If the Obama administration's goal was to come up with a policy decision that in one fell swoop could reinforce the worst fears about the Affordable Care Act, while at the same time damaging the president's re-election chances in some key toss-up states, then the recently announced contraception mandate was right on target.

Perhaps the Obama camp just couldn't take the good news of an improving jobs' picture and had to come up with some new ammunition to hand its political opponents. How else do you explain this decision that, in name of women health care rights, tramples on religious rights?

The Affordable Care Act gives the Department of Health and Human Services the authority to mandate basic preventive health services that insurance plans must provide. Among them is access to contraception and contraceptive services without co-pay or a deductible, as recommended by the Institute of Medicine.

The institute saw advantages in helping women space their pregnancies. It also pointed to studies that found that women experiencing unintended pregnancies are more likely to have little or no prenatal care, engage in risky behaviors such as smoking and drinking or experience domestic violence.

Makes sense so far. But what to do about religious institutions, most principally the Roman Catholic Church, that oppose the use of birth control on theological grounds? It would appear to be a clear violation of religious freedom to force the church to choose between either paying for an insurance policy that provides a service it considers morally wrong or terminating insurance for its employees.

In issuing her policy decision, DHHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius recognized this need for a religious exemption, but provides it in unreasonably narrow terms. An employer will be considered religious, and so exempt, only if its main purpose is spreading religious beliefs and it largely employs people of that faith.

This means a parish staff likely would qualify for the exemption, but not a large church-run soup kitchen employing and serving people of all faiths, or a Catholic-run nursing home or hospital. Those institutions have a year to comply.

In other words, the government is ordering the church to abandon its moral position on providing insurance for birth control because it employs and helps people regardless of their faith. That makes no sense.

In defense of its decision, the DHHS notes that large percentages of American Catholics disagree with their church's teaching on contraception and that most Catholic women have used some form of artificial birth control. That is beside the point. It is up to Catholics to iron out those matters, not for the government to impose its will.

A broader exemption, which would allow churches that oppose contraception not to include it in their institutional insurance plans, would protect religious choice while still achieving the administration's laudable goal in probably 95 percent of plans. In those few faith exemptions, workers who want contraceptive care could obtain it though co-insurance plans.

Perhaps the Obama administration is betting that Catholics in key battleground states such as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida and Ohio - because most disagree with the church's birth-control teachings - will not care if the DHHS tells their church what to do. That could be a fatal political miscalculation.

President Obama should reverse this policy-making and political misstep.