LAST FRIDAY, the Trump administration made good on now-ousted Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Priceâs promise to âre-examineâ the Affordable Care Actâs birth control benefit, reversing the ACA mandate that birth control be available without a copay.
With new rules written by a lawyer with ties to anti-abortion groups (so you know this isnât about public health), the Trump administration will now allow employers to refuse coverage for birth control. This doesnât just apply to religious organizations, eitherâthe new rules specify that employers with âmoralâ objections can also deny workers coverage.
Justifications for the new regulation are shaky, to say the least. According to reporting last week from the New York Times, one of the reasons for the change given by the administration is that birth control carries âhealth risksâ and âthe mandate could promote ârisky sexual behaviorâ among some teenagers and young adults.â
Hereâs the thing about the claim that access to birth control encourages promiscuity: Itâs a myth. A 2014 study in St. Louis called the Contraceptive Choice Project, which offered free birth control to 9,256 women and teenage girls, found no correlation between increased birth control access and an increase in the number of study participantsâ sexual partners. The argument that birth control leads to promiscuity isnât a scientific oneâitâs completely ideological.
The same goes for the insinuation that because birth control carries health risks, its access should be limitedâan argument that conveniently ignores that all kinds of medicines have health risks. But not being able to prevent pregnancy, or not being able to use birth control to treat health conditions like endometriosis or polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), are both riskier propositions than the ones the administration claims to be concerned about.
Itâs also worth noting that militant measures like these arenât particularly pro-life, because increasing access to birth control has been shown to reduce abortion ratesâcut off access and you risk the opposite. And making people pay out of pocket is one of the most effective ways to keep birth control out of reach, especially in its most effective forms. Just ask anyone whoâs ever had to pay for an IUD without insurance.
The Obama administrationâs birth control mandate was groundbreaking, but it also simply wrote into law what we already knew: Birth control is a necessary part of health care. Itâs medicine.
Now, with the Trump administrationâs latest attack, we can no longer rely on federal protections for safeguarding birth control access, so theyâll need to come from the states. Reproductive rights advocates are emphasizing Oregonâs Reproductive Health Equity Act (RHEA) as one way of safeguarding access under a hostile administration. RHEA, which passed both chambers in July and which Gov. Kate Brown signed in August, enshrines copay-free reproductive health care services, including birth control and abortion, into law, as well as protections for transgender patients and undocumented immigrants. âWe are so grateful that Gov. Kate Brown recently signed the Reproductive Health Equity Act, which protects no-cost coverage for contraception in Oregon statute,â said Lisa Gardner, President and CEO of Planned Parenthood of Southwestern Oregon, in a statement released last Friday. âWe will do everything in our power to enforce this landmark law and to stop Donald Trump from rolling back the progress women have made over the past century.â