Expanding the discussion on religious freedom and opposition to the ACA

I noted in my presentation about the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that the requirement that insurance plans provide contraception at no extra cost was fiercely opposed by the Catholic Church and others on the grounds of religious freedom.  As a result, the Obama administration exempted “religious employers” from the requirement, but there are still several court challenges in the works.  Dr. Sweat and I noted in our comments that this opposition is interesting given that large percentages of religious women and Catholic women use contraception.  A summary of this data and a link to more detail can be found here: http://www.guttmacher.org/media/nr/2011/04/13/index.html.

I also noted that I find it productive to see the opposition to this aspect of the ACA as going beyond a concern with religious freedom.  Providing contraception is opposed by many on the right and opposition to it is connected to other policy proposals and views: pro-life views, support for more restrictions on abortion, opposition to comprehensive sex education, proposed fetal personhood legislation, and the vote to defund Planned Parenthood. 

The morning after our panel discussion on the Affordable Care Act (ACA) I was asked how I would connect this to recent poll data finding that the numbers of Americans who are unaffiliated with any particular religion has increased (but is still only about 16%) and that the numbers of those who are affiliated with the Catholic Church has also decreased (31% of Americans were raised as Catholic but only 24% say they are still Catholic).  The full results can be found here: http://religions.pewforum.org/reports. This survey is also interesting in that it highlights the great degree of religious diversity in this country.

So, we know that we are a religiously diverse country and that not all of these religious traditions find contraception morally objectionable.  We also know that a very large majority of women who are affiliated with a religious tradition use contraception, including Catholic and Evangelical Protestant women (traditions that are opposed to the use of contraception).   How do we then account for the sharp rightward shift in discourse about contraception and other matters surrounding reproduction?  Increasing political clout among Evangelical Christians and the ways in which they share views with the already powerful Catholic hierarchy? This is certainly part of the picture. 

However, I would say that this opposition is also a sign of profound discomfort on the part of many conservatives with social changes that are sweeping and go beyond (but include) abortion and contraception.  I’m thinking here of feminism, the fact that women are in the paid labor force in greater numbers even when they have very small children, increasing tolerance for divorce, and the ways that sexuality has come to be separated from reproduction and increasingly accepted outside of marriage. As anthropologists who study reproduction point out, what is at stake in questions surrounding who reproduces, under what conditions, and who is in control of these decisions is not just the literal facts of creating, biologically, the next generation.  Instead, reproduction “provides a terrain for imagining new cultural futures and transformations” while conflicts surrounding the control of reproduction “engage the deep aspirations and the sense of survival of groups” (Ginsburg and Rapp 1995:2).  In other words, discourse and conflicts around issues surrounding biological reproduction are also about the reproduction of the social group and its beliefs and about the direction of change in beliefs, values, and social institutions. It is clear that conflicts around reproduction are also profoundly tied up with power relationships and conflicts between social groups divided by race, class, gender, ethnicity, generation, etc… 

I think it is useful to think about what is at stake when increased access to contraception is proposed and why the opposition to it is so strong in these broader terms.  One interpretation is that as religion loses some of its power to persuade, religious leaders are turning to policy as a way to influence the direction of cultural change.  As a society, probably through the courts, decisions will need to be made about where the line is between respecting religious freedom (a very important concern) and respecting the freedom of women who use (or want to use) contraception and who might need easier access to it.  The argument, I think, is much bigger than who can be forced to pay for contraception.

Reference: Ginsburg, Faye D. and Rayna Rapp. 1995. Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction. Berkeley: University of California Press.