“Free sterilization? I don’t know anything about free sterilization. I don’t know anything about that. I’m sorry. The answer is, I don’t. But I don’t think anybody is proposing that.”
~House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.)
Sabrina Gladstone
CNSNews.com
8/10/2012
Thanks to an Obamacare regulation that took effect on Aug. 1, health care plans in Oregon will now be required to provide free sterilizations to 15- year-old girls even if the parents of those girls do not consent to the procedure.
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius finalized the regulation earlier this year.
It says that all health care plans in the United States–except those provided by actual houses of worship organized under the section of the Internal Revenue Code reserved for churches per se–must provide coverage, without cost-sharing, for sterilizations and all Food and Drug Administration-approved contraceptives to “all women with reproductive capacity.”
In practical terms, “all women with reproductive capacity” means girls as young as about 12. That, according to the National Institutes of Health, is when girls usually start menstruating.
When the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act–a.k.a. Obamacare–was enacted in March 2010 it included (in Section 2713) a non-specific requirement that health care plans must provide “additional preventive services” to women. These unspecified “additional preventive services,” the law said, were to be “provided for in comprehensive guidelines supported by the Health Resources and Services Administration,” a division of the Department of Health and Human Services…
…Under Oregon law, girls from 15 years of age and up are given complete control over whether to be sterilized or not. The parents or guardians of a minor girl–between 15 and 18–can neither grant nor deny consent for a sterilization…
Read the entire article, with video, is at CNSNews.com
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