Insurance Coverage On Contraceptives

Margaret Sanger was born into a world in which doctors were not allowed to give their patients information about contraceptives. The result for many women was childbirth, miscarriage and illegal abortions. Back then the Federal Comstock law (passed in the 1873) banned contraception and abortion as forms of “obscenity”. Although rich women could afford getting what they needed from Europe, poor women who mostly resorted to illegal abortions often did not surviv

e. Sanger’s interest in sex education and safe contraceptive methods led her to Europe to learn how women there prevented pregnancy. She eventually went on to write about these measures which led to her being arrested for violations of Comstock law. Sanger was finally released, and she traveled across the U.S. to promote reproductive choice. She faced resistance from the government, the Catholic Church and many physicians. A seizure of a shipment of diaphragms that Sanger had ordered from Japan, caused a court to finally rule that physicians were excused from the Comstock law. This gave doctors the right to import, prescribe and distribute contraceptives. When Margaret Sanger opened her first clinic in 1916, the infant mortality rate in New York City was 88.2 per thousand births. By the time of Sanger’s death in 1966, the rate was 24.9. By 1973, when Roe v. Wade was decided, the rate was down to 19.9. Today, it is 7.8 (A Tradition of Choice).

This ruling is said to be the pinpoint of pushing other employer to re-evaluate their drug prescription plan and may want to measure the cost of adding such coverage against the potential cost of a lawsuit.

Despite the clear language of Title XII, courts have interpreted it in some exceptions to prohibit malicious discrimination on the basis of gender. For example a Jesuit university was allowed to require all faculty member be Jesuit, but a Christian school could not fire a pregnant, unmarried teacher, even if it was against their moral beliefs (Dollard). Although federal law protects health worker who will not perform abortions for reasons of conscious, these laws “provide no support for a religious employer who seeks to exclude contraception from an employee benefit plan” (Dollard). First of all conscious clauses only exist for abortions, not for contraception. “Neither employers who provide coverage for contraceptive services nor their employees are required as a result of that financial contribution to use contraception themselves” (Dollard). The religious conviction that they can not provide contraceptive services in employee insurance plans, carries little to no weight.

The twentieth century Margaret Sanger, is Jennifer Erickson, a pharmacy manager at Bartell Drug Store, who sued her employer becaus

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