Photo illustration by Danni Rains
Tori Lemon
Editor-in-Chief
A new unfortunate revision of the government’s contraception coverage mandate under the Affordable Care Act could cause many women to not have access to birth control free of charge.
This new regulation, issued by the Health and Human Services Department, allows a much broader group of employers and insurers to exempt themselves from covering contraceptives such as birth control pills on the bases of religious or moral grounds. Whatever happened to separation of church and state? Yeah, I don’t know either.
The Trump administration released the long-anticipated rules that relax the Obama-era birth control mandate on Friday, Oct. 13. What a coincidence. The entire new mandate was published on the Federal Register, which is the daily journal of the United States Government. With the rule credited to the Internal Revenue Service, the Employee Benefits Security Administration and the Health and Human Services Department.
In a sad attempt to justify this unwarranted decision, the administration wrote pages into the new regulations that ultimately challenge well-established research on the health impacts of birth control. Their goal was to show whether contraceptives reduced unwanted pregnancies to the pros and cons of the birth control pill. This case presented against birth control distorted the research on contraceptives.
There is a long history of false information shaping women’s health, law and policy — part of a broader push to curtail women’s reproductive rights in America. These birth control regulations seem to be part of this larger effort to roll back women’s health care and ultimately roll back access to reproductive options.
According to that same document published in the Federal Register regarding the “Religious exemptions and accommodations for coverage of certain preventive services under the Affordable Care Act”, there isn’t sufficient evidence linking access to birth control to lower rates of unintended pregnancies. They must not have given common sense a shot either. More specifically, they think we don’t actually know that giving more women birth control reduces the risk of unwanted pregnancies at the population level, the new regulations says, “In particular, association and causality can be hard to disentangle.”
What the White House failed to mention is that you, morally and ethically cannot do a causation-proving experiment. We know birth control works to reduce the risk of unwanted pregnancy. It would not be ethical to randomly assign some women to use contraception, and then on the other hand, withholding it from others and waiting to see what happens.
One key thing greatly ignored in administration’s claim about birth control is the simple fact that it works. Birth control is effective at stopping women from getting pregnant. I truly thought that was a common sense kind of fact, but I guess not.
“If there wasn’t any use of methods of birth control, 85 percent of reproductive-age women would get pregnant every year, and we’re not near that,” Leslie Kantor, vice president of education at Planned Parenthood and a professor at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health said in an interview with Vox magazine earlier this month. “So [this administration] is ignoring a lot of evidence to suggest we don’t know really well what birth control does.”
Another argument the Trump administration cites in the Federal Register is that a birth control coverage mandate could “affect risky sexual behavior in a negative way.” In other words, give more women birth control and they’ll be more promiscuous. They are also arguing that “[The] positive health effects might also be partially offset by an association with negative health effects,” according to the new regulations.
Yes, there are possible negative side effect to every medical intervention. Hell, Viagra has been linked with chest pain and even heart attacks, but I don’t see that being taken away from men.
When it comes to contraceptives and birth control, the positives outweigh the cons. It is not the government’s responsibility to give access to our employers and insurers to decide if they “feel” like covering birth control. Someone else’s beliefs should not mean your own have to go out of the window.