I've been Catholic all my life and have never personally met a catholic who toed the "no contraception line."
That's cool. It may very well be true that a huge majority of catholics ignore church doctrine on this issue. My point is that the survey cited by the media does NOT adequately prove this case, though. They are putting a ridiculous amount of spin on it to try and prove a political point that it doesn't actually prove. I'd be very interested to find, in a survey of ALL catholic women, what percentage regularly use contraception. That survey would give us an accurate read on this issue. That survey either doesn't exist, or isn't being reported (presumably because it doesn't make a point that favors the left).
Well...I'm of the opinion that health care should be socialized, at which point the Catholic church would not be paying for contraceptives because they are a religion and therefore don't pay taxes.
Separate issue. I'm obviously opposed to socialized health care. But aside from that, explain to me how birth control pills count as "health care." Pregnancy is not a disease. If you want birth control pills for the sole purpose of engaging in consequence-free sex, it stops being medicine and becomes a recreational drug that you are taking for entertainment, not health purposes.
Personally, I don't want to live in a society where we would let someone die because they didn't have the money to pay for live saving operation.
And I don't want to live in a society where we point a gun at a doctor's head and say "save this person's life or we throw you in jail."
By the way SMuffin there's a benefit to you and society in general in preventing unwanted pregnancies; those tend to cost society a lot more than a little birth control.
And this gets into the "moral hazard" argument I've ventured before. Once you start thinking about everything in terms of "societal costs," totalitarianism is just a stone's throw away. This is why death panels are a legitimate concern. Old people on dialysis cost a lot of money to keep alive, and they've been around for a good long time, and they probably aren't going to do much good for society in the rest of their lives, so we should really just pull the plug and let them die, right? If your goal is to minimize "societal costs" then there are a LOT of medical treatments we shouldn't be funding, and a lot of freedoms that we shouldn't allow people. Fat people cost a lot more than healthy people, right? Maybe every morning we should all be forced to do calisthenics in front of a two-way video camera, eh?
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SmartMuffin - Because anything less would be uncivilized - http://img.imgcake.com/smartmuffin/barkleyjpgde.jpg
http://dudewheresmyfreedom.com/