Pope Francis To Send Out Priests To Forgive The 'Sin' Of Women Who Have Had Abortions

[PeaceNikki]

98. So... You're saying they have no power in our legislative process? BS

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120399270

When Religion Collides With Legislative Process

But the bishops' conference still has clout. One big reason is its power over the church infrastructure. In Washington parlance, that would be the grass tops that influence the grass roots.

Late last month, the conference sent out nearly 19,000 notices for church bulletins that Sunday. They said that without strong anti-abortion language, Catholics should oppose the health care bill.

"Very few religions have the type of lobby machine that the United States Conference of Bishops have," says Jon O'Brien, president of Catholics for Choice. O'Brien says polls consistently show that a majority of Catholics are more liberal on reproductive issues than the conference is.

"Sometimes religious leaders are given a free pass, and it's as though we don't ask, 'Who do you represent, and is what you're saying factually correct?' " O'Brien says.

http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/1069406


A group of men with no real background in law or medicine, but blessed with a strong personal interest in women’s bodies, have quietly influenced all of the major anti-abortion legislation over the past several years. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops may be one of the quietest, yet most powerful lobbies on Capitol Hill, with political allies that have enabled them to roll back decades of law and precedent.
Over the past two years the GOP-controlled House of Representatives has launched one of the most extreme assaults on women's choice the U.S. has seen in decades. Republicans voted twice to slash federal family planning funds for low-income women, moved to prevent women from using their own money to buy insurance plans that cover abortion, introduced legislation that would force women to have ultrasounds before receiving an abortion and, most recently, passed a bill that will allow hospitals to refuse to perform emergency abortions for women with life-threatening pregnancy complications.

http://www.salon.com/2014/09/14/how_the_catholic_church_masterminded_the_supreme_courts_hobby_lobby_debacle/

How the Catholic Church masterminded the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby debacle


It was the Catholic Church, more specifically the U.S. Catholic bishops’ conference, that largely engineered Hobby Lobby to block the legitimization of contraception as a standard health insurance benefit—a last ditch effort to prevent by law what it couldn’t prevent from the pulpit: women from using birth control.
The Catholic bishops’ interest in “conscience clauses” that would allow employers to opt out of reproductive health care services began in earnest in the late 1990s, with the increased viability at the state and national levels of contraceptive equity measures designed to ensure that health plans covered prescription contraceptives like the Pill just like other prescription medications. For years, insurers had omitted contraceptives from prescription drug plans—the only entire class of drugs routinely and explicitly excluded—which made women’s out-of-pocket medical expenses some 70 percent higher than men’s. Measures to ensure contraceptive equity had been stalled by male legislators and social conservatives who asserted that employers and insurers shouldn’t be forced to pay for what they called a “lifestyle” choice, not a health care need. Despite that fact that nearly all women use contraceptives at some point in their lives—98 percent, according to government surveys—and that at any given moment two-thirds of women of child-bearing age are using a contraceptive method, the implication was that fertility management was frivolous or immoral and that “other people” shouldn’t be forced to pay for it.

I could go on... And on.