In a clear affirmation of the longstanding right of women and girls in California to choose whether or not to terminate a pregnancy, the Director of California’s Department of Managed Health Care (DMHC) this week rejected a multi-year effort by the administrations of two California universities affiliated with the Catholic Church to limit coverage of abortions in their employee health care plans.
California has long led the nation in the protection of a woman’s right to effective reproductive health care. Since the early 1970’s case law, statutes and the state Constitution itself have made it clear that under California law all women and girls possess a right to choose whether or not to terminate a pregnancy. Thus, the California Constitution enshrines an express right to privacy as a result of an amendment that followed court cases recognizing a woman’s right to choose. This was followed more recently (2002) by the Reproductive Privacy Act (RPA) which guarantees a woman’s right to both terminate a pregnancy and to birth control.
These fundamental rights to reproductive health care are reinforced by statutes that require state regulated health care plans including insurance plans and HMOs to provide coverage for safe and effective means to terminate a pregnancy once a woman or girl has exercised her right to choose that outcome.
There is only one category of abortion that an HMO or insurance provider would not be required to cover: an abortion that is illegal under the California Reproductive Privacy Act (termination of a pregnancy of a viable fetus is illegal under the RPA).
(One aspect of the law that confuses many is the question of what is a non-medically necessary abortion. Some anti-abortion advocates characterize such an abortion as “elective.” In fact, there is no category called “elective” abortion under California law unless one is referring to the right of a woman to “choose” to have an abortion (for whatever reason) in the sense that she may elect to have an abortion. A 1967 California statute called the Therapeutic Abortion Act attempted to create a distinction between abortions needed to protect the life of the mother and other abortions. At the time this was an advance from an era where all abortion was illegal. But the California Supreme Court struck down that attempt to create different classes of abortions In People v. Barksdale (1972) as “impermissibly vague.” The effect was to recognize abortions generally as legal in California prior to the US Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade. The TAA remained on the books, however, until expressly repealed by the RPA when it went into effect in 2003.
(The choice to have an abortion is, thus, separate from what kinds of medical or surgical methods are safe and effective to carry out that choice. Any such safe and effective method is considered “medically necessary” under the Knox-Keene Act and therefore will be part of providing a basic medical service that must be covered by a plan licensed under the Act by the DMHC, as the letters to the major insurers from the DMHC make clear. A non-medically necessary abortion is an oxymoron. Confusion may exist because some insurers explain to their beneficiaries that a request to use a drug like RU-486 for treatment of a medical condition other than pregnancy is considered “experimental” and therefore not “medically necessary.”)
Despite this clear Constitutional and statutory framework, in place since the mid-1970’s, certain entities affiliated with the Catholic Church have attempted to put in place new categories or distinctions that would carve out certain abortions from those that are protected under California law.
A few years after a resounding legal defeat at the California Supreme Court in 2004 (in an attempt to overturn the Women’s Contraception Equity Act), the Catholic Church apparently used its influence at Loyola Marymount University to get the University and its insurers to engineer in secret approval by the DMHC of an HMO product that would have prevented coverage of what Anthem called “elective” abortions as well as a wide variety of birth control methods. This restriction was approved in a hidden administrative process inside the DMHC, which has regulatory authority over the HMO industry in California, during the Schwarzenegger governorship. For more detail on that effort see my earlier post here.
DMHC records obtained through a Public Records Act request suggest that that 2008 decision was made on the basis of a relatively thin legal analysis with no reference to the Constitution or the RPA. In any case, Anthem did not in fact sell any HMO product based on that 2008 interpretation by the DMHC. Only in 2013 did Loyola Marymount University and Santa Clara University, both Jesuit affiliated schools, announce their intent to buy health care plans from Kaiser and Anthem that would exclude some abortion coverage.
Their announcement of this intention included new categorizations of abortions called “medically necessary” and “elective.” The new plans would have eliminated whatever was considered an “elective” as opposed to a “medically necessary” abortion. As explained above, the concept of an “elective” abortion does not exist in California law. Tellingly, neither the Universities nor the insurers ever definitively explained what kinds of abortions these new categories would include and provided no legal basis for these distinctions. At one point, Santa Clara University proposed language that mirrored that of the Hyde Amendment, attempting to define any abortion that was undertaken for anything other than to save the life of the mother as “elective.” Again, there was no basis for this kind of discriminatory language in California law, as the DMHC has now unambiguously agreed.
Faculty at Santa Clara University objected to this effort by the University Administration and its Trustees and, with the strong support of the campus chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), convened a special session of its Faculty Senate, apparently for the first time in the 150 year history of the school, to affirm its objections to the University’s new policy effort. Specifically, faculty objected to the failure of the University to abide by its commitment to shared governance in attempting the policy change. A campus wide vote of the faculty overwhelmingly approved this objection.
Several faculty demanded that the University define these new categories so that employees could understand the implications for their health care and to provide an explanation why these categories had a legal and constitutional basis in California. Many university staff and several student groups supported these efforts.
The University was never able to answer that challenge. University officials said they were attempting to answer those questions in conversations with Kaiser and Anthem. But no clear answer was ever provided. Instead, in the face of continued faculty and staff efforts to block the policy change, the trustees of Santa Clara publicly backed up the Administration and even went so far as to suggest that they were morally obligated to stop coverage for abortion because women faculty and staff might be using abortion to engage in “gender selection” of their children. This claim outraged many on the campus because it was not only facially absurd and not backed up by any serious research (in fact, quite the opposite, see here and here) but a racial slur aimed at Asian American communities. Unfortunately, this kind of charge has been used more widely of late by many in the anti-abortion movement.
Several faculty members at both SCU and LMU began a concerted effort last fall to raise objections to the proposed new restrictions with the State of California. Working closely with several advocacy groups including Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California, the ACLU of Northern California, the Trust Women Silver Ribbon Campaign and the National Health Law Program, extensive discussions with the DMHC took place.
Finally this past week the DMHC agreed unequivocally that the proposal by the University administrations at LMU and SCU had no basis in California law.
The Director of the DMHC, Michelle Rouillard, admitted that earlier approvals of new products that would have ended coverage of legal abortions were wrong. Further, she stated, using new discriminatory categories and limitations like “elective” abortions was inconsistent with both the California Constitution and the Knox-Keene Act. The letter, sent to seven major insurers, can be found here.
There has been widespread media coverage of the effort by SCU and LMU faculty and staff to defend reproductive freedom here, here and here. The ACLU has posted a blog about the DMHC letters here.
