Local Catholic women support court's decision

Friday, Jul. 18, 2014

SALT LAKE CITY — Count Utahns Stephanie Buck and Dr. Keri Kasun among those who applauded the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 30 ruling in the Burwell v. Hobby Lobby case, which held that closely held companies had the right to not comply, based on religious objections, to a federal mandate to include contraceptives in employee health insurance.

The Catholic Church opposes artificial birth control; both Kasun and Buck practice and teach natural family planning and believe the Church’s doctrine in this matter for several reasons.

Kasun, who is a Saint Thomas More parishioner, follows the Church’s teaching “because I’m an intelligent modern woman” who sees artificial birth control as “essentially polluting your body and the environment,” she said. “Potent artificial hormones override your body’s own natural systems responsible for much more than just regulating fertility and a woman’s natural cycle.”

Raised Catholic, Kasun didn’t always understand the reasons behind the Church’s position on this matter, but during her own faith journey she began to understand what was meant by “the human body was created in God’s likeness and image,” she said. 

Kasun has had experience with natural family planning’s benefits in her own life. She married at the age of 40, and using natural family planning was able to conceive and deliver a healthy son, she said.

Also, as a pharmacist in a non-traditional practice, she believes that natural methods of family planning provide a superior alternative that is equally effective to artificial birth control. She points out that the Church is not against the use of artificial hormone medications prescribed for treatment of medical conditions in women, but “we’re against treating fertility like a disease. As a Catholic woman in the profession of pharmacy I cannot by conscience use, provide or recommend artificial means of birth control to another woman, [but] my conscious objection does not take away another woman’s free will to choose the path they want to take,” she said.

For Buck, the heart of the Hobby Lobby decision was religious freedom, she said, “and if women feel like they need contraception or an abortion for their own reasons, then I think that they should pay for them. I don’t think that their employer needs to pay for them.”

Like Kasun, Buck sees artificial birth control and abortion as harmful to the health of women.

Natural family planning can not only effectively prevent pregnancy but can “also be used to achieve pregnancy, so it’s a both/and situation, and you’re not putting anything foreign in your body, so there aren’t any devices that can harm you and there aren’t any chemicals that are carcinogenic or that mess with your hormones or any of that stuff,” she said.

Natural family planning has other advantages, she said: It allows her husband to share in the responsibility of the decision of growing their family, and also increased their openness to additional children. A third spiritual benefit, she said, is that “it’s given me the opportunity to work through some trust issues with God that I would [otherwise] not have had.” 

Both women also said they believe that many of the moral quandaries faced by today’s world can be traced back to a general lowering of morality catalyzed by the widespread use of artificial birth control, a result predicted by Pope Paul VI in his 1968 encyclical Humane Vitae, which outlined the Catholic Church’s position on artificial birth control.