Catholic Health Association switches sides on HHS mandate

June 17, 2012 By

Why does huge news frequently drop on a Friday? It’s an old political trick to get bad news out in the Friday Night News Dump. Reporters loathe these as they want nothing more than to head to the bar (or whatever) and begin the weekend.

This year has seen quite a few Friday news releases affecting religion reporters, mostly related somehow to the HHS mandate requiring religious groups to purchase insurance coverage that may violate their religious beliefs. And this Friday fit into that pattern with some pretty big news about one of the key players in this debate switching sides. Here’s how the Washington Post put it:

The White House has lost perhaps its most prominent Catholic ally in its controversial effort to expand contraception coverage, with the huge Catholic Health Association saying Friday that the mandate for most religious employers to offer coverage would not “adequately meet the religious liberty concerns.”

The change of position at the association, the country’s largest group of nonprofit health care providers, comes as polls show President Obama and Mitt Romney tied among registered Catholic voters. In the last four of five presidential races, the candidate who won Catholics won the presidency.

Ah politics. Something tells me, however, that we won’t see the same types of stories about CHA that we were seeing in recent weeks about the Catholic bishops and other opponents of the mandate having a secret partisan plot against the current chief executive. I liked how this paragraph explained the situation in laymen’s terms:

The mandate that employers, including most religious ones, offer employees a variety of preventative services including contraception without any out-of-pocket charge, has been controversial among some from the start, particularly Catholic bishops. Actual houses of worship were exempted, but not other faith-based institutions like schools or hospitals that don’t primarily employ or serve people of the same faith.

It might also be nice to point out the abortion drug and sterilization issues, which are also of concern. The short blog post didn’t mention something I found interesting from the group’s letter, which is that they suggested the federal government might just use taxpayer dollars to fund these services (if they really think these things are important to provide at no cost to employees) rather than get religious employers directly involved. I was curious how that suggestion matched up with Catholic teaching. A writer at Commonweal picked up on the CHA proposal and had some interesting thoughts about it, if you’re interested. So did this writer at National Catholic Register.

Which reminds me of something I’ve been meaning to write about but probably won’t because the moment has passed. A few weeks ago there was a story that got quite a bit of play in the media alleging that bishops (although only one was named) were “divided in legal battle against Obama birth control mandate.” The one guy on the record, Bishop Stephen E. Blaire of the Diocese of Stockton, immediately clarified. He said “I stand solidly with my brother bishops in our common resolve to overturn the unacceptable intrusion of government into the life of the Church by the HHS Mandate.”

And when I was reading his overall comments, I was struck by how his initial comments weren’t actually that different from his clarification. He seemed worried that some people might exploit the bishops’ legal arguments or treat them as partisan. He wanted to make sure that didn’t happen precisely because he thought the issue was so important. It was a pretty nuanced and subtle position but you can see how it can easily be manipulated by media and advocates who want to cast someone’s position one way or the other.

And believe it or not, I think that something similar happened with Sister Carol Keehan, the head of the Catholic Health Association. Yes, it’s true that her statement in support of the suggested modification was highlighted by the White House in advance of President Obama’s statement on same and that her language was pretty effusive. But later that same day, she came out in a different direction, saying:

CHA and its members were profoundly disappointed to learn that the definition of a religious employer was not going to be broadened in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ rules for preventive services for women.

The impact of being told we do not fit the new definition of a religious employer and therefore cannot operate our ministries following our consciences has jolted us.

It is her first statement — and not the later — that made it into so many news stories the next few days, weeks and months. I don’t think the media have done a good job of accurately portraying CHA’s opposition to the suggested modification.

Yes, this is a big change of official position, but CHA’s history on this mandate is more complex than you’ve probably been told.

Anyway, even though this was a Friday night news dump, I don’t think it will stay a Friday night news story. It’s big. In the meantime, here’s an initial story in the Wall Street Journal, another from the Associated Press, Religion News Service here, and thoughts from Michael Sean Winters at National Catholic Reporter. Let us know what additional news stories you see that are particularly good or bad.

Angelfish picture via Shutterstock.

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Filed Under: Catholicism, Journalism, Politics
  • gladys whipple hurtis

    I’m watching the news fairly regularly. I have yet to see anything about this. Pray, pray, pray. Read, read, read. Vote.

  • Passing By

    Fascinating to omit the fact that the variety of preventive services includes abortion and sterilization. Not “fascinating” at all, but predictable and manipulative.

    There is yet one more shoe to drop in this melodrama, that of business owners who object to abortion but must pay for insurance coverage anyway. Why it’s no one asking about that group?

  • Ben

    I never saw mention of it on GetReligion when it came out, but the New York Times had a report earlier this month that says the science isn’t there for saying the mandate includes abortive medicines. Is there a journalistic case for continuing to mention abortion alongside contraception and sterilization in detailing the opposition to the mandate?

  • http://www.getreligion.org Mollie

    Ben,
    This OB-GYN pretty well explained why that piece didn’t sway pro-lifers at all when it came out. And they’re the ones — not abortion rights supporters — who say the mandate violates their teachings on abortion drugs, so the journalistic argument would remain the same:

    The Times’s Convolution of Facts on Abortifacients
    By Donna Harrison
    June 6, 2012 12:30 P.M.
    Comments
    31

    The recent New York Times article by Pam Belluck, asserting that so-called abortifacient drugs may not be abortive at all, is a wonderful example of convolution of facts to obscure reality. First of all, lumping together two very different drugs and calling them “morning-after pills” allows for clever confusion of what is known about the mechanism of action of each drug, and the role of progesterone in helping the embryo to implant and sustain the pregnancy.

