99% of women use birth control at some point in their lives. 98% of Catholic women use birth control at some point in their lives. American women, as a whole, are super ok with birth control.
Looking at Hobby Lobby and the endless cases by other companies and nonprofits that it has spawned, you might think birth control was super controversial. It’s absolutely not, at least not among its users. So where’s the controversy coming from?
The answer, unsurprisingly, is that the controversy is coming from men. Specifically, men who don’t have sex. Even more specifically, the clergy of the Catholic Church. In fact, a recent study found that news stories on the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate featured interviews with Catholic leaders 18% of the time – which doesn’t sound like much, but medical professionals of any kind were interviewed only 12% of the time, and OB-GYNs a measly 3%.
In other words, when you turned on your TV to hear about birth control coverage between 2010 and 2014, there was a one in five chance you were hearing about it from a Catholic leader. That’s a pretty remarkable amount of influence for religious leadership to have in shaping a public debate.
Now, I don’t want to minimize that many people – slightly less than half of voters – don’t support requiring insurance companies to pay for contraception. But I imagine that framing news about such coverage around objecting Catholic leadership could have lead to a perception that religious objection to contraception is widespread, when in fact it’s not.