Poll Finds Wide Support for Birth Control Coverage
By ERIK ECKHOLM
Published: March 1, 2012
The close divide in a Senate vote Thursday over whether employers can refuse insurance coverage for contraception mirrors a sharp partisan divide among the public, according to a national poll and interviews with women around the country.
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Over all, 63 percent of Americans said they supported the new federal requirement that private health insurance plans cover the cost of birth control, according to the survey of 1,519 Americans, conducted from Feb. 13 to Feb. 19 for the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. The poll has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.
While 8 in 10 Democrats said they supported requiring birth control coverage, only 4 in 10 Republicans did. Six in 10 people calling themselves independents voiced approval. Many Americans, in the survey and in independent interviews, expressed impatience with the focus on women’s reproductive issues in an era of economic distress.
Jennifer Meyer, 27, of Sugar Creek, Mo., said in an interview that the current controversy over birth control coverage was “a way for employers to get out of footing the bill by saying they don’t agree with it.” She called herself an independent, but said she was leaning toward Democrats as the “lesser of two evils.”
Mollyann Brodie, director of survey research at the Kaiser foundation, said that since the vast majority of Americans approved of birth control, the divisions over the mandate might be more related to views on federal regulation. “In the end, the answers say more about people’s views on the role of government than on the issue of contraception,” she said.
By a vote of 51 to 48, the Democratic-controlled Senate on Thursday voted down a proposal to overturn the contraception requirement brought by Republicans who call Mr. Obama’s plan an assault on religious liberty.
In January, when the Obama administration announced that religiously affiliated institutions like colleges and hospitals would not be exempted from a requirement that all health plans cover birth control, Roman Catholic bishops said the policy would force them to violate their faith. Evangelical groups and Republican leaders took up the cause and have injected it into the presidential campaign.
Mr. Obama, Democratic leaders and many women’s health advocates say the issue is a matter of basic health care and describe the opposition as part of a broader Republican war on women.
In the poll, the division was largely along partisan lines: 43 percent of Republican women said it was mainly a debate about religious freedom, while only 10 percent of Democratic women did.
Mary McNabb, 61, of Lenoir City, Tenn., said she was a Southern Baptist and was glad to see new attention focused on contraception and the Obama health care plan. She said the mandate was a violation of religious freedom.
“If a Catholic woman wants to take birth control, to go behind her priest’s back, that’s between her and God,” she said. “But I don’t think other Catholics should have to pay for it.”
But she added: “I don’t think they should beat this horse to death. There are other important issues.”
The Kaiser survey found little evidence of a gap between men’s and women’s views of the contraceptive mandate. But it did suggest a significant age gap, especially within theRepublican Party. Just over half of all Republicans ages 18 to 49 supported requiring contraceptive coverage, while only 33 percent of Republicans ages 50 and higher did so.
Despite the campaigns against the mandate by Republicans and conservative religious leaders, fewer than one percent of the people surveyed mentioned women’s health or birth control when asked what issues they most wanted to hear candidates discuss.
Half said they believed the debate over contraception coverage “is mostly being driven by election-year politics,” and interviews with women around the country suggested that many, whatever their politics, think leaders should focus on other matters.
Salonika Evans, 21, a dental hygienist student in Columbus, Ga., called the debate a diversion from the real issue of jobs.
“I am sitting at home eating ramen noodles and everyone in the government is eating filet mignon and talking about birth control, and they are all men,” said Ms. Evans, who calls herself an independent.
Marita Gallaway, 57, a social worker in Marion, Ind., who is against abortion and thinks the federal government is “out of control,” listed the war in Afghanistan, benefits for veterans, the aging population, education and the economy as things that are more important “than who’s going to pay for whose birth control.”
“Those are personal choices and personal issues,” she said. “War is not.”
Still, one in four people in the survey said women’s reproductive health could be an important factor in their choice of political leaders.
Leila Borders, 26, a medical student at Mercer University in Savannah, Ga. who calls herself a conservative Democrat, said, “I feel strongly that the attack that is being made on women’s health through politics is something that our nation will look back on as a dark blemish.”
“In this political climate where those issues are up for legislation,” she said, “a candidate’s stance would certainly determine my vote.”