    First of all, Plan B and Ella are very different drugs with very different mechanisms of action. Plan B is a progestin, a type of progesterone. Progesterone is a hormone that must be in a woman’s body for her to be able to allow the embryo to implant and develop the placental connections between the embryo and the mother. But Plan B is a very large dose of progesterone, higher than the woman’s body would normally make. It is the effect of that high dose which is under debate.

    Ella is a second-generation derivative of the abortion drug RU-486, and is equipotent with RU-486 in blocking the action of progesterone at the level of the ovary and endometrium, one of the facts I explain in my paper on this topic. Indeed, if taken before a woman ovulates, Ella will interfere with progesterone action and prevent the egg from being released. But the critically important question is what happens when you take Ella after ovulation. And the answer is clear. Ella blocks the action of progesterone at the level of the ovary, and blocks the action of progesterone at the endometrium, both of which interfere with implantation. Ms. Belluck is in factual error in her article. The European Medical Association technical review articles state that Ella is embryocidal. That means that Ella kills embryos. I attended the FDA Advisory Committee Hearing on approval of Ella, at which data were presented which demonstrated that Ella is around 95 percent effective in preventing a clinically recognized pregnancy. One of the Advisory Committee members repeatedly pointed out to the manufacturers that there was no way the effectiveness of Ella could be explained by delaying ovulation alone. This fact does not take an FDA Advisory Committee member to figure out. If Ella works even when a woman takes it after ovulation, then of course it doesn’t work in that woman by preventing ovulation.

    The same Advisory Committee member stated that the manufacturer had an even bigger problem. If you consider the pregnancies which are mentioned in the NYT article, what Ms. Belluck failed to mention is that 90 percent of those pregnancies “miscarried” and the other 10 percent were “lost to follow-up”. So what the studies supporting the FDA approval of Ella actually show is that even the dose of Ella used as “emergency contraception” is high enough to interfere with the early development of the embryo in such a fashion as to increase the miscarriage rate if a pregnancy is recognized.

    And here, abortion proponents speak out of both sides of their mouth. The quote from Trussell in the NYT article was particularly amusing. If you read his previous research papers, sometimes he claims over 90 percent efficacy from Plan B, and sometimes he claims around 50 percent efficacy. Why these differences? Well, as he so readily admits, you can’t get numbers of 90 percent efficacy without some sort of post-fertilization effect. So when the issue of mechanism of action is raised, suddenly the efficacy for Plan B gets “adjusted” to what would be expected from a drug with no post-fertilization effect. But, when issues of funding arise . . . well Plan B becomes much more effective.

    In point of fact, any drug which can act to prevent pregnancy after a woman has ovulated must have some post-fertilization effect. Whether it kills the embryo directly, or prevents the embryo from travelling down the tube, or prevents the embryo from implanting, or interferes with ovarian function, or increases immune rejection of the embryo, or directly destroys the placenta, some mechanism must be in place to interfere with the normal embryo functioning and then kill the living embryo.

    And, because some physicians and scientists stubbornly adhere to the principles of Hippocratic medicine, and refuse to give a drug which will kill one of their patients (the human embryo), and may harm the other (the mother) the controversy will not go away.

    — Donna Harrison, M.D., is an obstetrician-gynecologist in southwestern Michigan and director of research and public policy for the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

  • Julia

    The European Medical Association technical review articles state that Ella is embryocidal. That means that Ella kills embryos. I attended the FDA Advisory Committee Hearing on approval of Ella, at which data were presented which demonstrated that Ella is around 95 percent effective in preventing a clinically recognized pregnancy.

    The above is straight talk. I bolded some terms because I notice another problem of the media improperly mushing two separate things together. Some time back Planned Parenthood and others began speaking of “ending pregnancies” instead of killing or destroying embryos or some other sraight terminology for embryocide. It sounds less coarse. The fact of aborting an embryo or fetus was lost. Presto-changeo, aborting or killing an embryo morphed into “losing a pregnancy” = failure to implant or becoming un-implanted.

    The new-think is that if there never was a secure pregnancy = no abortion. The whole point of what happens to the embryo disappeared; we’re just left with the mother’s medical condition. The pregnant state ended or never started; no mention of ending the existence of a separate organism.

    Sorry if this is confusing, but that’s the whole point. There are word-salad games going on with language that are obfuscating what is really meant by women’s preventative health in all its various forms.

  • Deacon John M. Bresnahan

    It isn’t just this story that conveniently forgets to mention the abortion pill and sterilization–most so-called news stories in the mainstream media do so. Thus taking on the aspect of being propaganda for the mandate rather than straight news stories.
    There is probably no other topic covered in the news media that has been so victimized by Orwellian speak than abortion. Sme believe it started with abortion magically becoming “termination of pregnancy” in “news” accounts.

  • Gabriel Austin

    I have for some time been trying to discover exactly what is the Catholic Health Association. What is its organizational structure? How is it funded? What are its finances? Is there a board of trustees? Who is on the board?

    On what authority does Sister Keehan speak for the organization. Who are the effective members? Are they the bishops? Are they the heads of Catholic hospitals? It is a curious charitable organization that can afford to pay its head one million dollars a year.

    The organization is not listed in the Charity Navigator, being a [nominally?] religious organization. Where can one find the simplest information?

  • http://www.getreligion.org Mollie

    Gabriel,
    That’s an excellent idea for a story. I’ve long wondered about similar issues. Perhaps a reader has seen someone tackle the subject.