The Freedom of Religious Oppression?

For the past few decades in the US, reproductive health policies have taken up a large proportion of the nation’s political conversation and have since intensified during the run for the Republican presidential nomination. If the debate is not about abortion, it is about the availability of contraception and the morning after pill, issues that have recently gone hand in hand. Admittedly they encapsulate broadly different arguments, including widely different moral issues, but both orientate around the issue of women’s reproductive health and rights. The contraception debate has extended from governmental intrusion into the private sphere into a moral debate, with conservative representative Jim Jordan calling contraception “abortion-inducing drugs.” The compromise President Obama announced on Friday (10/02/2012) showed how the requirement of religious institutions to provide free contraceptives was withdrawn on religious moral objections (see videos in this article). Catholic bishops refuse to compromise even though religious institutions would not be required to directly pay for contraception for their employees with insurance companies taking over that responsibility instead. The bishops are aiming to dismantle the new legislation so no institutions or employers would have to cover contraception if they had religious objections. The debate is so polarised it has been called both the “war on women’s health care” and the “war on religion”. It even led Al Jazeera to ask in a tweet recently if US politics is endangering women’s health.
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