Free birth-control and breast pumps? Government subsidies for domestic-abuse interventions? Some people have no trouble conjuring the moral slide those new policies will precipitate.

Modeled on recommendations by the independent Institute of Medicine and announced by the U. S. Dept. of Health and Human Services this week, the new provisions set off a firestorm of protest in some conservative circles, including this diatribe from Stephen Colbert's conservative  character on Comedy Central.