Sorry, God: Catholic Schoolgirls Use Birth Control

By Erin Gloria Ryan | January 17, 2014 | 3:00pm

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Three anonymous women who attend the University of Notre Dame have been granted the right to intervene in the school’s lawsuit against the Affordable Care Act’s birth control mandate. The school claims that because the government has declared contraception basic care for women, their right to base other people’s health care options on ancient superstition is being violated. The students, in turn, contend that since they’re the ones who actually use birth control, they should have a say in the health care they’re allowed to access. And a court sided with them, much to the Virgin Mary’s chagrin.

According to ABC, the young women — known in court docs as Jane Does 1, 2, and 3 — were granted the right to intervene against the University’s case by the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago on Tuesday. The court agreed with the women’s contention that students who choose to attend Notre Dame shouldn’t have to accept as part of their education compromised health care coverage from their university-provided insurance. The university’s lawyer responded with a slippery slope argument that if the government can require universities to allow their students to access contraception, then who knows what else it might make religions do. Pay taxes on that big fucking golden dome that sits on top of the main building like a middle finger to Jesus’s whole “sell your stuff and feed the poor” philosophy? Hell no! Not in my country!

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The federal government has already given religious-run non-church institutions like Notre Dame a workaround in the ACA’s contraceptive mandate, but the University isn’t satisfied, instead choosing to fight tooth and nail until everyone in America who is not Catholic believes that all Catholics are uterus-obsessed sidewalk counselors.

To add more to the WTF factor in this case, it seems that, Notre Dame’s student insurance, provided by Aetna, already covers birth control, according to sources on campus who use their student insurance to access birth control (one woman says that, even pre-Obamacare, her $75 a month birth control prescription only required a $5 copay when she picked it up in the on-campus pharmacy). While the cost is covered, the University’s health services staff is notoriously wary of contraception prescriptions, sometimes subjecting students to varying degrees of humiliation. One of my friends during undergrad had a prescription from her home doctor because she used them to regulate a gynecological problem she’d had since her teens, and the only way that the on campus health services center would fill it is if they called her home doctor and made sure that she wasn’t using the pills for sex-fucking. A current grad student reports that she’s never had a problem working around the whole “No Whore Pills” thing in the slightest; she says the University has never given her grief about contraception as long as she shows up to health services and says “Ow! Cramps!” or feigns a Period Explosion (medical term). Another reports that she was given a bit of the third degree when she asked the pharmacy to fulfill a contraceptive prescription and then got a letter from her insurance company saying that her request for birth control had been “approved.” Uh, thanks? While the student health care plan gives women access to birth control, the plan that covers faculty and staff doesn’t similarly provide contraceptive coverage, a source on campus tells me.

So if the University basically allows grad students who are willing to lie about why they need it access to birth control using their school insurance plan and pick up their prescription without having to travel off campus, and the vast, vast majority of practicing Catholics either use contraception or don’t think it’s sinful, then why is the University waging what amounts to essentially a very expensive bad PR campaign to keep their undergrads, professors, librarians, and cafeteria workers from accessing contraception, or for preserving the itty bitty copay students who lie about having sex must pay for it? For fun? To remind the public, amid thousands of pages of documents detailing priest abuse of children, that the real victim here is the Church’s “freedom”?

This is why I will never give a cent of my giant piles of internet blogger money (lololol) to my alma mater. Because they spend it on useless, regressive shit like this and the giant South Quad lawn full of abortion crosses the University-sanctioned pro-life club erects One Very Special Football Saturday annually. Sorry, Notre Dame; any and all alumni contributions are hereby withheld until the school stops embarrassing me.