RUTHFULLY YOURS

The first thing to understand about the Department of Health and Human Services’ birth-control mandate, and the last, is that it is an assault on both faithful Christians and the Constitution by leftists who consider themselves at “war” — their word — with bourgeois America. It has nothing to do with guaranteeing access to contraceptives, sterilization, and abortifacients.

Don’t think so? Are you buying the Obama party line that the administration is merely protecting people who work for religious organizations — such as Catholic schools, hospitals, and charitable organizations? Ensuring they are not denied these “reproductive services” that are covered under health-insurance plans ordinary businesses arrange for their employees? These claims do not pass the laugh test. Nobody in America is denied access to abortion, let alone birth-control pills

Owing to its totemic status in the Kulturkampf, abortion is among the most heavily subsidized of medical procedures. In the first trimester, it generally costs less than $400. If the unborn child is in the second trimester, the price of ending his or her life is a bit steeper. Still, like life, death is cheap, generally under $600.

Abortion is alone on the top shelf at the Bang for the Buck Bar. The rest of the menu is cheap, cheap, cheap. The New York City Department of Health, for example, has a website dedicated to, er, disseminating “Free NYC Condoms” (“Get Some, Get Yours — Grab a Handful and Go!”). It even has the toll-free 3-1-1 number you can call if, while away from your computer, the cupboard is bare in your time of need. And if you’re really interested in the subject, Big Apple taxpayers helpfully provide “A Brief History of Condoms in New York City.” Besides learning that “distribution of the NYC Condom topped 40 million” in 2009, you’ll revisit such milestones as Valentine’s Day 2007, when the health department “set a national precedent” with its “Lifestyles condom in a chic, branded Gotham wrapper.” Go New York, go New York, go!

Planned Parenthood reports that birth-control pills run as low as $15 per month — and at the click of a mouse, PP will help you find a health center from which to get a prescription. Like the pill, diaphragms and the “Nuva Ring” start as low as $15 per month, and PP will work to get you set up with Medicaid or other state programs that defray costs — just as it will if you prefer the cervical cap route, which will set you back about $70 (with the spermicide “kit”) but, like a diaphragm, lasts about two years. Starting at $400, Implanon, a thin implant inserted in the arm, sounds costly at first blush, but it lasts for three years. Injections of Depo-Provera, the “birth control shot,” go for about 40 smackers, and they last three months. If for some reason you’re not near one of Nanny Bloomberg’s Gotham wrapper stands but you’d still rather go over-the-counter, PP itself will supply you with a package of three sponges for about ten bucks.

More good news: You’re not like BP — if there’s an accidental spill, you’ve got very affordable options. The “Morning After” pill — which is actually a treatment course of four to eight tablets — costs about $20 at the local drugstore, although, as PP points out, “we all like to be prepared. That is why it’s a great idea to keep some emergency contraception in your medicine cabinet or bedside table” just in case. If you wait too long, there’s always the “abortion pill,” RU-486. It starts at about $300, and PP assures you that “Planned Parenthood centers that do not provide it can refer you to someone who does.”

At these prices, it’s absurd to suggest that anyone in America who wants birth control, pre- or post-conception, cannot get it at minimal cost and with minimal effort. Let’s consider for a moment some of the items that, unlike “reproductive health services,” government does not directly subsidize — at least right now, though there’s always Obama’s second term.

Scouring Census data and other government reports about Americans categorized as “poor,” the Heritage Foundation’s Robert Rector and Rachel Sheffield uncovered some startling facts: 80 percent of poor households have air conditioning, and 92 percent have microwaves; 75 percent have a car or truck, and nearly half of those have more than one. It goes without saying that virtually everyone has television, but a third of poor households have at least one wide-screen TV, two-thirds have cable- or satellite-TV service, more than two-thirds have either a DVD or a VCR player, about a quarter have digital recorders like TiVo, and more than half have an Xbox, a PlayStation, or a similar video-game system. Half of poor households have at least one personal computer, and nearly 15 percent have more than one.

