Kyle C. Velte

Old Turf New Battles Feminism, Legislation, and the Body

Legislation about female bodies has been a concern of social work since the early days of Hull House. Specifically, two Hull House residents and physicians, Alice Hamilton and Rachelle Yarro, were involved in programming and policy work related to the access to contraceptive devices (Haslett, 1997). Hamilton and Yarro sagely understood the ability (or lack thereof) to control reproduction as being related to ‘‘the causes and consequences of poverty, the role and status of women, classism, and ethnocentrism’’ (Haslett, 1997, p. 273). Reproductive rights continues to be a disputed turf on which women’s agency is battled over, compromised, bartered with and diminished through legislation, health policy, and Supreme Court decisions. The recent Supreme Court decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. (2014) highlights multiple concerns regarding embodiment from a feminist perspective, including but not limited to the right of a corporation to determine if and which kinds of contraception it will provide as part of workers’ health care package, the determination that a corporation is a ‘‘person’’ with religiously held beliefs, and ultimately that a corporation’s religious noncorporal body has the same or perhaps more rights than women’s actual, corporal bodies. The implications of this Court decision potentially has dire consequences for people in the United States as we begin to think about the rights of corporations to discriminate against because it is a ‘‘person’’ complete with a belief system and a religious perspective protected by the constitution, even when that discrimination violates an otherwise enforceable antidiscrimination law. In the Supreme Court’s June 30, 2014, decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. (2014), Hobby Lobby the owners of several closely held, for-profit corporations objected to regulations issued under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that required them to provide costfree health insurance coverage to women for certain methods of contraception. The basis of the companies’ objections was that the regulations violated the sincerely held religious beliefs of the companies’ owners. Although the companies asserted that the regulations violated both the Constitution (specifically, the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause) and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (RFRA), the Court, in a deeply divided decision, decided the case solely on statutory grounds under the RFRA. The RFRA prohibits the federal government from substantially burdening a person’s exercise of religion, even if that burden results from the application a law of general applicability, unless