Yesterday, August 1, 2012, was a momentous day for women, marking the official beginning of a process of ensuring that millions of women across the United States will–finally–have access to a full range of preventive health care services without a co-pay.

These include a wide range of services and interventions identified by the Institutes of Medicine as essential to women’s health and well-being, including breastfeeding support, supplies, and counseling; screening and counseling for interpersonal and domestic violence; screening for gestational diabetes; DNA testing for high-risk strains of HPV; counseling regarding sexually transmitted infections, including HIV; screening for HIV; contraceptive methods and counseling; and well-woman visits. Likewise, the ACA also ensures that plans must cover an array of services, vaccinations, and interventions, including those specifically needed by women, infants, children, and adolescents at different points in their lifecycle.

Recently, an all-Catholic coalition of 43 dioceses, hospitals, church agencies, schools and other religious-owned or operated but public entities filed a dozen separate lawsuits against the Obama administration, protesting the requirement that insurance plans covering secular employees include contraceptive services. These lawsuits follow on the heels of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ high-profile attacks on nuns and Girl Scouts.

What I find as interesting as who Catholic leaders have chosen to attack is when they choose to be silent.

In recent years, the political right has tried to separate the issues of abortion and contraception, condemning abortion loudly while at the same time working quietly to make access to birth control more difficult and expensive. At the same time, in their rhetoric, they have tried to conflate birth control and abortion in the public’s mind—for example, in the case of Plan B. The recent insurance controversy has linked those two issues, but not to the advantage of pro-life and anti-contraception forces. Suddenly, women have been forced to confront the fact that the right even to birth control, which they considered long settled, is more fragile than they realized.