5 Myths About the Hobby Lobby Case, Debunked
5. “It’s just contraception. It’s not vital health care.”
This also comes straight from the majority opinion, though more implicitly. Alito holds at arms’ length the government’s claims that “public health” and “gender equality” are compelling interests, because, he says, they’re too broad. Whether the law serves a “compelling government interest” is part of the test under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which was the crucial law in the case. But it’s sufficiently unclear that Alito believes contraceptive access matters at all that Justice Anthony Kennedy felt the need to write separately to “confirm” it.
Believing women’s equality matters is a value - one that, clearly, not everyone holds. But contraceptives’ public health benefits are inarguable. Just ask the leading group for obstetricians and gynecologists, who wrote in their brief, “Pregnancies that are too frequent and too closely spaced, which are more likely when those pregnancies are unintended, put women at significantly greater risk for permanent physical health damage … The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention identified family planning as one of the greatest public health achievements of the twentieth century, finding that smaller families and longer birth intervals contribute to the better health of infants, children, and women, as well as improving the social and economic roles of women.” They added, “Contraception also helps to protect the health of those women for whom pregnancy can be hazardous, or even life-threatening,” which Justice Kennedy does note in his concurrence.