It's not "Uter-YOU", it's "Uter-US"!

Sexually-active female-bodied people recognize the importance of birth control and the role that it plays in family-planning, their own physical well-being, and their economic security, and support the provision that birth control be covered by insurance without co-pay.  The celibate male-bodied Catholic Bishops think this is a terrible thing, and that their religious freedom extends to telling grown human beings what kind of medical care they can seek for their reproductive organs. The very idea of providing insurance that covers birth control makes them feel so, so....dirty. 

The Catholic Church leadership is at the forefront of the argument that their non-church institutions shouldn't be "forced" to provide health insurance that covers birth control because of the aforementioned idea that this makes them feel complicit in their employees' non-reproductive sexy-times. As if they aren't already paying their employees in money, that is already being used for out-of-pocket birth control expenses, anyway.  What are they going to do next--not pay their employees?  You know, because the money can be used for "sin"?

They claim their problem has to do with "religious freedom".  How is that?

They have the freedom to disapprove. They have the freedom to preach about how they'd rather people not use birth control. But I would have a real problem, as an employee, if my employer was going to make decisions for me that effected my access to reproductive health care. That doesn't sound like my freedom to make choices about my body are being respected.  My choice to use birth control doesn't have any impact on the beliefs of any religious person whatsoever.  They, however, want to exert a "right" that would interfere in how others carry out their lives.  That doesn't strike me a real "right".  Actually, that strikes me as a self-appointed privilege that undermines the bodily autonomy of others.

In other words--no. This rejection of a simple rule regarding coverage for people who may not even themselves have any belief that birth control is somehow sinful is overstepping the authority to simply practice one's religion, to imposing tenets of it on others.  That's not okay.  I hope this rule regarding birth control remains, because it is my belief that this is entirely a private matter for individuals and the medical counsel that they seek--not their employers, regardless of the religious status of that employer.