Sacramento News and Review
Thursday, August 10, 2006

COVER STORY

Birth Control Battle:
Access to Plan B, a form of emergency contraception, has become a new battleground issue for the religious right nationwide--and right here in Sacramento
by Chrisanne Beckner

Following are excerpts of the article covering the interview with then CNES executive director, Jennifer Le. For the complete story go to http://www.newsreview.com archives search. [The beginning of the article focuses on an instance where a pharmacist refused to fill a prescription for the “morning after pill” because it would be in violation of his conscience.]

. . . There are health-care professionals who would deliberately keep Plan B from catching on. Even in California, some pro-life nurses are refusing to distribute any kind of birth control, basing their opposition on religious doctrine.

At the root of the debate is one of the oldest and most unromantic ideas in the book: that sex is primarily a tool for procreation. According to religious teachings (especially among Catholics), teens, unmarried couples and even married couples using contraception compromise the dignity of human beings and the sexual act. If sex is separated from procreation, everybody is cheapened by the experience, relationships are fleeting, and God can’t exercise his creative powers.

If you think such conservative concerns don’t affect access here in progressive California, think again.

A PRO-LIFE STANCE
Jennifer Le recently pitched a legal battle to pressure her former employer, Kaiser Permanente, into accommodating the religious opposition of pro-life nurses who want nothing to do with abortion, emergency contraception or even the birth-control pill.

A registered nurse and a devout Catholic, Le, the Executive Director of California Nurses for Ethical Standards, was once an advice nurse, answering the phones at a Kaiser call center in Sacramento. If she received calls about abortion or Plan B, she would politely say that she couldn’t help the caller, she told SN&R. She would take down the woman’s name and number and then pass the information to another nurse, who would call back and answer questions regarding contraception and abortion. “They had accommodated, on some level, my religious opposition,” said Le.

However, in 2003, Kaiser asked advice nurses to facilitate prescriptions for contraception over the phone. Le was told by her supervisors that “her religious beliefs preventing this would not be accommodated.”

“I told them I couldn’t do that,” said Le.

When the next call for contraception came in--they were rare, as she was working specifically on pediatric calls--Le held firm and would not assist the caller. She was then put on unpaid leave for three months to look for other work within the Kaiser system. She filed suit against Kaiser for religious discrimination in Sacramento Superior Court in June.

In her original complaint against Kaiser Permanente, Le states that the Catholic Church teaches that all life, from the moment of conception, must be protected, adding, “The Catholic Church teaches that most forms of contraception are wrong, as they negate the creative act of God.”

As an emerging advocate for pro-life health-care providers, Le was willing to lose her job rather than help women access contraception.

Le’s attorney, Steve Burlingham, says his client is protected by the California Fair Employment and Housing Act, which requires her employer to reasonably accommodate her religious beliefs and practices, as well as the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees freedom of religion. He asserts that Le’s opposition to birth control and emergency contraception specifically is based on that small number of cases where the drug might prevent a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterine wall.

Litigation is increasing, he said, because Plan B “is not just dealing with preventing life, but ending life.” As he sees it, pro-life health professionals “don’t want to commit murder.”

Le is asking for injunctive relief, pressuring Kaiser to change its policy “so that they would accommodate this kind of religious belief,” said Burlingham.

Jeff Hausman, a public-affairs representative for Kaiser, sent along a statement saying that Kaiser respected the religious beliefs of its call nurses in relation to abortion and emergency contraception and has policies in place to “immediately refer such calls to other Call Center staff. ... In this employee’s case, we worked very hard to help her find another position within Kaiser Permanente that would not be objectionable to her religious beliefs as they relate to contraception in general. However, she eventually decided to accept a position outside of our organization.”

This was not Le’s only battle against easy access to contraception. She first grabbed headlines earlier this year for suing the California Nurses Association with the help of the Pacific Justice Institute, also for religious discrimination. While working for Kaiser, Le researched the nurses’ union and found that she objected to the union’s positions on abortion and comprehensive sex education and didn’t want her dues supporting these causes. She wrote a letter saying so and decided to give her money to a charity instead. The union’s bargaining agreement identified five charities that would be acceptable stand-ins, including Planned Parenthood, Doctors Without Borders, the American Heart Association, the American Cancer Society and the AIDS Foundation.

“Le found that all five of the charity options violated her sincerely held religious beliefs,” reads the complaint. For instance, the American Heart Association was unacceptable because it received “over $10 million dollars from promoting the use of a drug developed by Genentech, which supports embryonic stem cell research.”

Le asked that she be able to choose her own charity, but the union did not respond to her request.

Filed in the Eastern District of the federal court, Le’s case claims that the union not only discriminated against her deeply held religious beliefs, but also that it will be difficult for her to find work at other hospitals covered by the same union.

The union recently asked for the case to be dismissed, claiming that it never retaliated against Le for her decision not to pay dues, but U.S. District Judge David Levi denied the union’s request. “We’re facing another motion to dismiss,” said Le’s attorney, Kevin Snider. Oral arguments are planned for August 9, one day past SN&R’s press deadline.

Though Le’s case may be unusual, she said she knows of at least eight other nurses throughout California who have laid their jobs on the line rather than provide abortions or contraception. She believes that as a nation we’ll soon wake up and acknowledge the harm caused by our reproductive policies.

“To call them reproductive rights is wrong,” she said. “It’s the right not to reproduce.”

“You have an entire movement to force hospitals to provide morning-after pills and even abortions--even Catholic hospitals!” said Le. “Why should a woman have the right to go into any doctor’s office and force them to provide any procedure?”

Even in the case of rape, Le doesn’t support emergency contraception. “A child in the womb is a child in the womb,” she said. “It doesn’t matter, the behavior of the parents.”

According to Catholics for a Free Choice, “five percent of women who have been sexually assaulted become pregnant as a result of the attack--with the majority undergoing elective abortion.”

But like Le, who finds all contraception unacceptable, Catholic hospitals have a mandate. “A potential obstacle to the provision of emergency contraception in Catholic hospitals is the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services developed by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops,” says the report by Catholics for a Free Choice. “These guidelines were designed to ensure that the nation’s 611 Catholic hospitals do not violate Catholic teaching which prohibits the use of artificial contraception.”

Le’s case seeks to protect the conscience of the provider, and Catholic hospitals sometimes follow policies to protect every fertilized egg.

A state-by-state fight

Even as emergency contraception remains a lightning rod for the nation’s ethical and religious feelings about birth control and abortion, women’s health in general has become a heated battleground for states’ rights. Not only are states preparing to limit abortion within their borders, but also, according to the Guttmacher Institute, of the 81 state bills on reproductive health passed in the first half of 2006, 14 measures supported “sexual and reproductive health and rights,” while 37 were “antithetical.”

With battles still raging, there are recent victories on both sides, proving that Americans are anything but decided about a woman’s right to choose. Recently, voters in California shot down a law that would have delayed a minor’s abortion until her parents consented (though Californians will get a chance to reconsider the issue this November), but nationally, the trend goes the other way. President Bush likely will sign a bill that makes it illegal to take a woman across state lines to avoid her home state’s parental-notification laws.

In this political climate, some conservatives are eagerly awaiting the Supreme Court’s decision to reconsider the validity of Roe v. Wade. If a woman’s privacy and health-care rights are limited, emergency contraception, from over the counter or behind it, might see its day in the sun after all. If abortion is no longer safe and legal throughout the nation, emergency contraception might become the nearest thing to a woman’s right to choose.

Relighting the Lamp