The following comes from a July 1 press release from American Life League.

Hobby Lobby Decision and Abortion Lies 

Washington, DC—-The Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in the Burwell v. Hobby Lobby case has caused a bit of consternation among pro-abortion fanatics. The ruling makes the following statements:

“Although many of the required, FDA-approved methods of contraception work by preventing the fertilization of an egg, four of those methods (those specifically at issue in these cases) may have the effect of preventing an already fertilized egg from developing any further by inhibiting its attachment to the uterus. . . .

“They therefore object on religious grounds to providing health insurance that covers methods of birth control that, as HHS acknowledges, see brief for HHS in No. 13-354, at 9, n. 4, may result in the destruction of an embryo.”

In each statement, the scientific fact is enunciated that there are forms of chemical contraception that do in fact work in several ways—-one of which destroys the embryo because the lining of the woman’s uterus is made inhospitable to the embryonic human being.

As WebMD puts it:
“Hormonal contraceptives (the pill, the patch, and the vaginal ring) all contain a small amount of man-made estrogen and progestin hormones. These hormones work to inhibit the body’s natural cyclical hormones to prevent pregnancy. Pregnancy is prevented by a combination of factors. The hormonal contraceptive usually stops the body from ovulating. Hormonal contraceptives also change the cervical mucus to make it difficult for the sperm to find an egg. Hormonal contraceptives can also prevent pregnancy by making the lining of the womb inhospitable for implantation.”

But this has not stopped the abortion cartel from screaming bloody murder that the decision must be condemned because it sets a dangerous precedent for women’s healthcare.

They suggest that there are three lies that were reinforced by the SCOTUS ruling yesterday.

Alleged Lie #1: Birth control is the same as abortion.

Fact#1: Birth control has three modes of action, one of which does in fact destroy human beings prior to implantation. Therefore, birth control can be the same as abortion.

Alleged Lie #2: Birth control should be separated from other types of medical services.

Fact #2: The birth control pill and its progeny do not treat a medical condition, but rather are promoted as a way for women to avoid pregnancy. Therefore, these pills are not actual medical services but are, in fact, recreational drugs.

Alleged Lie #3: It’s easier for the government to pay for people’s birth control so that companies don’t have to.

Fact #3: The government should never have gotten into the business of providing payment for contraceptives or abortion in the first place. Neither is healthcare, and neither is good for women or babies.

The last word is this: Abortion mongers never met an abortion they did not like. They have never seen an act of killing a preborn baby that they did not think the government—-meaning taxpayers—-should pay for, no matter what the cost in human lives or women’s health.

The least they could do is tell the truth.

 

The following comes from a July 1 posting on the website of the New Yorker magazine.

A Very Bad Ruling on Hobby Lobby

Posted by Amy Davidson

“The Court, I fear, has ventured into a minefield,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in a strong dissent from a 5-4 ruling, issued by the Supreme Court on Monday, in favor of Hobby Lobby, a for-profit corporation that runs a chain of craft stores and wanted an exemption from part of the Affordable Care Act because it was, its owners said, against their religion. In particular, the owners were unwilling to pay for coverage for certain contraceptives. Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, said that he had “no trouble” concluding that this sort of insurance coverage “substantially burdened” the owners of Hobby Lobby—burdened them morally, if not financially. The government, he wrote, needed to find another way; Hobby Lobby could ignore the law.

Hobby Lobby’s defenders have emphasized that this is a very particular case: the Greens, the company’s owners, are devout, and they are only objecting to four contraceptives. Alito noted that churches and other religious non-profits already have an exemption from this aspect of Obamacare; he figured there were ways for the government to make sure the women working for Hobby Lobby got contraception without making the company pay. What could be the broader harm in letting these pious people off the hook?

To start with, who else is off the hook, or will be? What other companies can ignore which other laws on what real or dreamed-up religious grounds? That is something the majority decision in Hobby Lobby leaves shockingly undefined. Ginsburg called it “a decision of startling breadth,” one that could allow for-profit corporations to “opt out of any law (saving only tax laws) they judge incompatible with their sincerely held religious beliefs.” Alito, in his opinion, denies this; so does Anthony Kennedy, in a concurrence. But neither does so persuasively: their reassurance about the protections against what Ginsburg calls “the havoc the Court’s judgment can introduce” come down to, in Alito’s case, shrugs about how nothing alarming has shown up on the Court’s docket yet and, in Kennedy’s, the belief that everyone will be sensible about this. But if there hasn’t been a wave of cases there also hasn’t been a precedent like this—and now there is. And good sense has never been much of a reliable restraint. This suggests that the majority is either being disingenuous about how broad its ruling is or is blind to its own logic. As Ginsburg notes, religious objections to, say, vaccines are neither as theoretical nor as easily put aside as the majority pretends.

Nor is science much of a constraint. Hobby Lobby is really asserting two religious beliefs: that abortion is immoral and that the kinds of contraception it doesn’t want to pay for are, in fact, a form of abortion, even though the scientific evidence says they are not. The majority defers to both of these beliefs.

Can a for-profit corporation even have religious beliefs—can it be a person acting out of sacred conviction, in the sense of either the First Amendment or the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act (a law Hobby Lobby cites)? Alito doesn’t see why not; it doesn’t seem fair to him that the owners of a business should have to forgo either identifying its religious rights with their own “or the benefits, available to their competitors, of operating as corporations.” But corporations create a legal separation between owners and businesses that protects them in many ways; why is the upside a presumptive right and not any downside?…

The decision is limited to “closely held” corporations, that is, ones for which five or fewer owners control more than fifty per cent of the stock, but that is not much of a limit; as Ginsburg writes, “closely held” is not synonymous with “small.” Cargill is closely held, and it “takes in more than $136 billion in revenues and employs some 140,000 persons.” (What if the owners have differing religious beliefs? Alito, in one of this decision’s many invitations to litigation, says “state corporate law” will help.) And anyway, Alito writes, there is nothing here that precludes a publicly held company, of any size, from bringing a suit making the exact same claim: since Hobby Lobby and another company involved in the case, Conestoga, are not in that category, the Court didn’t make a judgment on them either way. That may be next.

To read the entire New Yorker posting, click here.