Birth Control

won't you celebrate with me
what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model.

When my coworker posed the question, why are you celebrating women being able to access preventative services without a copay, my answer was sure and simple, “Because women deserve it.”

Not everyone agrees with that statement. If the last months of public debate have shown anything, it’s that there are a wide variety of views on the women’s right to access reproductive healthcare. Some people think it is good public policy and long overdue; others think that it’s a gift or worse, immoral.

I’m personally inclined to side with Justice Ginsberg. In reflecting on Roe she said, “[In] the balance is a woman’s autonomous charge of her full life’s course, her ability to stand in relation to men, society and to stay as an independent, self-sustaining equal citizen.” As I celebrate the ACA and Roe, I celebrate women’s ability to build lives they lives they desire. I’m grateful that reproductive healthcare is one of the tools that expands rather than constrains women’s decisions.

born in babylon
both nonwhite and woman
what did i see to be except myself? Read more »

As challenges to the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive coverage provision pile up—on the theory that somehow more lawsuits equals more legal merit—the United Nations declares that access to contraception is a basic human right.

After recovering from shock that some in the United States would disagree with the United Nations (sarcasm!), take a look at some of the things the UN Population Fund report points out. Access to contraception is a fundamental part of women’s ability to make decisions for ourselves and realize other rights—including getting an education and participating in the workforce, both of which in turn improve nations’ economies. And financial, cultural, and legal barriers to contraception infringe on women’s rights. Read more »

Last week at a lunch with African advocates for women’s rights, we discussed pregnancy rates in Africa and the United States. Across the continents one thing remained constant—women have better outcomes when they are able to control their fertility. They enjoy greater freedom to pursue academic studies or careers, and to plan their lives as they see fit.

The ACA’s contraceptive coverage rule affords 47 million women this freedom by ensuring that they will be able to access birth control and related information through private insurance without having to worry about the cost. While many celebrate the anticipated improvements to women and children’s health, others are infuriated by the rule.

Opponents to birth control have made speeches decrying the rule, hosted conferences and brought lawsuit, after lawsuit, after lawsuit... Since the lawsuits have proved to be a publicity-gaining tool, we can anticipate many more. Read more »

Isn’t it a shame when we live in a time when we want to applaud someone for simply doing what they are supposed to do? Well, that is the case with Xavier University.

Let’s give credit where credit is due. Xavier University, a Catholic institution, announced last week that it is reversing its previous decision and will provide contraception coverage in its employees’ health-insurance plan. It’s encouraging to see a Catholic institution embrace true religious freedom by allowing employees to make personal choices based on their own beliefs and what is best for their health and the well-being of their families.

The controversy started last spring when Xavier University employees learned that their health insurance would no longer cover birth control unless it was necessary for medical purposes. The university president wrote in a letter to employees that “as a Catholic priest and as president of a Catholic university, I have concluded that, absent a legal mandate, it is inconsistent for a Catholic institution to cover those drugs and procedures the Church opposes.” But Catholic universities like Xavier University employ people from all faiths, and those employees should have the same rights and benefits that other employees have.

The policy was reconsidered after many employees, students, and alumni expressed their displeasure with the sudden change. Read more »

If you are wondering why they would need a study to show 2+2=4, that’s exactly how I felt when I saw the two headlines:

“Free birth control cuts abortion rate dramatically, study finds”

“HPV vaccine not tied to increased promiscuity for girls”

The results of the first study followed an experiment “when more than 9,000 women ages 14 to 45 in the St. Louis area were given no-cost contraception for three years.” And the results? “Among teen girls ages 15 to 19 who participated in the study, the annual birth rate was 6.3 per 1,000 girls, far below the U.S. rate of 34.3 per 1,000 for girls the same age.” And “abortion rates dropped from two-thirds to three-quarters lower than the national rate.” So providing women access to no-cost contraception means dramatically lowered unintended pregnancy and abortion rates. All right. Sounds good. Read more »

Not to go off on a rant, but…

Earlier this week, I was very upset by an interesting post on The New York Times Economix blog about the economic arguments for contraception.

Not the whole post by any means, just the first sentence – which was wrong. Really, really wrong.

It said, “Americans passionately disagree about both the biology and the morality of contraception.”

This simply isn’t true.

Nine out of 10 adults believe birth control is moral. That doesn’t sound like passionate disagreement to me.

Oh, and on the “biology” of birth control? 99 percent of sexually active women have used contraception. It is one of the most widely prescribed categories of drugs and devices in the country.

Birth control is an everyday part of the lives of American adults in the 21st century.

It is the norm. The usual. Conventional. Routine.

And yet, it certainly has been debated in the news a lot lately.

Why? Read more »

Picking up where Leila left off, let’s look at how far bosses’ take their license to discriminate. Consider a world in which our boss decides whether our decisions are morally or religiously “clean” enough for him. You may think this is a thing of the past or that employers only have objections to covering birth control in health insurance. The following are real life examples of bosses exercising their “religious freedom”—can you guess the years in which they happened?

1. A school fired a fourth-grade teacher for asking for maternity leave based on the employer’s belief that she should not have become pregnant outside of marriage. According to court documents, the school administrator told her “there are consequences for disobeying the word of God.”  
2. A chain of banks refused to cover health insurance for dependents of a single mother or a married woman because, according to a former employee, the boss believes it is “a man’s responsibility to provide for his family.”

As you may have heard, Hobby Lobby is suing the federal government because its owner believes that the HHS rule requiring health insurance coverage of birth control violates his religious freedom. There have been a whole series of reactions to the lawsuit, including one led by pastors protesting Hobby Lobby’s decision to sue. Then there’s The Oklahoman newspaper’s reaction, in which its editorial board recently came out in support of the owners’ lawsuit, calling it a “powerful voice in fight against Obamacare mandate.”

In the editorial, the board dismissed a point I had made to an Oklahoman reporter, where I explained that it is a slippery slope to allow employers to opt out of generally applicable rules because of his or her own moral or religious objection to such rules. While people may balk at the requirement to cover the “oh-so-controversial” health care item known as birth control, how would people feel if an employer refused to cover children immunizations?

Well, the editorial board took my point and said it supported theirs. They theorized that because people have the right to refuse a vaccine, bosses should have the right to refuse to cover vaccines in their company’s health insurance. And here is the impasse we are facing. Read more »

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. Read more »

According to a recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine, the repercussions of Texas' decision to forgo over 30 million dollars in federal Medicaid money for the Texas Women's Health Program which provides screening for breast and cervical cancers, diabetes, sexually transmitted diseases, and high blood pressure; family planning counseling; and birth control will create a drastic reduction in the availability of and access to reproductive health care for low-income women. At the same time, Texas Governor Rick Perry is touting The Source for Women, a crisis pregnancy center (CPC), as the alternative to Planned Parenthood affiliates, which the Texas Legislature barred from participating in the Women's Health Program. In his remarks at a ribbon cutting ceremony for The Source for Women, which is trying to revamp itself into a "medical" clinic, Perry congratulated himself and the Texas legislators "who stood strong in the face of assaults" and refused federal money rather than allow Planned Parenthood affiliates to participate in the Women's Health Program. Proudly, Perry proclaimed that The Source for Women "will be part of Texas' own Women's Health Program, and Planned Parenthood will not be." So, Planned Parenthood affiliates that do not provide abortions but do provide a full range of reproductive health services, including pap smears, mammograms, and birth control cannot participate in the Women's Health Program but a CPC that is adding nurse practitioners to its staff to provide some testing, but not treatment, for sexually transmitted diseases can. Read more »