Poll Finds Divisions Over Requiring Coverage (of birth control)
The close divide in a Senate vote Thursday over whether employers can refuse insurance coverage for contraception mirrors a sharp partisan divide among the public, according to a national poll and interviews with women around the country.
Over all, 63 percent of Americans said they supported the new federal requirement that private health insurance plans cover the cost of birth control, according to the survey of 1,519 Americans, conducted from Feb. 13 to Feb. 19 for the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. The poll has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.
While 8 in 10 Democrats said they supported requiring birth control coverage, only 4 in 10 Republicans did. Six in 10 people calling themselves independents voiced approval. Many Americans, in the survey and in independent interviews, expressed impatience with the focus on women’s reproductive issues in an era of economic distress.
Jennifer Meyer, 27, of Sugar Creek, Mo., said in an interview that the current controversy over birth control coverage was “a way for employers to get out of footing the bill by saying they don’t agree with it.” She called herself an independent, but said she was leaning toward Democrats as the “lesser of two evils.”
full: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/02/us/politics/americans-divided-on-birth-control-coverage-poll-finds.html
Later in the article, someone from Georgia who's a self-labeled "conservative Democrat" saying "the attack that is being made on women’s health through politics is something that our nation will look back on as a dark blemish.”
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