Gretchen Borchelt, Senior Counsel & Director of State Reproductive Health Policy

Gretchen Borchelt is Senior Counsel and Director of State Reproductive Health Policy at the National Women’s Law Center. She oversees the Center’s state-based legal and policy efforts to protect and expand women’s access to reproductive health care. Gretchen also works on a range of issues as part of the Center’s Health and Reproductive Rights Team, including health care law implementation, access to contraception, refusals to provide health care, and judicial nominations. Previously, she worked at Physicians for Human Rights and was a Women’s Law and Public Policy Fellow at the National Partnership for Women and Families. Gretchen is a graduate of Columbia Law School and the University of Virginia.

Expert in: Abortion, Pharmacy Refusals, Barriers to Reproductive Care, Family Planning, Health Care & Reproductive Rights
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My Take

Texas Proves that Slashing Funds for Birth Control Hurts Women and Families

Posted by Gretchen Borchelt, Senior Counsel & Director of State Reproductive Health Policy | Posted on: September 28, 2012 at 02:24 pm

If you think we’ve been crying wolf when we say that women’s access to birth control is under attack, here’s some proof. A new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine evaluated the initial impact of recent birth control-focused budget cuts in Texas. In 2011, Texas lawmakers cut funding for birth control services by two-thirds. And to add insult to injury, they adopted a provision that would give the remaining funds first to entities other than family planning clinics. In other words, family planning clinics were the very last on the list to get limited family planning funds!

The impact? Already, 53 clinics that provided birth control services have closed. Clinics that remain open have been forced to restrict access to the most effective contraceptive methods (like IUDs) because of their higher up-front costs. And clinics are requiring women to pay for services.

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Tags: Birth Control, Texas, Barriers to Reproductive Care | Add new comment

Breaking News: Ninth Circuit Comes Through for Arizona Women

Posted by Gretchen Borchelt, Senior Counsel & Director of State Reproductive Health Policy | Posted on: August 01, 2012 at 04:36 pm

We just heard that the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has issued a preliminary injunction, stopping the extreme pre-viability ban in Arizona from going into effect pending consideration of the case. This is great news for women in Arizona.

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Tags: Abortion, Arizona, Abortion, Courts & the Judiciary, Health Care & Reproductive Rights | 1 comment

Arizona Women Put at Risk Thanks to Judge Ignoring Roe v. Wade

Posted by Gretchen Borchelt, Senior Counsel & Director of State Reproductive Health Policy | Posted on: July 31, 2012 at 04:00 pm

In a devastating setback for women in Arizona, a federal judge yesterday upheld a state law that bans all abortion procedures at 20 weeks from a woman’s last menstrual period (PDF). This law is an unconstitutional attempt to take away from women, their doctors, and their families an extremely personal, medical decision. It harms women in the most desperate situations by ignoring women’s health needs and individual circumstances.

Passing these types of laws has been a recent trend in the states, spurred by those who want to see Roe v. Wade overturned. Since 2010, when Nebraska passed the first such law, states have taken them up with alarming speed. There are now 9 states that ban abortion earlier in pregnancy than current law allows. We’ve already seen the devastating consequences for women in Nebraska.

As bad as all of these laws are, the Arizona law is particularly egregious. It bans abortion earlier than the other state laws, with only a severely limited emergency exception. 

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Tags: Abortion, Arizona, Abortion, Roe v. Wade, Health Care & Reproductive Rights | 2 comments

One Part of the Health Care Law We’d Like to See Thrown Out

Posted by Gretchen Borchelt, Senior Counsel & Director of State Reproductive Health Policy | Posted on: July 06, 2012 at 04:36 pm

While we take every opportunity to cheer that – thanks to the Supreme Court – women will continue to receive so many critical benefits provided by the health care law, it is also worth pointing out one way that the law hurts women: it explicitly allows states to pass laws prohibiting private insurance coverage of abortion. After the law passed, state politicians who don’t want abortion to be legal in America stepped right up, pushing bans on insurance coverage of abortion to make it unaffordable.

At this midyear point in 2012, there are now twenty states that prohibit a woman from obtaining insurance coverage for abortion either on the exchange or in any private insurance plan in the state.

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Tags: Abortion, Affordable Care Act (ACA), Abortion, Health Care Reform, Health Care & Reproductive Rights | 12 comments

Stopping a Rollback of Access to Contraception in Arizona

Posted by Gretchen Borchelt, Senior Counsel & Director of State Reproductive Health Policy | 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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Tags: Arizona, Birth Control Refusal, Birth Control, Health Care, Health Insurance, Reproductive Health & Rights, Barriers to Reproductive Care, Religious Restrictions, Health Care Reform, Health Care & Reproductive Rights | Add new comment