Religious leaders, who are all, "I don't want the Affordable Care Act and its free birth control pills to ruin my church-going ladies": you're in for a rude awakening.

Because (some of) those ladies are like, fuck yes, give me the free pills.

Via The Atlantic:

But what about religiously-affiliated women? Where were their voices in all of this? And what did they think about the mandate? This was the question that intrigued Elizabeth Patton, an OB/GYN and health-services researcher at the University of Michigan. "There was a lot of media framing around religious opposition to the mandate and we tend to hear from certain religious and political leaders, but the voices of religious women aren't really well-represented," she said. "We wanted to see what women who self-identify with a religious affiliation think."


"Leaders," like mostly men who don't have vaginas but are very concerned about the ongoings of others' vaginas.

But:

What they found is surprising. Catholic women, the group most frequently singled out in the policy debate, were among the most supportive of employer-provided contraception coverage. Sixty-three percent of Catholic women said that employers should provide no-cost contraception for employees, making them second only to mainline Protestant women, at 66 percent, in their support. Both groups supported the mandate at greater rates than the general population—according to the Public Religion Research Institute, 61 percent of Americans think public corporations should have to provide health insurance that offers free contraception, and 57 percent think the same for private corporations. "Catholics are often portrayed as the group that is opposed to the mandate, but these women had some of the highest rates of support," Patton noted. "This shows that the narrative that we hear isn't reflecting what women are thinking."


Oh.

So, again: that's some, not all, ladies of a sampling conducted in a study—and certainly, it's not the end of the conversation; as the piece points out, 80 percent of women have some religious affiliation, with complex views on things like abortion and rape—but it's a start, and a message to religious decision makers to maybe start listening to what their congregants want, not what they think they should want.


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