Darrell Issa, R-Calif. Democrats and women's groups protested when Issa, saying the topic of the hearing was religious freedom, not access to birth control or women's rights, rejected Fluke as a witness because she was not a member of the clergy. Instead, Issa convened an interfaith panel made up only of men. During the hearing past week, Fluke sat quietly behind the witness table, an obvious display of her refusal to be silenced.
The all-male panel focused on the president's new mandate that employers with religious affiliations must offer health insurance plans that covered birth control. Proponents of such initiatives have stated that they would outlaw commonly used forms of contraceptives that a ffect implantation of the egg, emergency contraceptives, IUDs, and certain in-vitro fertilization techniques. For example, these initiatives could make it illegal for doctors to treat pregnant women for cancer if the treatments could endanger the fetus.
State legislators across the country have introduced bills to deny contraception coverage to more women in several states.
Bills to create exemptions to existing state contraception mandates or to broaden existing exemptions have been introduced in states including Arizona , Indiana , Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. He also filed it as an amendment to the federal highway reauthorization bill. Related Items:. Health Care. How can Congress consider the Fortenberry, Rubio and Blunt legislation, that would allow even more employers and institutions to refuse contraception coverage, and then respond that the nonprofit clinics should step up to take care of the resulting medical crisis; particularly when so many legislators are attempting to defund those very same clinics?
These denials of contraceptive coverage impact real people. In the worst cases, women who need this medication for other medical reasons suffer very dire consequences. A friend of mine, for example, has polycystic ovarian syndrome, and she has to take prescription birth control to stop cysts from growing on her ovaries. Her prescription is technically covered by Georgetown's insurance, because it's not intended to prevent pregnancy.
Unfortunately, under many religious institutions' insurance plans, it wouldn't be. There would be no exception for other medical needs. And under Senator Blunt's amendment, Senator Rubio's bill or Representative Fortenberry's bill, there's no requirement that such an exception be made for these medical needs. When this exception does exist, these exceptions don't accomplish their well-intended goals, because when you let university administrators or other employers, rather than women and their doctors, dictate whose medical needs are legitimate and whose are not, a woman's health takes a backseat to a bureaucracy focused on policing her body.
In 65 percent of the cases at our school, our female students were interrogated by insurance representatives and university medical staff about why they needed prescriptions and whether they were lying about their symptoms. For my friend, and 20 percent of the women in her situation, she never got the insurance company to cover her prescription. Despite verification of her illness from her doctor, her claim was denied repeatedly on the assumption that she really wanted birth control to prevent pregnancy.
She's gay -- so clearly, polycystic ovarian syndrome was a much more urgent concern than accidental pregnancy for her. I learned about all of this when I walked out of a test and got a message from her that, in the middle of the night in her final-exam period, she'd been in the emergency room. She'd been there all night in just terrible, excruciating pain. She wrote to me: "It was so painful I woke up thinking I'd been shot. She had to have surgery to remove her entire ovary as a result.
On the morning I was originally scheduled to give this testimony, she was sitting in a doctor's office trying to cope with the consequences of this medical catastrophe.
Since last year's surgery, she's been experiencing night sweats and awaking and other symptoms of early menopause as a result of the removal of her ovary. She's 32 years old. As she put it: If my body indeed does enter early menopause, no fertility specialist in the world will be able to help me have my own children. I will have no choice at giving my mother her desperately desired grandbabies, simply because the insurance policy -- that I paid for, totally unsubsidized by my school -- wouldn't cover my prescription for birth control when I needed it.
Now, in addition to potentially facing the health complications that come with having menopause at such an early age -- increased risk of cancer, heart disease, osteoporosis -- she may never be able to conceive a child. Some may say that my friend's tragic story is rare. It's not. I wish it were. One woman told us doctors believe she has endometriosis, but that can't be proven without surgery. So the insurance has not been willing to cover her medication, the contraception she needs to treat her endometriosis.
Recently, another woman told me that she also has polycystic ovarian syndrome, and she's struggling to pay for her medication and is terrified not to have access to it.
Due to the barriers erected by Georgetown's policy, she hasn't been reimbursed for her medication since last August. I sincerely pray that we don't have to wait until she loses an ovary or is diagnosed with cancer before her needs and the needs of all of these women are taken seriously, because this is the message that not requiring coverage of contraception sends: A woman's reproductive health care isn't a necessity, isn't a priority.
One woman told us that she knew birth control wasn't covered on the insurance, and she assumed that that's how Georgetown's insurance handled all of women's reproductive and sexual health care.
So when she was raped, she didn't go to the doctor, even to be examined or tested for sexually transmitted infections, because she thought insurance wasn't going to cover something like that, something that was related to a woman's reproductive health. As one other student put it, this policy communicates to female students that our school doesn't understand our needs. These are not feelings that male fellow students experience, and they're not burdens that male students must shoulder.
In the media lately, some conservative Catholic organizations have been asking, what did we expect when we enrolled at a Catholic school?
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