Americans outraged over the Obama administration’s requirement that health insurance policies cover contraception and sterilization at no charge are about to get even hotter under the collar. According to CNSNews.com, depending on state law, girls as young as 15 could well be eligible for free surgical sterilizations — even without their parents’ consent.
The ObamaCare regulation, issued by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) earlier this year, states: “Non-grandfathered plans and issuers are required to provide coverage without cost sharing consistent with these guidelines in the first plan year … that begins on or after August 1, 2012.” The guidelines call for insurers to cover “all Food and Drug Administration approved contraceptive methods, sterilization procedures, and patient education and counseling for all women with reproductive capacity.”
While the guidelines do not define “all women with reproductive capacity,” they are based on the recommendations of an Institute of Medicine report that defines it as “from the time of menarche” — the onset of menstruation, which occurs around age 12 — “to the time of menopause.” Thus it would appear that HHS is requiring all new insurance plans to cover legal sterilizations for girls age 12 and older.
Of course, in most states women must be considerably older than 12 to be sterilized, and teenagers desiring to be sterilized must obtain their parents’ consent. In Oregon, however, girls 15 and older need not obtain parental consent to be sterilized. All they must do is sign a form stating that they are making an informed decision to be sterilized — a procedure that “must be considered permanent and not reversible” — voluntarily and with the understanding that “my decision will not affect my right to future care or treatment.” For girls unable to understand English, the state helpfully permits an interpreter to sign the form for them.
Therefore, under ObamaCare a 15-year-old Oregonian girl apparently can get a tubal ligation for free without so much as a by-your-leave from her parents. (This same girl, meanwhile, must wait until she is 16 to drive and 17 to wed and can do neither without parental consent until she is 18.) Parents and other policyholders not wishing to pay for sterilization coverage will be forced to do so since it will now be baked into every policy sold. And taxpayers, whether or not they agree with the practice of sterilizing minors without parental consent, will be forced to subsidize such coverage for those unable to buy insurance on their own — a segment of the population sure to grow as mandates such as this drive up premiums.
CNSNews.com says it made a valiant effort to get HHS to comment on the accuracy of the news site’s interpretation of the sterilization regulation. But after “multiple phone calls and e-mails, CNSNews.com was told by the HHS office of the secretary that there was no one available to answer these questions” — which suggests that no one at HHS wants to go on the record stating that, yes, teenagers in Oregon (and perhaps other states) can get free sterilizations without their parents’ consent. Someone at HHS would probably have hurried to quell such rumors if they were false.
“Could there be any easier way to push the next generation towards mass sterilization?” asked Stephanie Zawada of Catholic Online. Even more pointedly, could it be a prelude to forcible sterilization?
Edwin Black, author of War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race, fears that it could. He told CNSNews.com:
I find it abhorrent that a 15-year-old girl who is not old enough to consent to sexual activity, who is not old enough to consent to buying a beer, who is not old enough to drive herself to the hospital could possibly be considered old enough and mature enough to give informed consent for her own sterilization. And the most vulnerable of these girls will be those who are wards of the state who are presented a piece of paper and told “sign here,” as they were in Virginia and California.
Right now, when our country is considering compensation, such as in North Carolina for sterilization victims [and] states are hopping on the bandwagon to issue formal apologies … is not the time to reverse years of awareness and dive back into state-sponsored sterilization.
The decades of genocidal sterilization are filled with numerous examples of fake consent forms being executed by young women who were being pressured by the state into sterilization.
Sterilization, by definition, reduces population growth — a major goal of the globalist elites in Washington, the United Nations, and elsewhere. The masses are less inclined to go along with this agenda, and so the elites sell it to them under various guises, including (in the past) preventing “undesirables” from reproducing and (in the present) “saving the planet.”
In the case of the ObamaCare contraception and sterilization mandate, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius aimed squarely at Americans’ back pockets, assuring them that they needn’t worry that the requirement will increase insurance premiums. “The reduction in the number of pregnancies compensates for the cost of contraception,” Sebelius told the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health in March.
Rep. Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.) pointed out the absurdity of this assertion, telling CNSNews.com: “If you think about it, why don’t health insurance companies provide [free contraception] now if the argument is health insurance companies are going to make a lot of money? If the health insurance companies were really acting in their own best interest, they would be giving these pills out for free, if it really saved money.”
The contraception/sterilization mandate, therefore, cannot be about saving money but about achieving the globalists’ population-control objectives. Combine that with state laws allowing girls early in their reproductive years to be sterilized without parental consent, and you’ve got a recipe for significantly smaller future generations. Yet as the Economist reported quite recently, “in 2011 America’s fertility rate was below replacement level and below that of some large European countries” — and it’s still falling. The last thing Americans need is an incentive to have even fewer babies; and they certainly don’t need to be forced to do so.
The contraception mandate thus not only offends many Americans’ moral and religious sensibilities but also threatens the country’s future. It’s just one more reason why ObamaCare needs to be excised from American society root and branch.
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© 2012 The New American
