Washington, USA - The White House may be open to compromising on a new rule that requires religious schools and hospitals to provide employees with access to free birth control, a senior strategist for President Obama said on Tuesday morning.
David Axelrod, who serves as a top adviser to Mr. Obama’s re-election campaign, said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program that the president would “look for a way” to address the vocal opposition from Catholic groups who say the rule forces them to violate their religious beliefs against contraception.
“We certainly don’t want to abridge anyone’s religious freedoms, so we’re going to look for a way to move forward that both provides women with the preventative care that they need and respects the prerogatives of religious institutions,” Mr. Axelrod said.
The comments come as last month’s decision has prompted a furor among religious groups while providing Mr. Obama’s Republican opponents with fresh ammunition to claim that the president wants the federal government to control the provision of health care.
Mitt Romney, the president’s likely Republican opponent in the fall, seized on the issue in a campaign appearance in Colorado late Monday evening.
“This same administration said that in churches and the institutions they run, such as schools and let’s say adoption agencies, hospitals, that they have to provide for their employees, free of charge, contraceptives, morning-after pills — in other words abortive pills and the like at no cost,” Mr. Romney said at a rally in Centennial, Colo. “Think what that does to people in faiths without sharing those views. This is a violation of conscience.”
When the Obama administration last month unveiled rules that would require some religious hospitals, colleges and other institutions to provide free coverage for contraception to their employees under the new health care law, it might have seemed to be a political winner.
The idea of birth control being covered by insurance companies is popular across the political spectrum, even among Catholics. The new policy will exempt churches themselves and will have no effect on doctors who object to prescribing contraception. And the decision means the president’s health care law will help make birth control cheaper for millions of women.
“The administration decided — the president agrees with this decision — that we need to provide these services that have enormous health benefits for American women and that the exemption that we carved out is appropriate,” Jay Carney, the White House spokesman, said Monday afternoon.
But Catholic groups, including some friendly to the White House, are loudly objecting. David A. Zubik, the Catholic Bishop of Pittsburgh, told the Catholic News Agency that the rule is a “slap in the face” to Catholics.
“This is government by fiat that attacks the rights of everyone – not only Catholics; not only people of all religion. At no other time in memory or history has there been such a governmental intrusion on freedom not only with regard to religion, but even across-the-board with all citizens,” he wrote.
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops posted a fact-sheet on its blog saying the rule will force “institutions and others, against their conscience, to pay for things they consider immoral.”
Mr. Axelrod noted that there are similar rules in 28 states and that its intention is to provide employees of the religiously-affiliated institutions with access to “the same package that every other woman in the country has, the same right and access to basic preventive care.”
But Republicans like Mr. Romney are framing the issue more broadly in an effort to use it during the presidential campaign.
Their accusation is that Mr. Obama is waging a war on religious freedoms. They argue that the president’s decision on contraception can be seen as an expansion of efforts to extend the reach and power of the federal government, even into the affairs of religious groups.
Mr. Romney on Monday urged his supporters to sign a petition calling on Mr. Obama to “stop the attacks on religious liberty.” In a Twitter message Monday morning, Mr. Romney called on Republicans to “stand with me and sign the petition” on his Web site.
“The Obama administration is at it again,” Mr. Romney says in the introduction to the petition. “They are now using Obamacare to impose a secular vision on Americans who believe that they should not have their religious freedom taken away.”
Mr. Romney’s criticism of the president for the contraception rule is part of a concerted effort by Republicans to use the issue in the coming elections. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, a Catholic, has introduced legislation that would more broadly exempt religious institutions from the requirement.
“From a practical standpoint,” Mr. Rubio wrote in The New York Post about the health care rule, “this will force Catholic organizations to make an unacceptable choice: Ignore a major tenet of their faith, or not provide any insurance to their employees and be punished with a federal fine for violating Obamacare’s mandate on employers.”
And the Republican critique has gotten some support from unlikely places. An editorial in Monday’s USA Today said the decision set off a “predictable backlash” by imposing a policy that is contrary to Catholic doctrine and constitutional guarantees of religious freedom.”
“In drawing up the rules that will govern health care reform, the Obama administration didn’t just cross that line. It galloped over it,” the paper wrote.
Senior White House officials on Monday defended the decision, saying that the policy balances the rights of religious organizations with the interests of their female employees to receive affordable contraception.
“The employees at these institutions ought to enjoy access to the free contraceptive care that their colleagues in other places are going to receive,” one senior administration official said during a briefing with reporters on Monday.
And Democratic strategists outside of the White House said they believed the president would not suffer politically from embracing a policy that helps women pay for birth control.
Geoff Garin, a pollster who has worked for decades with Planned Parenthood and other women’s groups, predicted that the attacks from Mr. Romney and other Republicans would only work with voters who are hard-core Republicans anyway — not with people inclined to support the president.
“At the end of the day, in an election, the people most likely to care about this thing will be younger women who care about their access to affordable birth control,” Mr. Garin said.
White House aides said Mr. Obama would have faced similar criticism from the other direction, from supporters of greater access to contraception, if he had decided to exempt big religious hospitals and colleges — who employ people of all different faiths — from making birth control accessible and affordable.
And they said a one-year delay in implementing the law would give the administration time to work with religious hospitals and colleges to “allay” their concerns about how it would work.
“You make the best substantive call about what you think the right thing is to do,” one senior official said during the Monday briefing. “And the politics fall where they may.”
But this is an election year, and it appears that Mr. Romney — if he becomes the nominee — is prepared to try to use the issue to undermine support for the president among Catholics and people of other faiths.
It also gives Mr. Romney a new opportunity to attack Mr. Obama’s health care plan. In an opinion article published late last week in The Washington Examiner, Mr. Romney vowed to issue waivers to roll back the health care plan and to undo the contraception decision.
“I will eliminate the Obama administration rule that compels religious institutions to violate the tenets of their own faith,” he wrote. “Such rules don’t belong in the America that I believe in.”
Whether that attack gains traction among independent voters in important swing states this fall may depend on how well the White House responds.
If it can frame the issue as one about affordability and availability of a popular form of health care for women, it may be successful in neutralizing the impact of Mr. Romney’s broader attacks about religion.
But if Mr. Romney is successful in creating doubt among blue-collar, religious voters in states like North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia — constituencies that Mr. Obama struggled to attract in 2008 — it could hurt the president politically.
Mr. Garin said he was confident that the president could win if he made his case effectively.
“As in any political debate, you can’t give the other side free rein to define the issue,” he said. “As long as the president and his supporters are clear that what he did is draw respectful bounds between the interests of churches and the interests of employees, then he’s got a winning hand.”