Colorado supporter of Personhood USA explicitly calls for the death penalty for women who get abortions.

Types of birth control that could prevent a zygote from implanting in the uterus, including the IUD, birth control pill, and “morning after” drug, likely would be banned as well under Gingrich’s proposals. When a woman asked Gingrich if his proposals would in fact ban those types of birth control, he answered, “Any kind of pre-conception birth control would be legal, but I think…post conception birth control would be a form of abortion. No, I don’t support abortion.” (See also Paul Hsieh’s article on the subject.)

The types of laws Gingrich advocates also would threaten women’s health in the case of risky pregnancies, ban common forms of in vitro fertility treatments, ban potentially life-saving embryonic stem-cell research, force large numbers of pregnant women into motherhood, and more.

Gingrich holds that a microscopic clump of largely undifferentiated cells inside a woman’s body deserves the same legal protections as a born infant living independently outside its mother’s body. His dogmatic position utterly defies the facts of pregnancy and the status of the zygote or fetus, as well as the basis and meaning of individual rights. Individuals need rights to live successfully with others; the concept cannot apply to a zygote or fetus wholly contained within another’s body. A woman is an independent person with the right to live her own life in accordance with her own judgment. A zygote or fetus is not. Abortion bans severely harm women and their partners by violating their rights.

Gingrich’s support of total abortion bans reveals him as an enemy of liberty and individual rights. His call to ban all abortion is profoundly anti-life.

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Image: Wikipedia Commons

FDA Bans Life-Saving Asthma Medications to Protect Ozone

Joshua Lipana — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 03:31:23 +0000

The FDA will force U.S. pharmaceutical companies to phase out over-the-counter (OTC) inhalers used by people with Asthma. The ban was “justified” on the premise that it will protect the ozone layer.

The proper purpose of government, however, is not to protect the ozone, but to protect individual rights—including the rights of drug producers and consumers to act on their judgment in support of their lives. If there were sufficient evidence that aerosol was destroying the ozone and thus a threat to human life, then free markets and consequent technology would address the problem. (Those who doubt that people would address such problems without government coercion are stuck with the contradiction that the government consists of people.)

OTC inhalers, like countless other drugs, are produced, marketed, and purchased because they enhance or save human lives. The fact that there are “green” alternatives is irrelevant. Morally, individuals have a right to choose what they think is best for themselves. Economically, the green alternatives are more expensive, and, for many people, less effective. Further these alternatives require prescriptions—and thus visits to doctors and all the time and expenses involved therein.

This ban is a patent violation of individual rights. Americans who care about liberty must denounce it and demand its reversal.

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Image: Wikipedia Commons

The United Nations’ Assault on Tobacco Companies

Joshua Lipana — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 17:28:30 +0000

The United Nations is encouraging governments all around the world to “curb” smoking by increasing taxes and regulations on tobacco companies. Supporters of this move justify this increase in government coercion by claiming this will make people healthier and increase revenue for the government.

The government’s proper function, however, is not to make people healthier but to protect people’s rights—including the rights of tobacco producers and consumers to contract by mutual consent in accordance with their own judgment. Adults are perfectly capable of making their own decisions about risks in life, and they have a moral right to do so. Unless there is fraud or some other kind of coercion involved, the government has no moral right to intervene in market transactions.

As for the “revenue” that would be increased by raising taxes on tobacco sales, it would be increased only by means of increased violations of the rights of producers and consumers. This would be immoral. Further, the governments of the world don’t need to increase “revenue”; rather, they need to decrease their interventions in the marketplace and in people’s lives, and to limit their function to the only proper purpose of government: the protection of rights.

Still further, the UN is a wholly illegitimate organization, the purpose of which is to undermine the United States, prop up dictators and socialist regimes, and redistribute America’s wealth. The organization should not be abided; it should be abolished.

