President Barack Obama’s healthcare policies unleashed one of the most significant factors in reducing our abortion rate to its lowest point in recorded history. The “contraception mandate” in Obamacare also catapulted the list price of birth control and embroiled the courts in an all-out war over religious liberty and the size and scope of government. A decade later, how should conservatives feel about the contraception mandate? Well, it’s complicated.
Although Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law in 2010, the contraception mandate didn’t fully go into effect until 2014. There’s no question that the mandate was illegal as written, and, even after multiple court-ordered modifications, many of which differed about the scope of religious liberty, it remained constitutionally dubious at best, but the two pragmatic questions about the mandate provide two opposite results.
