Today is the last day to submit comments on the HHS Mandate. I have been putting this off, but I do believe strongly that the new conscience exceptions are completely inadequate. So I finally made time this morning. I said the following:
Please provide broader conscience protection under the HHS mandate. As it stands, the conscience protections do not extend far enough. As a Catholic business owner, my dad for many years has provided health insurance for his employees in order to ensure that they have access to necessary medical care. Under the current mandate, he can no longer offer health insurance to his employees without violating his conscience on the issues of abortion, sterilization, and contraception.
As Catholics, we must live our faith both privately and publicly. Vatican II states, "The layman, at one and the same time a believer and a citizen of the world, has only a single conscience, a Christian conscience; it is by this that he must be guided continually in both domains." (Paragraph 5, Decree on the Apostolate of Lay People, November 18, 1965.) To provide insurance that pays for contraception, sterilization, or abortion would violate the Christian conscience of any Catholic or Christian business owner just as much as it violates the conscience of a Church-run school, hospital, or charitable operation.
The Church and its faithful members believe that contraception, sterilization, and abortion are grave evils that cause deep psychological and spiritual harm to the very women and men they are meant to help. How can a person who sincerely holds that understanding, based on current science as well as anecdotal evidence from those who have been harmed by these activities (see the studies and testimonies on the websites of One More Soul, Feminists for Life, and Silent No More), then pay for insurance that provide those exact harmful things for others? It's not rational to provide something harmful to another person. It violates the conscience of the person who is forced to provide something he or she knows to be harmful to another.
Please broaden the conscience protections under the HHS Mandate to include all those who object to providing contraception, sterilization, and abortion for religious or moral reasons.
So I'm on record now.
If you'd like to comment, you can go here.
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