The high cost of conscience

Kathleen Parker:

Two of the top news stories this week have revolved around reproductive rights, though both raise far more troubling issues than a woman’s right to contraception or abortion. 

The more compelling questions concern a person’s or an institution’s freedom of conscience and the right to act upon one’s moral beliefs without fear of intimidation and/or government coercion. 

Both cases — one involving the Catholic Church and the other, Susan G. Komen for the Cure — deal with the ongoing conflict between the pro-life and pro-choice camps. And both are exposing the dangerous extent to which some pro-choice advocates, including the president of the United States, are willing to tread on fundamental freedoms in order to impose and secure ideological purity. 

To recap: Komen created a firestorm with its recent decision to stop donating about $680,000 a year to Planned Parenthood. (On Friday, Komen released a statement noting that Planned Parenthood will be eligible for future grants, although they won’t be guaranteed.) The bulk of that money was supposed to be used for breast cancer screening. Most Planned Parenthood affiliates don’t do mammograms but refer women elsewhere, sometimes reimbursing them using Komen funds.
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Komen is a nonprofit, free agent, and the good it has performed for millions of underserved women around the world is staggering. 

Nevertheless, given the rabid response from abortion-rights supporters, you’d think that Brinker and her organization were running puppy mills for soup vendors. Even if their real reason for ending funding is because they no longer want to be associated with an organization as politically controversial as Planned Parenthood — or even if because some of their potential donors want the relationship severed — it is inarguably their right to change course. 

Don’t like it? Don’t run in Komen’s fundraising races. Don’t buy a pink blender. Give directly to Planned Parenthood. In fact, both organizations have enjoyed a surge in donations since news of the break erupted. Note to fundraisers: Create an enemy, enjoy a bonanza. 

On a far more serious level, Catholic institutions are under siege by the federal government vis-a-vis the Affordable Care Act, which requires nearly all employers to provide health insurance that covers contraception, including in some cases abortifacient drugs. The Obama administration insists that these offerings are part of women’s health and should be made easily available; Catholics, both liberal and conservative, believe that these requirements are the edge of the wedge. 

Essentially, the new law forces them either to forfeit their most fundamental beliefs or to face prohibitive penalties — or to close hospitals, schools and other charities, with catastrophic consequences for millions who depend them. For perspective, one in six patients in the United States is cared for in a Catholic hospital. 

The Obama administration has given Catholics a year to adapt to the new rule, which is a laughably obtuse approach. The Catholic Church is a 2,000-year-old institution that has faced more severe persecutions than a government mandate to provide funding for morning-after pills. But this politically inept and morally fungible step does reveal utter disregard for religious liberty.

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This is a fight Obama should lose.  He may lose it at the ballot box in November.  I do not have a high regard for Planned Parenthood.  It starts with the fraudulent name of the organization which should be called Planned Un-Parenthood, since that appears to be its primary objective.