Abortion Industry Revs Up ‘War on Women’ over End of Contraceptive Mandate

A woman holds a sign that reads "stop the war on women". During US president Don
Kevin Van den Panhuyzen/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Dr. Susan Berry

The abortion industry and its media friends are stirring up “war on women” rhetoric with the announcement Friday that the Trump administration is ending Obamacare’s contraceptive mandate for employers and individuals with religious and moral objections.

As expected, the Trump administration announced the end of the controversial mandate (HHS mandate) that has required most employers to provide free contraception, sterilization procedures, and abortion-inducing drugs to their employees through health insurance plans.

The new rule provides full protection for Americans with religious beliefs and moral convictions and acknowledges that the contraceptive mandate concerns serious issues of moral concern, including those involving human life.

Though left-wing groups claim President Donald Trump is taking away women’s birth control – which can be purchased for relatively little expense – the Obama administration itself actually exempted at least 25 million Americans, through various exemption allowances, from its own rule.

The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which represented the Little Sisters of the Poor in its case against the HHS mandate, noted the Obama administration had exempted large corporations such as Chevron, Exxon, Visa, and Pepsi Bottling from the rule, as well as the U.S. military and large cities like New York City.

The headline for the story covered at NBC News reads, “Trump Just Made It So Employers Can Refuse to Pay for Birth Control.”

Glamour’s headline on the story states, “The White House Just Took Away Affordable Birth Control Protections from Thousands of Women.”

“Dear Men in Trump’s White House: Please Don’t Take Away Our Birth Control,” Vogue begs.

Ahead of the announcement, Elite Daily offered, “Trump Administration’s Birth Control Rule Could Take Contraception Away from Millions if Announced.”

Ilyse Hogue, President of NARAL – the political lobbying organization for the abortion industry – said in response to the Trump administration’s new rule:

Donald Trump’s latest dictate is a perfect execution of his passions: controlling women and robbing people of healthcare. At a time when the nation is grappling with very severe problems – from healing after the worst mass shooting in modern American history to devastation in Puerto Rico leaving millions of Americans without electricity or safe drinking water – the fact that our president decides to spend his time and energy on meddling with women’s birth control speaks volumes.

Hogue also returned to the “boss-blaming” narrative that was common when many Americans objected to the mandate Obama’s HHS secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, an abortion advocate, inserted into Obamacare.

“Giving our bosses decision-making power over whether and which birth control we can have goes the extra mile to be destructive and demeaning,” she added.

Using the left’s economic argument for birth control, Planned Parenthood also tweeted out, “An attack on birth control is outrageous. Access to birth control has been essential to women’s progress.”

However, the Guttmacher Institute, which promotes reproductive rights, announced in March that a new study finds “no change in levels of contraceptive use or in consistency of use among U.S. women at risk of unintended pregnancy between 2012 and 2015, a period that straddles the implementation of the Affordable Care Act.”

Many American women, in fact, are praising the Trump administration for rescinding the Obama-era rule, confronting attacks on religious liberty, and following through with his promise.

Women Speak for Themselves, a national grassroots movement that seeks to “reconnect sex with marriage and children,” says:

The “women’s health” argument for the mandate was false. There was never good evidence linking the mandate to boosting women’s health.

This WSFT fact sheet shows how all of the Obama administration arguments made for reducing unintended pregnancy, or nonmarital births, or domestic violence, or cancer, found no credible support in the sources and footnotes the administration cited.

“Americans United for Life [AUL] applauds the actions of the Department of Health and Human Services to ensure that the right of conscientious employers and employees not to participate in or provide abortion-causing drugs is protected in law,” states Catherine Glenn Foster, AUL’s president. “Millions of Americans want no part of an insurance system that subsidizes the destruction of innocent human life, and HHS’s new interim regulation respects that principled stand.”

Dr. Grazie Pozo Christie, Policy Adviser with The Catholic Association, notes, “It has been five long years since President Obama’s HHS hijacked the health insurance plans of most Americans in order to provide ‘free’ birth control and abortifacients—in the process riding rough-shod over the consciences of religious and moral objectors.”

“President Trump campaigned on a promise to bring relief from the mandate and its crushing fines, and with this act he delivers,” she adds. “Americans who value the free exercise of religion and our country’s proud tradition of peaceful pluralism applaud the administration’s move.”

Kristan Hawkins – who heads the nation’s largest organization of pro-life youth – observed that President Barack Obama’s deputies “wrote the healthcare mandates with the help of the abortion industry, deliberately forcing people of faith to subsidize drugs some find morally objectionable.”

The President of Students for Life of America continued:

Even more offensive, they also mislabeled drugs that end life as “contraception” and forced funding for them, too. That fact that nuns had to go to court to fight for their Constitutional right to freedom of religion when it comes to the contraceptive mandate shows just how broken the Obamacare mandates were.

Penny Nance, president of Concerned Women for America says Trump has made his promise to the Little Sisters of the Poor and other Americans of faith a reality.

“And that is the story to me,” she continues. “The story should be that this is a president who is truly committed to liberty. He is committed to America, and he is working to keep his word to the American people. That is incredibly honorable and noble.”

“So, on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of women I represent, we just want to say a big ‘Thank you!’ to President Trump and his team for this historic stance in support of religious liberty,” Nance applauds. “CWA will continue to lift him and the White House in prayer as they continue to tackle the challenges ahead.”

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