Catholic bishops in
the US have rejected President Obama’s proposed change to his plan to force all employers — including most
religious institutions to provide free contraception, abortifacients and sterilisation to women in
their health insurance coverage.

The White House
claimed on Friday that it would accommodate religious institutions with
objections to the health mandate by
relieving them of the requirement to pay for
coverage of contraception, the Morning After
Pill, which is an abortifacient, and sterilisation. However, they will still be forced to enroll their staff
in schemes that provide such coverage.

The United States
Conference of Catholic Bishops responded to the move by saying that “[t]he only
complete solution to this religious liberty problem is for HHS to rescind the
mandate of these objectionable services”.

They said that their
original objection to the Department of
Health and Human Services (HHS) regulations was that they forced “private health
plans — nationwide, by the stroke of a bureaucrat’s pen — to cover sterilisation
and contraception, including drugs that may cause abortion”.

The bishops noted
that all the other mandated “preventive services” under the HHS regulations
address the prevention of disease, “and pregnancy is not a disease”.

They added:
“Moreover, forcing plans to cover abortifacients violates existing federal
conscience laws.”

In addition, they
said that Obama’s mandate would saddle many individuals and institutions with
the burden of facilitating services that the Church considers immoral, among
them “insurers forced to write policies including this coverage; employers and
schools forced to sponsor and subsidise the coverage; and individual employees
and students forced to pay premiums for the coverage.”

While suggesting that
the President’s changes deserved “careful moral analysis,” they nonetheless
declared that “the lack of clear protection for key stakeholders — for
self-insured religious employers; for religious and secular for-profit
employers; for secular non-profit employers; for religious insurers; and for
individuals — is unacceptable and must be corrected.”

They also noted that
“where the employee and insurer agree to add the objectionable coverage, that
coverage is still provided as a part of the objecting employer’s plan, financed
in the same way as the rest of the coverage offered by the objecting employer.
This, too, raises serious moral concerns.”

Meanwhile, individual
Catholic bishops attacked the President over the move. In an article published
by the Philadelphia Inquirer on Sunday, Philadelphia Archbishop Charles J.
Chaput called the presidential mandate revision “insulting” and “dangerous” to
the religious rights of Christians.

“The HHS mandate,
including its latest variant, is belligerent, unnecessary, and deeply offensive
to the content of Catholic belief,” wrote the bishop.

“Any such mandate
would make it morally compromising for us to provide health care benefits to the
staffing of our public service ministries.” He added that believers “cannot
afford to be fooled — yet again — by evasive and misleading allusions to the
administration’s alleged ‘flexibility’ on such issues. The HHS mandate needs to
be rescinded.”

Dr. Samuel Gregg of
the Acton Institute said that any idea of the contraception being “free” is an
absurdity. “Someone has to pay,” he told LifeSiteNews.com. “and it would be
entirely reasonable — and very probable — for the insurance companies to simply
charge religious institutions extra for their overall insurance policies in
order to cover their not-so-free costs.”

He added that despite
how the Obama administration tries to spin the “accommodation,” under the
mandate Christian institutions would still end up assisting with something they
consider sinful.

“No amount of
rationalisation … can disguise the fact that indirect payment for these services
would fall into the areas of either what the Church calls formal cooperation in
evil or direct material cooperation in evil,” he said.

Over 100 university
presidents, professors, scholars, organisational heads, and activists also
signed a statement declaring that the mandate is “a grave violation” of
constitutionally protected religious freedoms.

The statement, typed
on the letterhead of Notre Dame University’s law school, pointed out that
Obama’s “so-called ‘accommodation’ changes nothing of moral substance and fails
to remove the assault on religious liberty and the rights of conscience which
gave rise to the controversy. It is certainly no
compromise.”