HHS MANDATE/ Excused from Prudence: Contraception and the Mother of all Virtues

The phrases, “insurance co-pay” and “Thomistic ethics” are not frequently passengers on the same train of thought. However, U.S. political events of recent weeks have quietly thrust the two concepts into uncomfortably close quarters. Although obscured by distress over religious freedom and woman’s health, the real story of President Obama’s contraception mandate is that of the meeting between healthcare policy and the natural virtue of prudence.

On January 20th, Department of Health and Human Services Secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, announced that, effective August 1, 2012, health insurance plans, including those offered by many religious organizations would be required to cover contraceptive and sterilization services without charge. This announcement, as well as the administration’s subsequent “accommodation”, transferring the direct financial responsibility of providing contraceptive services from employers to insurance companies, has incited furious debate over the administration’s positions on healthcare and religious liberty.

President Obama has characterized the central issue in the resolution as one of access, declaring: "Nearly 99 percent of all women have relied on contraception at some point in their lives – 99 percent.  And yet, more than half of all women between the ages of 18 and 34 have struggled to afford it.  So for all these reasons, we decided to follow the judgment of the nation’s leading medical experts and make sure that free preventive care includes access to free contraceptive care."

By styling the mandate as a matter of public health and social justice, the President appeals to the nation’s impressionable good intentions. By authorizing the mandate in the first place, he panders to the public’s desire for a free lunch. In a country where nine in ten employer-based insurance plans cover a full range of prescription contraceptives, and where condoms are dispensed, quite literally, like candy from vending machines in gas station restrooms, the issue is not one of access. The very fact 99 percent of women have reportedly used contraception—a misleading statistic given that it includes women who practice natural family planning—attests to the ubiquitous availability of birth control. However, speculation as to the President’s unstated political motivation of pleasing voters by offering free services also fails to fully account for the forces at work in his decision.

In order to understand the impetus for, and implications of, requiring individuals, businesses, and insurance companies to pay for contraception, we must look beyond politics and religious liberty. At the heart of this fiercely divisive issue is the simple, but much abused concept of prudence. If we accept the definition of Thomas Aquinas, the virtue of prudence is “a disposition of our reason to right action”; although, in its common usage, the word connotes self-righteousness and moralism. In The Four Cardinal Virtues, Josef Pieper acknowledges popular scorn for the virtue, but names prudence the “cause, root, mother, measure, precept, guide, and prototype of all ethical virtues”. Likening prudence to an image in the mind of an artist, Pieper explains that the goodness of our actions is measured by their correlation to the model that prudence provides.