Two months ago, NYRA petitioned against Obama’s Health and Human Services Agency discriminating against teenagers trying to get emergency contraceptives. It’s great to see the administration now taking a position for college students, at least, enjoying equal access to birth control.
Beginning in 2013, most health plans will be required to cover contraceptives, including the health plans universities offer students. Some Catholic-run universities have pressed the administration to give them an exemption so they can continue to deny birth control pills to the students they cover, but Obama’s HHS has rightly figured out that what counts is the religious and moral views of the individual student, not of the guys running her school.
This morning, NYRA joined other organizations supporting the administration’s stand for students’ right to follow their own conscience.
As a dues-paying member of NYRA, I must dissent from this particular position statement. Let’s not forget to place youth rights within the larger category of liberty for all people in all things. Liberty is for the young and the old, individual persons and organized groups of persons. It pertains to both the moral sphere and the economic sphere. I don’t happen to agree with the Catholic Church’s stand on contraception, but I must defend their institutional freedom of conscience as well as anyone else’s.
For that matter, rights cannot be secured by government mandates forcing third parties to fund them. We in the youth rights movement should remember what a disaster the utopian dream of “free public education” has become. Lower- and middle-income families are forced to pay taxes for mediocre government schools whether or not they send their own kids there, effectively making private education options unaffordable. Similarly with birth control, we ought to beware of the kiss of death for everyone’s liberty in the Obama administration’s heavy-handed approach to health care.