Contraception

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. NADLER. I thank the gentlelady for yielding, and I thank her for her excellent exposition as to the law and the constitutionality, with which I am in full agreement.

As we all know, the administration recently announced that a popular and critically important component of the health care reform law would guarantee that most women have access to contraceptives paid for by their health insurance. This decision was based on the sound science of the impartial and independent Institute of Medicine, which recognized that contraceptives are an essential health service fundamental to improving the lives of women and their families.

This decision is a major victory for women. Eighty-nine percent of American women, including a similar percentage of Catholic women, use contraceptives at some point in their lives. Particularly at this time of economic uncertainty, women will have one less cost to worry about that can be a substantial cost. Make no mistake about it, freeing up $600 or $800 a year will have significant effects on working families.

The decision also recognizes and supports religious freedom by providing certain limited exemptions for places of worship, as well as for those organization that hire and predominantly care for those who share the same religious beliefs. They were protected against being required to violate their religious teachings.

I am proud to stand shoulder to shoulder with President Obama and his administration for helping to strike this important balance between religious rights and the rights of women to protect their health.

Yet to hear some people talk about this decision, you'd have no idea that the religious organizations and the religiously devout have their liberties protected. Amid all the hyperbole, the truth is that the administration's decision, while significant and important, is hardly new. This measured approach that balances religious rights on the one hand and the rights of women on the other is already the standard in 28 States, including my home State of New York.

Because it is not just employers and corporations that have rights at stake, hardworking people and their families also have rights.

Under the approach adopted by the administration, universities and hospitals which serve and employ people from a multitude of faiths and cultures are not exempt from the requirement that health insurance provide coverage for contraceptives, nor should they be. Women should not be denied a basic health service merely because they work or study at a university or hospital affiliated with a religious organization.

The difference here is that churches are and should be protected in their religious role, protected against having to violate their religious views, but they must not be protected in their role as employers. We permit a church, for example, to discriminate in religious practice. No one asks the Catholic Church how come you do not permit women priests? That's their business.

But we do not permit them to discriminate as employers. We do not permit a church-affiliated hospital or university to say we will not permit the hiring of female doctors or female professors or black doctors or nurses because that would impinge on liberty. If a church has a doctrine against hiring female priests, that's fine. But hiring female professors in the university, unless it was a solely ecclesiastical university, only for religious purposes, if it is a regular university, then they cannot be permitted to have that kind of discrimination.

We protect religious liberty, but we cannot permit a church to impose its views on others who may not share those views.

The church can preach its views, it can seek to persuade people, but it cannot coerce people who may work for a church-affiliated university or hospital that they cannot use contraceptives if they want to. The liberty here is the liberty of the employee that must be protected. The liberty of the church must be protected in its churchly function and in its function as a religious institution. In its function as an employer, the liberty belongs to the employees. And that is the distinction that is made here. It is the proper distinction.

Imagine if some other church that thinks that it is wrong to give transfusions to people, blood transfusions, ran a hospital. We would not permit them to let people die in that hospital for lack of transfusions because it's not up to them to decide medical practice by their religious doctrine. If the person wants to refuse treatment because his religious doctrine says, I don't want a transfusion, that's his liberty. But we must not confuse the religious liberty of the church to propagate its views and to conduct its religious affairs as it sees fit with the liberty of employees in a secular institution affiliated with the church to have the normal protections against discrimination and the normal rights that we afford all people.

That is why the administration's decision to say that contraceptives are scientifically a necessary health care service which must be provided by health insurance is right, and any attempt by a religious institution to say that they should be exempt from having employees allowed to get contraceptives paid for is wrong, and I applaud the administration for making the proper distinction to protect the liberty of the employees and the religious liberty of the church both.

I yield to the distinguished gentleman from New Jersey.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source