We’ve been talking about it for — well — it seems like forever. And now we have the Supreme Court’s decision in the Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Woods cases. The 5 to 4 ruling says that the Hobby Lobby arts-and-crafts chain and other closely held corporations cannot be forced to subsidize contraceptives that can work by inducing abortion.
The plaintiffs in these cases claimed an exemption from the Obama Administration’s HHS Mandate that companies provide all FDA-approved forms of contraception to their employees, or face punitive fines. Providing abortion-causing drugs and devices violates the strongly held religious beliefs of the companies’ owners. First, the Court had to decide: does a corporation even have religious freedom? The Obama administration argued that once a family goes into business, it loses its religious freedom. The Supreme Court rejected that argument 7 to 2.
The case was not about contraception. It’s about abortion. The Green family, which owns Hobby Lobby, only objected to the forms of contraception that can work after an egg has been fertilized, thus killing an embryo. Four out of the twenty mandated contraceptives work this way.
The Left’s reaction makes it sound as if the Court’s decision will forever deprive women of contraception. They trotted out former Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke who told MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, “What this is really about is trying to figure out as many ways as possible to limit women’s access to reproductive healthcare.”
The Hobby Lobby decision protects Hobby Lobby, Conestoga Woods and other family owned companies under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a law President Bill Clinton signed in 1993. Yet Hillary Clinton said this decision upholding RFRA is Sharia-like, part of “a disturbing trend that you see in a lot of societies that are very unstable, anti-democratic, and frankly prone to extremism.”
All this implies that this decision took something away from women. It didn’t. Contraceptive access has been relatively cheap and abundant and remains so. Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Woods will comply with the mandate to provide contraception, cost-free, to employees as long as it’s not of the abortifacient variety. Female employees of these companies who wanted those paid for their own before this case was decided, and they will continue doing so.
This decision is not — I repeat — not a ban on contraceptives. The Wall Street Journal rightly pointed out that “Declining to force someone to pay for something is not the same as ‘banning’ it.”
Women are not victims here and, despite the rhetoric, they are not losing anything they had before.
The White House issued the HHS mandate as an ObamaCare regulation in
2012 as part of its “war on women” election theme. The Left will continue to milk it at least through the next election. Some women will buy in. But millions of women also value religious liberty and are glad to see it protected in this decision.