Officials object to birth control mandates [The Frederick News-Post, Md.]

March 14--President Barack Obama's move to accommodate Catholics and others opposed to part of a new health care law that will require insurers to provide contraception coverage does not go far enough, according to some Catholic groups and officials at Mount St. Mary's University.

The controversial provision of the Affordable Care Act, set to take effect in August, allows religious employers to refuse to provide birth control, according to a Feb. 10 statement from the White House. Instead, insurance companies must provide birth control to employees.

In an open letter to Obama printed in the March 12Washington Post, Mount President Thomas Powell and board of trustees chairman Eugene Waldron Jr. said the health care provision is a threat to religious liberty.

"This would require many religious Americans, and other men and women of goodwill, to act against their conscience, but the (Department of Health and Human Services) has refused to grant the standard and expected religious exemption called for by the First Amendment," they wrote.

The government's definition of religious groups exempted in the law is too narrow, Monsignor Stuart Swetland, vice president for Catholic identity and mission at Mount St. Mary's, said Tuesday.

Catholic parishes, for instance, would be exempted from the provision, but not Catholic hospitals or universities, which are seen within the Catholic community as organizations flowing out of a commitment of faith, he said.

Mount officials, as well as members of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, have said they will continue to petition Obama and legislators for a broader exemption.

Recent efforts to iron out problems with the White House have stalled, according to a March 2 letter to his fellow bishops by Archbishop of New York Timothy Dolan, president of the conference.

Dolan said the conference would continue to try to rescind "the suffocating mandates that require us to violate our moral convictions."

The Catholic Health Association of the U.S., the nation's largest group of nonprofit health care providers, which had opposed the requirement, expressed support of the compromise Feb. 10 and continues to hold that position, according to Fred Caesar, special assistant to Sister Carol Keehan, the association's president.

Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards has said the organization also supported the Obama administration's Affordable Care Act provisions concerning birth control as critically important for women's health and basic health care.

"Planned Parenthood believes that women, regardless of where they work, should have access to health insurance that covers preventive health care, including birth control, with no co-pays," Richards was quoted as saying in a March 7 statement following the defeat of Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt's proposal to reverse Obama's contraception requirement.

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