Attorney general is wrong: Government should not force contraceptive insurance coverage

	Guest commentary  Peggy Hamill

Attorney General Peg Lautenschlager has issued a "formal" opinion stating that Wisconsin law prohibits both employers (including employers affiliated with a church whose tenets prohibit the use of contraceptives) and state colleges and universities from excluding prescription contraceptives from their drug plans.

It's increasingly obvious that what the liberals in Madison cannot pull off legislatively, they will seek to ram through the courts.

Purely elective

Pregnancy is not a disease. Unborn children are not the moral or legal equivalent of tumors. The government should not force insurance companies - and the policyholders who will pay for this expansion through increased premiums - to cover drugs and devices that are purely elective.

Importantly, many of these so-called contraceptives do not always prevent conception. Instead, they can act and often do act to cause early abortions by preventing implantation of the newly-conceived human being.

Forcing abortion coverage

Just read the tiny print inside the packaging of the patch, the pill, or "emergency contraception." Forcing birth control coverage is forcing abortion coverage.

Let's also remember that many of these drugs and devices come with serious, sometimes deadly, side effects.

Yet the so-called pro-choice movement wants the millions of Americans who oppose abortion and know human life begins at the moment of fertilization to pay - through their insurance premiums - for the elective actions of others.

Rights of conscience

What about our choice? What about our consciences? And what about the rights of those health insurers and health providers who have religious, moral, or ethical objections to offering these drugs and devices, which they know to be the antitheses of true health care and morally prohibitive?

Compounding skyrocketing health insurance premiums by mandating medically unnecessary items is economically foolish. Forced to cover such expenses, companies may respond by downsizing or eliminating health care coverage altogether, creating a health risk.

Hopefully, no Wisconsin court will share the attorney general's opinion. That would certainly be in the best interest of the conscience, economy, and health of our great state.

Peggy Hamill is state director of Pro-Life Wisconsin, Brookfield.

No theology, please: We're British

		The Catholic  Difference  George Weigel

This past summer I had a pleasant dinner with a senior British churchman who happened to be visiting Cracow while I was teaching there.

His Grace was, in many respects, an Anglican prelate straight from central casting: handsome, charming, urbane, impeccably attired, emotions under control, disclaimers always preceded by a "perhaps," etc., etc.

Earlier in the day, he had gone to Wadowice, the pope's birthplace, and was clearly moved to have seen the roots from which a great Christian witness had sprung.

Omitting theology

What was disconcerting about our conversation was that it never touched on theology. We discussed the impact on the Anglican Communion and Anglican-Catholic dialogue of last year's decision by the Diocese of New Hampshire (supported by a majority vote of delegates to a national Anglican convention) to ordain as local bishop a man who lived for years with his homosexual lover - after divorcing his wife in a church ceremony.

My interlocutor suggested that the real problem was one of management, or perhaps of manners: U.S. Episcopalians had rushed into this before the rest of the Anglican Communion had had a chance to adjust its thinking to more enlightened (so to speak) ways.

That the Gene Robinson case in New Hampshire engaged some core theological questions, including the church's claim to be the bearer of moral truth, did not seem to be at the top of my dinner companion's menu of concerns.

Lord Carey confused

Later in the summer I remembered this conversation when reading several reviews of, and commentaries on, the memoirs of George Carey, former Archbishop of Canterbury and head of the Anglican Communion. It is no offense against charity to suggest that Lord Carey is confused about several things - and, once again, they are theological in character.

Carey argues that, as John Paul II has experienced more physical difficulties, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger has taken the Catholic Church in a new direction, undercutting the pope's personal witness.

The evidence for this? The 2000 Vatican document Dominus Iesus, which reaffirms the unique salvific mission of Jesus Christ and the Catholic Church's ancient understanding of itself as the most rightly ordered expression in history of the One Church of Christ.

Why has Cardinal Ratzinger done this? Because, Carey writes, Cardinal Ratzinger is "exceedingly conservative," a man who shows "little of the flexibility that characterized the approach of the Second Vatican Council."

Really? Dominus Iesus contains 102 footnoted citations; 50 of them are taken from the documents of the Second Vatican Council. Another 37 citations are from the magisterium of John Paul II, who approved the document.

Strained relations

Carey also blames Cardinal Ratzinger and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith for the strained relations between Rome and Canterbury over the Anglican admission of women to the ordained ministry.

But this, too, makes no sense. Carey's predecessor, Archbishop Robert Runcie, had been told in letters from the pope and from Cardinal Johannes Willebrands (whom no one would ever style "conservative") that Anglican approval of the ordination of women would raise grave questions about the future of the Anglican-Catholic dialogue.

Runcie replied there were serious theological and ecumenical issues in play - and then made the case for ordaining women on strictly sociological grounds.

Fixing theology deficit

Which leads to the awkward but inescapable thought that some high-ranking Anglican prelates of recent vintage have suffered from a theology deficit.

Lord Carey's successor, Dr. Rowan Williams, is a formidable and well-regarded theologian. Whether he can convince his fellow bishops of the Anglican Communion to think theologically, rather than sociologically and politically, about central questions of Christian doctrine and church order is one of his challenges.

If Dr. Williams is unsuccessful, then many Catholics, including those fully committed to ecumenism, will sadly conclude that what styles itself an Anglican "Communion" is in fact a fraternity of quarreling Protestant sects.

George Weigel is a senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.