When reading that Hobby Lobby and other like-in-cause corporations won their Supreme Court challenge to forgo covering birth control for their employees due to religious objections, I wondered why are they so against birth control? Then when I was doing further reading in the NYT I found two great pieces in which the first poses, and then the second answers.
First, I found this quote in the Room For Debate op-ed feature of the NYT with a short piece by “Douglas Laycock, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Virginia. He wrote an amicus brief in the Hobby Lobby case on behalf of a coalition of groups led by the Christian Legal Society.” He writes:
Making Hobby Lobby pay for contraception methods that might also cause abortions… [My italics]
So I thought I found my answer to why Hobby Lobby and their legal cohorts fought the Affordable Care Act (ACA) for forcing them to cover women’s birth control: It’s tantamount to abortion.
But then I found a piece in The Upshot section of the NYT by that put this claim to rest. He writes that…
The owners of Hobby Lobby told the Court that they were willing to cover some forms of contraception but believed that the so-called morning-after pills and two kinds of IUDs can cause what they believe to be a type of abortion, by preventing a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterine wall or causing an already implanted egg to fail to thrive.
As colleagues have noted, the scientific consensus is against this idea…Even without contraception, fertilized eggs often fail to implant naturally.
Carroll goes on to explain, with linked citations to medical journal articles, that neither IUD’s nor morning-after (Plan-B) pills cause abortions under this definition. He states:
Moreover, the fact that both of these forms of contraception can fail, and allow pregnancies to occur, provides evidence that if a fertilization occurs, it can move on to implant and grow.
So Carroll’s answer to my question proves one thing: the owners/founders of Hobby Lobby and their fellow plaintiffs are misinformed. In the Carroll piece, he goes into how IUD’s work stating that not much is known about their form and explicit function, hence a probable load of PR against them. These corporation owners need to step away from religious, right-wing, Pro-Life propaganda and get informed by the science.
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Sparking The Left 