As you may have heard by now, the Health and Human Services Department has issued a mandate that all private health insurance plans must offer coverage for all FDA-approved “contraceptive services” without copay or deductible. “Contraceptive services” includes: sterilization, abortifacients, and contraception.
This means that an employer must now, by law, pay for a plan that includes sterilization, abortifacients, and contraception. This is clearly a problem for those employers (and individuals for that matter) who morally object to sterilization, abortifacients, or contraception.
This causes serious problems…
Problem 1: No Options for You
If you morally or religiously objects to sterilization, abortifacients, or contraception, you have no options for health insurance. All private and public plans will cover these things.
If you are like me and want nothing to do with anything that causes an abortion because it takes a human life then you will be forced to pay for the destruction of human life in order to have health insurance.
Basically the government wants to force you to choose between your life and health and the life of pre-born children.
Actually, they don’t want you to choose. Obamacare’s individual mandate (if upheld in court) will force you to have to have a health insurance policy. So, if you are altruistic and are willing to give up your own health and life for the sake of the pre-born, you’ll have to pay a fine to the government to be allowed to do that.
Problem 2: No More Religious Freedom
This is the problem that you’ve probably heard the most about. Religious run schools, hospitals and charitable institutions will be required to provide ‘contraceptive services’ with their insurance plans. As you know, many of these institutions are run by religious organizations (the largest of which is the Catholic Church) that explicitly teach as a tenant of morality that these services are contrary to their belief and practice.
So much for the free exercise of religion…
These institutions could be fined $2,000 per employee per year that they do not provide this government mandated insurance. For Catholic Charities, which has about 70,000 employees and serves about 10 Million poor people each year that amounts to $140,000,000 a year in fines just because they want to practice their religion (the practice of which happens to help 10 Million people a year!).
Do you really think Catholic Charities can afford an extra $140 Million a year? The poor will suffer while suppliers of birth control get richer.
In conclusion…
- Your rights are being thrown under the bus.
- Freedom of Religion is being thrown under the bus.
- Millions of poor people served by religious organizations are being thrown under the bus.
With this type of power, it won’t be long before direct abortions are mandated.
With this type of power, the ‘healthcare’ lobbyists that can front the most money will get special governmental treatment at our expense.
What You Can Do: Two things that take two minutes!
- Contact Congress: Click here to easily send an email to your Representative in support of the ‘Respect for Rights of Conscience Act’
- Share this post with your friends and family.
Thank you for standing with me for life, freedom and human dignity.
P.S. It appears that the ‘Compromise’ put forth by President Obama is merely a rewording of the initial rule.
Last week was a roller coaster!
Whenever someone makes a difficult public decision, they need support to know that they made the right decision.
Emotional Roadblocks to Reason – Part 1
Before you say to yourself, “surely, not I” – I really mean MOST people can’t do it. You and I are quite possibly some of those people.
However, as pro-lifers we tend to assume that everyone can face the truth and change if simply given the truth. We tend to assume that the truth will overcome those strong emotions. But what do emotions do?
Emotions motivate, they move people.
Does the truth really move people?
Nope.
An emotional response to the truth might move someone. But, the pure truth itself rarely does that for the average person.
There have been studies with people whose emotional centers of their brains had been injured. These people are given very basic decisions to make like which cereal to buy. We would think that given no emotion and pure reason that these people would quickly find the best cereal through the use of their reason. (not being swayed by an irrational affinity for a talking toucan, for example)
That doesn’t happen.
In fact, they are paralyzed by the decision and it takes hours to decide.
Why is this the case?
Emotion plays a huge part in our decision making process as humans.
So, what does this have to do with abortion?
Abortion is a very simple, black and white type of issue right? Yes, it is very simple in terms of biology. It is very simple in terms of morality and it is very simple in terms of law.
However, it is not at all simple in terms of emotion. The failure to recognize that fact is a detriment to our pro-life efforts.
Emotion is the gatekeeper to reason.
If we ignore emotion, we will only reach someone’s reason by chance.
In my last post, I talked about how my goal in talking about abortion is to discover and overcome what emotional roadblocks someone has.
So, in this post and the next, I’d like to talk about the different types of emotional roadblocks that you may encounter. Here are the first two types:
Roadblock #1 – Identity
This is a really big one. I see this all the time.
“I’m not one of THOSE people” – “I’m ‘this’ type of person and ‘this’ type of person doesn’t oppose abortion.” – “Educated people are pro-choice (and I’m educated)” – “Pro-life people are all religious fanatics and I’m not a religious fanatic so I’m pro-choice”
This is probably the most common. It involves the lowest commitment to being pro-choice and the smallest amount of thought or reflection.
What this comes down to is repeating the common mentality. People want their concept of themselves to be consistent. If the culture says that the type of person they think they are is pro-choice then they conform.
This is why you hear so many people repeat the exact same phrases word-for-word when defending their position on abortion. They didn’t come up with those phrases. They probably haven’t even really thought about them. Generally, they just repeat them…
I’m sure you’ve seen this before.
This is also why you hear a lot of people who support abortion default to an anti-religious argument or to a political argument. This happens a lot to me and others.
You know how it goes… You’re just starting an abortion discussion and the first argument offered by your friend is that you shouldn’t force your religion on people. The irony is that the pro-choice person is usually the only one who brings up religion in these cases!
Why does this happen? Well, they just know that they aren’t religious and so they must not be pro-life.
Nobody wants to have an identity crisis. Challenging someone’s identity is a very emotionally charged experience. The fact is if you challenge someone’s belief about something when that belief is tied to their concept of their own identity, you are forcing a mini-identity crisis.
When someone is in a mini-identity crisis, they will not be thinking with reason, only with emotion. Rationalizations will abound to restore order to that person’s sense of self.
All of this has very little to do with reason and a lot to do with emotion.
Roadblock #2 – Personal Connection
Abortion is pervasive. It is, unfortunately, way too common.
Personal abortion stories are rarely talked about because of the shame and hurt associated with them. However, the mother is rarely the only one involved and sometimes these experiences are shared with close friends and relatives.
This creates a difficult emotional position for someone who has a close friend who’s had an abortion. The deep bond of friendship and love makes it very emotionally difficult to oppose abortion. This is because it is hard for many people to separate the act and the individual.
So, what ends up happening is that the friend of the post-abortive woman feels compelled to defend her BFF when the subject of abortion comes up. To assent to the logic and science that clearly show that abortion is wrong is to betray her friend. So, she defaults to defending abortion in order to defend her friend.
As you can see, this defense of abortion has nothing to do with reason or science and everything to do with emotions.
More Coming Soon
As you can see, these first two emotional roadblocks bypass reason. Maybe these are what’s behind some pro-choice people in your life who seem so utterly irrational?
I have a few more types of emotional roadblocks that I will discuss in the next post. For now, what do you think of the first two? Have you encountered these? Have you successfully gotten around the roadblock?
Please comment below!
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