TNR recently profiled Sister Gramick and we’re honored to have her voice on the Dish all this week. Previous videos here, here and here. A reader sends an email related to the today’s topic:
After reading the beautiful letter by the Franciscans that you posted last week and hearing the impassioned words of Sister Jeannine Gramick on your blog today, I decided to write you in the hope that you might share my letter with your readers. At my school, half of the professors of childbearing age do not belong to the faith. Since most of us are untenured, we are reluctant to disclose our views on the HHS mandate that university health insurers must provide access to birth control for students and employees. Rather than rehashing the arguments in favor of the administration’s plan, I want to explain what it feels like to work for an institution that not only assumes the right to decide the legitimacy of my prescriptions and procedures, but which also regularly treats its female faculty, staff, and students like ill-informed miscreants.
Women at my school have become resigned to public scolding by our student newspaper and the numerous guest lecturers invited by our administration. Each week I open the editorial page to find accusations of laziness and licentiousness on the part of those who would indulge in the luxury of birth control. Catholic officials visit campus to share their uniform perspective on the threat posed by the government to the sanctity of reproduction. In fact, everyone has been given a platform to air their concerns except, of course, the women who work here.
Like the moral crusades that defined paternalistic attitudes toward women throughout modern history, the Catholic hierarchy assumes a protectionist stance toward the women engaged by its institutions. We’ve been told that our reproductive treatments may be covered if our reasons for needing them are medical rather than “immoral,” and only then if the university is generous enough to acknowledge the validity of our prescribers’ diagnoses. It is absurd to assert that Catholic objections to the mandate have nothing to do with women’s rights while simultaneously scrutinizing and silencing the very women affected by the new law.
Calling itself the victim in a cultural “war on religion,” the Church demeans women’s ability to comprehend the stakes of the debate. We understood in the 1910s that arguments about the sanctity of the home were attempts to keep women out of the public sphere. We understood in the 1950s that laments about the breakdown of the nuclear family were meant to keep women out of the workforce. We understood in the 1970s that invocations of chivalry were used to keep women out of powerful military positions. And now this. We’ve heard it all before.
Catholic leaders have warned that should its organizations lose lawsuits that would make them exempt from the mandate, schools like mine would be required either to restrict their services to the Catholic population or to deny health care coverage to their workers. Indeed, Franciscan University in Ohio and Ave Maria University in Florida have already eliminated their student insurance plans. Yet we ought to keep in mind that Catholic schools and hospitals cannot maintain their status in the marketplace of ideas and treatments without hiring talented non-Catholics. The Church’s anguished concern about the future of Catholic institutions thus ought to run in the other direction: without non-Catholic employees, what hope do Catholic universities and hospitals have of providing high-quality education and care?
If my university is willing to discount whatever contributions I might make to a debate that concerns my own biological functions, why should it assume I have the intellectual capacity to educate its students? My classroom authority has been undermined by my own administration, which has proven itself ready to suppress my objections in the name of freedom. Of course, tenure-track and contingent faculty have difficulties opposing all sorts of administrative policies on all kinds of campuses. Yet when these regulations extend to our bodies and find their way into the national conversation, we ought not to allow our consent to be coerced by our tenuous employment status. Female employees at universities like mine must find ways to make our voices heard. As private entities, Catholic schools are well within their rights to treat us this way. I just wish that they would stop pretending to speak on our behalf.
“Ask Anything” archive here.
The Dish 