(LifeSiteNews) — The Biden administration proposed on Monday that insurance companies be required to cover over-the-counter contraception, in what the White House said would be “the most significant expansion of contraception coverage” since birth control was first required to be covered in 2012.
Under the new proposed rule, which expands on the Affordable Care Act, women would be able to obtain, through their private insurance plan, contraception without a prescription “at no additional cost.”
The rule would also expand coverage of prescribed birth control: “Health plans would be required to cover every FDA-approved contraceptive drug or drug-led combination product without cost sharing,” according to the White House press release.
As Reuters has noted, “Opill is currently the only daily birth control pill approved for sale without a prescription by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration,” and the proposed rule covers other forms of over-the-counter birth control, including the abortifacient “morning after pill Plan B,” spermicides, condoms, and birth control sponges.
The administration is proposing the rule specifically through the Departments of Health and Human Services, Labor, and the Treasury. It would be enacted in 2025 if finalized.
The use of contraception is always gravely immoral: The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that “every action” that “proposes … to render procreation impossible” is “intrinsically evil” (No. 2370). The use of abortifacients takes on added gravity, since such “birth control methods” kill innocent human life.
Many contraception methods, such as hormonal birth control pills, also have an abortifacient effect.
While it is widely used and accepted, even among self-identified Catholics, contraception has deeply damaged the fabric of society. When the birth control pill was introduced – revolutionary for its effectiveness as a contraceptive and now the most commonly used form of contraception – sexual activity was decoupled from procreation in practice by users.
This triggered a slew of damaging effects: Large rises in premarital sexual activity, more casual relationship dynamics, increased illegal abortions, demand for legal abortion (as women treated the pill, which was only about 90 percent effective in practice, as 100 percent effective), a rise in adultery, a rise in divorce, etc. The effects were nothing short of monumental.
Contraception’s role in abortion is testified to by moral theologian Janet Smith, who pointed out in her acclaimed talk “Contraception: Why Not?” in which she says that about “50 percent of women who go to abortion clinics ‘tell us that they’re there because of contraceptive failure.’”
In 1981, in the apostolic exhortation Familiaris Consortio, Pope John Paul II condemned contraception as a contradiction that falsifies a spouse’s giving of self to the other:
When couples, by means of recourse to contraception, separate these two meanings that God the Creator has inscribed in the being of man and woman and in the dynamism of their sexual communion, they act as ‘arbiters’ of the Divine plan and they ‘manipulate’ and degrade human sexuality – and with it themselves and their married partner – by altering its value of ‘total’ self-giving. Thus the innate language that expresses the total reciprocal self-giving of husband and wife is overlaid, through contraception, by an objectively contradictory language, namely, that of not giving oneself totally to the other. This leads not only to a positive refusal to be open to life but also to a falsification of the inner truth of conjugal love, which is called upon to give itself in personal totality (n.32).