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Gretchen Borchelt, Senior Counsel

Gretchen Borchelt is Senior Counsel for Health and Reproductive Rights. She promotes access to contraception, including taking action against pharmacy refusals and for insurance coverage of contraception; analyzes legislation, court decisions, and policy initiatives affecting women's reproductive rights; and contributes to the Center's judicial nominations work. Prior to joining the Center, Ms. Borchelt worked at Physicians for Human Rights and was a Women's Law and Public Policy Fellow at the National Partnership for Women and Families. She is a graduate of Columbia Law School and the University of Virginia. Ms. Borchelt currently serves on the Board of Directors for Population Connection.

My Take

Stopping a Rollback of Access to Contraception in Arizona

Posted by Gretchen Borchelt, Senior Counsel | Posted on: March 21, 2012 at 12:02 pm

Good news from Arizona! Legislators there listened to women that their health is not up for debate! Politicians were attempting to make it more difficult for Arizona women to access insurance coverage of birth control by stripping away current protections in the state contraceptive equity law. They wanted to allow any employer with a religious objection – even the CEO of a for-profit corporation – to refuse to provide contraceptive coverage to employees. They also wanted to make it easier for those employers to fire a woman if they found out she obtained birth control on her own. Most egregious to the press and public, the bill would have forced women who work for those employers and need contraception for medical reasons to prove it.

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More Proof that States are Turning Against Women

Posted by Gretchen Borchelt, Senior Counsel | Posted on: March 16, 2012 at 04:13 pm

Don’t believe us when we say that states are becoming increasingly hostile to women’s access to necessary reproductive health care? If legislation requiring mandatory vaginal ultrasounds and allowing employers to fire women for using birth control, aren’t proof enough, I’ve got more for you. The Guttmacher Institute just released a new study looking at how the abortion policy landscape at the state level has shifted over the last decade. The conclusion: more states are hostile to abortion rights now than in 2000. And more than half of American women of reproductive age live in those states.

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On Roe’s Anniversary, A Standard Refrain

Posted by Gretchen Borchelt, Senior Counsel | Posted on: January 22, 2012 at 09:00 am

My coworker Leila has already explained the problems with the recent decision by the Fifth Circuit overturning a district court’s block of key provisions of a Texas law forcing doctors to give women seeking abortions ultrasound information.

What Leila didn’t mention, however, was who wrote the decision: Chief Judge Edith Jones. And although I am as outraged as Leila by the decision, I’m not entirely surprised.

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Please voice your support for birth control without cost-sharing on Wall Street Journal site!

Posted by Gretchen Borchelt, Senior Counsel | Posted on: July 21, 2011 at 10:14 am

The Wall Street Journal has asked for comments on whether readers support the IOM’s recommendation that women be provided the full range of FDA-approved contraception without cost sharing.

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Score One for Patients: HHS Refusal Regulation Eliminated (In Part)

Posted by Gretchen Borchelt, Senior Counsel | Posted on: February 23, 2011 at 03:03 pm

We're pleased to report that on Friday, the Department of Health and Human Services rescinded most of the bad Bush Administration "midnight" regulation on health care provider "conscience." For those of you who have forgotten, the Bush regulation supposedly interpreted three existing laws that allow individuals and entities to refuse abortion services.But it went much further than

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