Furthermore, over 40 percent of poor households own their homes, and the average poor American enjoys “more living space than the typical non-poor person in Sweden, France, or the United Kingdom.” The poor in America are extraordinarily well fed, and “by their own reports, the average poor person had sufficient funds to meet all essential needs and obtain medical care for family members throughout the year whenever needed.”

Furthermore, consider this: It is a black-letter legal principle that the existence of a right, even a right of constitutional magnitude, does not imply a companion right to have the government or any third party pay for its exercise — you don’t hear anyone claiming that Catholic organizations need to provide firearms for their employees. So, while the courts have invented a constitutional right to abortion and constitutional protections for birth control, there is no right to have subsidized birth control.

Yet Americans pay through the nose anyway, very much including Catholic organizations and people of faith who adhere to their creeds’ teachings on abortion and birth control. Thanks to our elected officials, federal taxpayers provide Planned Parenthood with a whopping $360 million per year — more than a third of PP’s annual budget. Mind you, we are talking here only about PP and Uncle Sam. That $360 million does not count millions of dollars in state-government funding of PP, nor total funding by governments at any level for birth-control providers other than PP.

So to summarize, contraception is broadly and inexpensively available. Voluminous information about birth-control methods, prices, and comprehensive support services is free and easily accessible online, by telephone, and at hundreds of clinics that encourage the curious or needy to walk in. And though there is no constitutional right to public funding for abortion and contraception, they are nevertheless richly underwritten by taxpayers — including religious believers whose contribution is coerced despite their profound moral objections to some or all of the practices at issue.

There is no crisis in “reproductive health.” There is not even inconvenience. Contraception and abortion services are readily, affordably accessible to anyone who wants them, including anyone — Catholic or not — who works at or otherwise gets health insurance through a Catholic institution. In fact, one suggested “compromise” solution to the HHS mandate dispute — the so-called Hawaii Rule — proves the point. In the Aloha State, religious organizations that choose not to provide birth-control coverage are required to tell their employees where and how they can obtain it. Putting aside the fact that this “solution” is blatantly unconstitutional, violating free speech as well as religious liberty, it is a rationally plausible alternative only because birth control is so pervasively available.

Consequently, there was no access-related reason for the Obama administration to pick a fight here — a fight the president well knew would be controversial given his years as a front-line soldier for the abortion (and infanticide) cause, the personal pleas made to him by top religious leaders, and the bickering the prospect of the mandate provoked within his administration. Obama dropped this bomb only because he is at war with America’s culture of individual liberty, of which religious freedom lies at the heart.

War is the right word — and it’s not one conservatives invoked. Just a few months back, in October, Obama’s top field commander, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, spoke at a fundraiser for NARAL Pro-Choice America, the most rabid of Obama supporters. “We are in a war,” she told the crowd. As her remarks made unmistakable, the administration views believing Christians — the bitter clingers of Obama lore — as the enemy in that war. Sebelius, the National Catholic Register reports, “boasted of the regulation that forces religious objectors to choose between violating their religion and kicking their employees off of health insurance.”

And, again, think about the Hawaii Rule, which the administration that so welcomed the ongoing battle has reportedly floated as a potential truce. There would not be a United States without the Bill of Rights — absent the understanding that a Bill of Rights would soon be added, the states would not have ratified the Constitution. There would not be a Bill of Rights without the guarantees of free speech and religious liberty enshrined in the very first amendment. This is the irreducible core of the social contract: Government may not compel an American to parrot the policy preferences of the executive branch, nor may it force an American to engage in or directly abet practices that are repellent to Christian doctrine.

The Obama Left is well aware of these things, for these things are basic. The president does not care. His doctrine, hard-Left doctrine, is government promotion of contraception and abortion on demand. On these tenets, he brooks no dissent. Regardless of what the Constitution says, you are commanded to obey. He has started the war against our liberties not because of any crisis, but because he can. That is tyranny. It is a rupturing of the American conception of sovereignty, in which the president is our servant, not our ruler. It cannot stand.

— Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.