PSA Testing and Obama's Birth Control Mandate Revisted

Roman Catholic leaders opened a new front against the Obama administration mandate that employers provide workers birth control coverage, filing federal lawsuits Monday on behalf of dioceses, schools and health care agencies that argued the requirement violates religious freedom.

So reported the Associated Press' Rachel Zoll on Tuesday, May 22.

It is always welcome when someone takes a firm stand in defense of their inalienable rights. Whenever someone--or in this instance, an institution--does so, he/she is implicitly defending all rights of all people.

But as I said earlier, the Catholic Church has been quick to subordinate fundamental rights to its collectivist visions of "social justice," so its action rings hollow from the perspective of principle.

Nevertheless, I welcome the Church's fight for religious freedom. Perhaps, as noted at FIRM, the Church will come to realize that all rights are interlinked. To protect religious freedom, one must protect all freedoms, including rights to free trade and property.

On the healthcare front:

   Men should no longer receive a routine blood test to check for prostate cancer because the test does more harm than good, a top-level government task force has concluded in a final recommendation that immediately became controversial.   The recommendation from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force runs counter to two decades of medical practice in which many primary-care physicians give the prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test to healthy middle-aged men.

As I said earlier, "It’s notable that the study was done under the purview of the same bureaucrats charged with administering federal health care programs." If this were an independent research group operating in a free market, a man could simply agree to disagree. 


But being a government entity operating in the context of expanding government control of healthcare, with its associated rationing powers, this decision implicitly carries the coercive force of law. It is just on the basis of such "advisory board" recommendations that government bureaucrats will determine who gets what healthcare and when.


For more, see:


What About the Freedom of Non-Catholics, Mike Spina?


The Double Standard of the Catholic Church


PSA Testing: Are Death Panels Arriving Under Cover of "Scientific Evidence?"

Forbes: "Death Panels... We Already Have One"