Battle escalates over Obama rule for contraception coverage at Catholic institutions
By Dan Gilgoff and Lesa Jansen, CNN
(CNN) - The battle over a new White House policy compelling Catholic institutions to cover contraception in health insurance plans continues to escalate, with Republican presidential candidates denouncing the rule, liberal groups spotlighting Catholic support for contraception, and the Obama administration vowing to confront religious concerns head on."The president's interest is in making sure that … all women here have access to the same preventive care services," White House press secretary Jay Carney said Tuesday.
"He is also concerned about and understands the religious concerns that have been raised," Carney said, stressing that the White House would work to see if "the implementation of the policy can be done in a way that allays some of those concerns."
Earlier Tuesday, a senior adviser to President Barack Obama's re-election campaign, David Axelrod, signaled that the president might be open to compromise on the issue.
"We certainly don't want to abridge anyone's religious freedoms," Axelrod said on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," "so we're going to look for a way to move forward that both provides women with the preventative care that they need and respects the prerogatives of religious institutions."
But the dispute - spurred by a late January announcement by the Department of Health and Human Services that all employers, including Catholic hospitals and schools, will be required to offer free access to FDA-approved contraceptives like the birth control pill and Plan B (the so-called morning-after pill) through health insurance plans - shows no signs of dying down.
"Implementing the policy as is and allaying the concerns are mutually exclusive," Anthony Picarello, general counsel for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, told CNN on Tuesday. "If they want to allay concerns, they need to change the policy. Nothing less will do."
Churches are exempt from the policy, which goes into effect August 1, and religious institutions that oppose contraception have been given a yearlong extension to comply.
The Roman Catholic Church, which opposes the use of contraception, continued Tuesday to signal that it is intent on resisting the new policy.
"The bishops aren't going to stop until this is fixed, and that means pursuing every legal means available to them to fix it," Picarello said.
The flap was thrust further into the national political spotlight on Tuesday, as Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum attacked the new rule in his victory speech on a night that he swept primaries and caucuses in Missouri, Minnesota and Colorado.
The administration had told American Catholics that "you have a right to health care, but you will have the health care that we tell you you have to give your people, whether it's against the teachings of your church or not," Santorum said in his Missouri speech.
"I never thought, as a first-generation American, whose parents and grandparents loved freedom and came here because they didn't want the government telling them what to believe and how to believe … that we'd have a president of the United States who would roll over that and impose his secular values on the people of this country."
His GOP rival Mitt Romney has continually denounced the HHS rule in recent weeks.
Speaking in Loveland, Colorado, on Tuesday, Romney said the rule was "in violation of the religious conscience of (Catholic) organizations."
"This kind of assault on religion will end if I am president of the United States," he said.
A survey released Tuesday by Public Religion Research Institute found that Catholics are divided over whether religious colleges and hospitals should have to provide employees with health insurance that covers birth control at no cost. Forty-five percent of Catholic voters support such a requirement, while 52% oppose it.
"Given how closely divided Catholic voters are over the requirement that religiously affiliated hospitals and colleges provide employees with health care plans that cover contraception," said Daniel Cox, PRRI research director, "it seems unlikely that this issue will galvanize Catholics nationally and seriously undermine Obama's electoral prospects with this important religious constituency."
Planned Parenthood also released a survey on the HHS rule Tuesday; it found that 53% of Catholics think that women employed by Catholic hospitals and universities should have the same rights to contraceptive coverage as other women.
"The message to Democrats is that this is something all women deserve to have and that religion just shouldn't be an issue with it," says Tom Jensen, director of Public Policy Polling, which conducted the survey for Planned Parenthood.
Over the past two weekends, the American Catholic hierarchy has distributed letters, harshly condemning the HHS policy, to be read at parishes nationwide during Mass.
"We cannot – we will not – comply with this unjust law," Kansas City, Kansas, Archbishop Joseph F. Naumann wrote in a letter to parishes last weekend. "Our parents and grandparents did not come to these shores to help rebuild America's cities and towns, its infrastructure and institutions, its enterprise and culture, only to have their posterity stripped of their God-given rights."
–CNN's Brianna Keilar contributed to this report.
