Loyola Mount University (LMU) is a private post-secondary institution grounded in a religious tradition and faith in God. One of the most egregious elements of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare, is that employment insurance must fund abortions. Religious institutions like LMU and business owners of a distinct conscience have refused to implement the portion of the law which requires them to provide insurance funding abortions.
The Catholic Church, the sponsor for Loyola Marymount, recognizes the biological and genetic truth that life begins at conception. Thus, LMU’s Board of Trustees has decided that their employment insurance plans will no longer cover elective abortions. They have the authority per the First Amendment to assert this belief on their campus.
LMU professor Anna Muraco suggests that the university’s policy decision was “sudden and unnerving.” As an employee of a Catholic institution, surely she would have understood her employer’s stance on life, conception, and abortion. For her to contend that the university is depriving women of their reproductive rights is unfounded. Muraco’s argument that the university is breaching social justice in removing elective abortion as an insured medical procedure adds nothing substantial to our understanding of this complex issue, nor does it justify any argument that Loyola Marymount is undermining “workplace equity”.
A woman has a right to have a child, or she has a right not to have a child. She also has the right not to work at a Catholic institution if those values do not agree with hers. In the tragic circumstances of rape or incest, certainly a pregnant woman would have the choice whether to carry that child to birth, yet such circumstances could be deemed “emergent” as opposed to “elective”.
Like many Americans, I believe that there should be limits to access to abortion. As a conservative, I believe that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare”. Kathleen Hannon Aikenhead, the head of LMU’s Board of Trustees, commented that LMU would ensure women’s other health issues. I respect the university’s decision not to cover elective abortions as part of their employees’ insurance plans.
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