The editors and at least two of the leading political reporters at the New York Times, Robert Pear and Adam Liptak, appear to believe that before Obama begat Obamacare in March 2010 untold thousands of American women, may more, lacked access to contraceptives. How else could Pear and Liptak begin their article on page A1 of today’s paper by writing that “The Obama administration, reeling from back-to-back blows from the Supreme Court this week, is weighing options that would provide contraceptive coverage to thousands of women who are about to lose it or never had it because of their employers’ religious objections”?
First, the only women who “are about to lose anything” as a result of those two cases are some of the employees of Hobby Lobby, Conestoga Wood Specialties, and an undetermined number of small, closely held (usually by family) for-profit companies whose owners have sincere religious objections to some form of birth control. The second of the two cases, Wheaton College v. Burwell, took away no contraception from anyone. It granted an injunction against imposing the contraceptive mandate on Wheaton while its appeal was in progress, and the majority insisted that “Nothing in this interim order affects the ability of the applicant’s employees and students to obtain, without cost, the full range of FDA approved contraceptives.”
Second, no women at Hobby Lobby or Conestoga Wood Specialties, the only companies whose complaint has so far been litigated, have lost access to contraceptives as a result of this decision. They have lost free employer-provided insurance coverage for four of the 20 drugs on the FDA approved list, which is hardly the same thing at all as losing “contraceptive coverage.”
Third, an employer refusing to provide a product or service to employees at no cost does not deny those employees of access to that product or service. Hobby Lobby et al. do not provide free lunches to their employees, but that doesn’t mean it is starving them.
