Trump’s contraceptive rule is an insult to women

Despite the facts, Trump administration sees little reason to cover contraception The Trump administration’s recently proposed rule change to make it easier for businesses to get out of providing insurance coverage for contraception for religious reasons

Yes, you read that correctly. Trump’s proposed rule regarding the Affordable Health Care Act’s requirement that insurance plans cover contraception spends an unbelievable amount of time questioning whether the government has a compelling interest in policies that help women time and plan their pregnancies to optimize maternal and infant health. The draft memo, in essence, concludes pregnancy doesn’t have enough to do with a woman’s health for the government to mandate insurance companies pay for contraception.

Trump’s administration could be forgiven had it launched a legitimate debate about First Amendment rights and tried to create a clear, bright-line rule defining who can be granted a religious exemption from the requirement that insurance cover contraception.

Instead, in its justifications, the administration unforgivably questions whether pregnancy has enough to do with a woman’s health to warrant a government interest.

The maternal fatality rate in the U.S. is higher than any other developed nation in the world, according to a joint investigation done by NPR and ProPublica. Every year 700 to 900 women die from pregnancy or childbirth-related causes. Another 65,000 suffer serious health complications. According to the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, women who live in poverty or who are minorities have a higher maternal death rate.

Birthing babies isn’t straightforward for all women. Far better for women with illnesses and other complications to work with doctors to time pregnancies with the goal of healthy deliveries.

The order is supposed to take up the question of whether the government is infringing on religious liberties with its current rule directing when an entity can opt out of paying for insurance that covers contraception. There is a legitimate debate about where that threshold stands, and whether a publicly traded company with no purpose other than profit can claim religious beliefs. This board is dubious that such an entity should be able to refuse health insurance policies to female employees that cover contraception, given the government’s inherent interest in protecting maternal health.

The draft rule calls into question the Institute of Medicine’s determination that contraception is an important part of preventive health care, quoting a dissenting opinion written by a single man on the 16-member committee: “Troublingly, the process tended to result in a mix of objective and subjective determinations filtered through a lens of advocacy.”

Yes, doctors tend to be advocates for a woman’s health, unlike Trump’s administration, which appears to be advocating in this rule that not only is access to contraception not important for women, covering contraception doesn’t really work to prevent unintended pregnancies. The draft rule even says that contraception has the unintended consequence of making unwed teens more promiscuous.

This draft rule should have focused on when to allow religious groups to be exempted from the mandate. Instead, the proposed change insults every woman in this nation who has ever made a medically driven decision about whether or not the time is right to conceive.