By Kate Quiñones
CNA Team October 21, 2024 / 12:15 pm
The Biden administration announced Monday it will require insurance companies to cover over-the-counter contraception in what the White House called “the most significant expansion … in more than a decade” of access to birth control under federal law.
The new rule requires insurance companies to eliminate the prescription requirement for contraception coverage. The administration is seeking to expand contraception after the Supreme Court's 2022 overturn of Roe v. Wade, according to a White House press conference.
“The Biden-Harris administration is advancing the most significant expansion of contraceptive coverage under the Affordable Care Act in more than a decade,” Jennifer Klein, assistant to the president and director of the White House Gender Equality Policy Council, said in a press release at the White House briefing.
“For the first time, women will be able to get over-the-counter (OTC) contraception without a prescription at no additional cost, and health plans will have to cover even more prescription contraceptives without cost sharing,” Klein said.
The new rule requires insurers to provide OTC contraceptives to women for free without requiring a prescription. The rule also increases required coverage for prescription contraceptive drugs by requiring one drug per contraceptive category, such as oral contraceptives or implants.
After the comment period, the new rule requires insurance companies to expand contraceptive coverage by fully covering multiple birth control methods, including oral contraception, condoms and “emergency contraception.”
The Catholic Church has long condemned artificial contraception
The Catechism of the Catholic Church calls contraception a “morally unacceptable” form of birth control, stating that “any act” that “proposes … to make reproduction impossible” is an “intrinsic evil” (No. 2370).
In his 1968 encyclical human lifePope Paul VI called the “surrender of human life” “the most serious role in which married people cooperate freely and responsibly with God the Creator,” writing that it is a “source of great joy” even though it “sometimes leads to many difficulties and difficulties.”
In the document, Paul VI wrote that marriage was created by God for husband and wife to develop a union through the “mutual gift of themselves.”
The Pope condemned “any act which before, at the time of or after sexual intercourse is specifically intended to prevent procreation – whether as an end or as a means”.
“We must accept that there are certain limits, beyond which it is wrong to go, to man's power over his own body and its natural functions,” the document says.
The only means of “distribution of births” which the Church supports is “so[ing] advantage of the natural cycles inherent in the reproductive system” through Natural Family Planning (NFP).
Paul VI recognized that there are sometimes good reasons for couples to “decide not to have more children for a definite or indefinite period of time”, depending on “physical, economic, psychological and social conditions”.
However, “every conjugal act must necessarily preserve its intrinsic connection with the creation of human life,” wrote Paul VI. Union and procreation are “both inherent in the marriage act,” Paul VI continued, making contraceptives “illegal.”
Over-the-counter contraceptives can also have negative medical consequences for women, notes the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB).
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Bishop Robert Barron of Winona-Rochester, Minnesota, who heads the USCCB's Commission on Laity, Marriage, Family Life and Youth, condemned the US Food and Drug Administration's approval of OTC contraception in 2023.
Barron noted that giving OTC hormonal contraceptives “without a doctor's supervision and contrary to growing evidence of very harmful side effects — violates the Hippocratic Oath by putting women's health at serious risk.”
Contraception mandates have also led to legal challenges in the past for religious organizations, including the case of the Little Sisters of the Poor.
The religious sisters spent nine years embroiled in a legal battle while appealing a religious exemption from the Affordable Care Act's birth control rule. This rule requires employers to provide contraceptive coverage for employees through their health plans.
The US Supreme Court ultimately ruled in favor of Little Sisters in 2020.
Kate Quiñones is a Catholic News Agency contributor and College Fix contributor. She has been published by the Wall Street Journal, Denver Catholic Register and CatholicVote and is a graduate of Hillsdale College. She lives in Colorado with her husband.