Pelosi’s office retreats on Hobby Lobby “ban” claim

Ed Morrisey:

Earlier in the week, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi aptly captured the uninformed hysteria on the Left prompted by the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision. In a press conference on Thursday, Pelosi told reporters that the decision meant “[t]hat five guys should start determining what contraceptions are legal or not … [t]that five men should get down to the specifics of whether a woman should use a diaphragm[.]” Megyn Kelly shredded this claim on Fox News later that night in a memorable segment.

That caught the attention of Politifact, but also Pelosi’s office, which rushed to walk back the boss’ remarks with the fact-checkers. The site assigned Pelosi a “false” rating anyway, but they should have taken a closer look at the walkback, too (via Twitchy):

We can eliminate any reader suspense by sharing the response Pelosi’s office sent PolitiFact after we inquired: “She misspoke,” spokesman Drew Hammill acknowledged. “Obviously the impact of the court’s decision is not to make these four contraceptive methods illegal – i.e. no longer allowed to be sold.”

Hammill went on to explain that Pelosi’s “overriding point” was that the decision “does in fact limit access … which is the key point Pelosi made.” He pointed to portions of Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dissent in which Ginsburg notes that IUDs are expensive and that removing company support for them could leave some female employees without the “most effective” medical option for their needs.

No, that was not the “overriding point” — and even if it was, it’s still nonsense. The Hobby Lobby decision does not limit access, and access to birth control hasn’t been an issue since Griswold. Anyone who wants it can buy it, and any employer who desires to provide it as part of health insurance coverage is still free to do so. Eighty-five percent of employer-provided health insurance already did that before the HHS contraception mandate was imposed on businesses, while almost every plaintiff against the mandate did not. Moreover, the CDC’s 26-year study of unplanned pregnancies found no evidence of a lack of access to birth control as a contributing cause to the issue from 1982-2008.

The walkback itself perpetuated another lie, but Politifact skips it in favor of a regurgitation of the “ban” argument:

Indeed, one of Pelosi’s later comments from the news conference — when she focused on the issue of who pays for contraceptives, rather than whether they remain legal — seems to be on firmer ground. She expressed concern “that five men could get down to specifics of whether a woman should use a diaphragm and (whether) she should pay for it herself, or her boss. It’s not her boss’ business. The business is whatever his business is, but it’s not what contraception she uses.”

Is this really “on firmer ground”? It’s the same argument under another pretext — that by not paying for a woman’s contraception, it’s a de facto ban, this time by bosses rather than the courts. It again assumes that something is “banned” and inaccessible because you can’t get someone else to buy it for you. That’s absurd on its face, but oddly Politifact never really gets around to addressing this “firmer ground.” They just note that the courts aren’t going to ban contraception as a result of Hobby Lobby, and that women (and men) can still buy it on their own.

Read more