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Image: Wikipedia Commons

Cheers to Big Tobacco for Defending Itself

Joshua Lipana — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 23:17:37 +0000

FoxNews.com reports that four of the five biggest U.S tobacco companies are suing the federal government to stop it from forcing them to use “new graphic cigarette labels that include the sewn-up corpse of a smoker and a picture of diseased lungs.”

They are right to do so: The government’s proposed regulation is an obscene attack on the tobacco industry.

U.S. tobacco companies make their profits through voluntary exchange; they do not force anyone to smoke. And everyone today is well aware of the risks of smoking—just as everyone is aware of the risks of driving, flying, eating Twinkies, and drinking beer. The government’s constant assault on tobacco companies is a violation of their rights and is contrary to the government’s proper function of protecting rights.

Kudos to R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. and Lorillard Tobacco Co. for leading this lawsuit; kudos also to Commonwealth Brands Inc., Liggett Group LLC, and Santa Fe Natural Tobacco Company Inc. for joining the fray in defense of their rights. More businessmen should follow their example and stand up to improper government force.

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Image: Wikipedia Commons

Jim Demint’s “Retirement Freedom Act” is a Step in the Right Direction

Joshua Lipana — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 19:55:57 +0000

Sen. Jim Demint (R-SC) has introduced the “Retirement Freedom Act,” a piece of legislation that would allow seniors to opt out of Medicare Part A while continuing to collect Social Security payments. As Demint’s press release states, “Currently, the Social Security Administration has handcuffed Social Security benefits to Medicare enrollment.”

These two programs have been unnecessarily tied together by unaccountable bureaucrats without the consent of the people or their elected officials. Today, if a senior can afford private insurance and chooses to not accept Medicare, they are forced to give up their Social Security benefits. This is not right and it must change.

Demint’s proposal is a step in the right direction, toward freedom, personal responsibility, and proper government. Kudos to him for introducing this bill.

HT: FreedomWorks.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

The Summer 2011 Issue of TOS

TOS Admin — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 17:53:16 +0000

The online edition of the Summer issue has been posted to our website. The contents are:

ARTICLES

ObamaCare v. the Constitution
by Paul J. Beard II

The Iranian and Saudi Regimes Must Go
by Craig Biddle

Interview with Reza Kahlili, an Ex-CIA Spy Embedded in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards

Interview with Historian John David Lewis about U.S. Foreign Policy and the Middle East

The Government’s Assault on Private-Sector Colleges and Universities
by Craig Biddle

Interview with Andy Kessler about the Virtue of Eating People

FILM REVIEWS

Iranium, directed by Alex Traiman
Reviewed by Daniel Wahl

Temple Grandin, directed by Mick Jackson
Reviewed by C. A. Wolski

BOOK REVIEWS

Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations and Abroad, by John Bolton

Reviewed by Gideon Reich

The Infidel: Chapter One, by Bosch Fawstin
Reviewed by Joshua Lipana

Why ObamaCare is Wrong For America: How the New Health Care Law Drives Up Costs, Puts Government in Charge of Your Decisions, and Threatens Your Constitutional Rights, by Grace-Marie Turner, James C.

Capretta, Thomas P. Miller, and Robert E. Moffit
Reviewed by Jared M. Rhoads

Ethical Oil: The Case for Canada’s Oil Sands, by Ezra Levant
Reviewed by Andrew Brannan

Anti-intellectualism in American Life, by Richard Hofstadter, and The Age of American Unreason, by Susan Jacoby
Reviewed by Burgess Laughlin

His Dark Materials Trilogy, by Philip Pullman
Reviewed by C. A. Wolski

Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, by Joshua Foer
Reviewed by Daniel Wahl

Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory, by Ben Macintyre
Reviewed by Daniel Wahl

DEPARTMENTS

From the Editor

Letters and Replies

If you’ve not yet subscribed to TOS, you can do so online or by calling 800-423-6151. The journal also makes a great graduation gift. Subscriptions start at just $29 and are available in print, online, e-book, and audio editions.

Enjoy!