On Oct. 6, the Trump administration took a major step backwards from supporting women’s health: employers are no longer required to provide insurance coverage for contraception.
The change in mandate, which was issued by the Health and Human Services Department (HHS), rolls back an Obama-era legislation: the Affordable Care Act (ACA) contraception coverage mandate. This was put in place to require most employers to cover birth control that didn’t have a co-pay. This took a burden off many women who needed financial support from their employment to get their birth control. Hundreds of thousands of women will lose these benefits due to the new regulations.
Why should you care?
Aside from supporting women’s health, there are a number of reasons to care about this legislative change: perhaps your birth control is covered by your health insurance, perhaps you don’t use it, or perhaps you can afford to cover it yourself. But regardless of whether or not President Trump’s changes directly impact you, there are many ways that this mandate rollback will affect you, be it now or in the future.
It could impact sex ed curriculums in the future.
One of the reasons that the administration put this rollback in motion was because they “will not allow people of faith to be targeted, bullied or silenced anymore,” according to President Trump. In other words, the Trump administration views birth control as a threat to religious groups.
So, if covering the finances of birth control discriminates against religious beliefs, does that mean it will be wrong to cover the topic of birth control in sex education classes in the near future? Will this lead health teachers to gloss over important lectures on contraceptives, STDs, and other sex-related topics because it doesn’t “respect” religious establishments? This kind of thinking could bring us back to a time when abstinence was the only lesson taught in health class.
How are we going to afford more tampons without equal pay?
Do you know how much birth control could end up costing you? It’s debatable, according to Nora Becker, who authored a study on how much women paid for birth control before and after the ACA.
“I don’t think anyone can really answer that question for sure, and this is the reason: If you remove the mandate, then insurers can price things how they want to again, and there’s no rule that says that insurers have to go back to the way the cost sharing was for these products before the law went into effect,” Becker said.
What we do know, according to Becker’s study, is that women spent on $248 more on average for an IUD before the ACA was instituted. Annually, they spent $255 less for oral contraceptive pills after the ACA was instituted. Okay, so maybe we just have to accept the expense of birth control because reproduction is part of human nature, right? Well, yes, that is right — but those expenses don’t affect everyone. See: men.
Women are going to be the ones who are going to have to pay for this — but how is this fair when women are still earning less than men? Research from the Labor Department shows women that in 2016 women earned about 82 cents for every dollar a man made. We’re losing our researchers in the workforce, and still getting paid less.
52 percent of men in the U.S. said they don’t benefit personally from birth control. On the contrary, they actually do without even knowing it (guys, thank birth control for helping you to avoid that “I’m late” text).
Birth control covers more than just safe sex.
Monthly birth control costs are the equivalent of receiving a menstrual cycle utility fee, and trust me: any woman who gets their period knows it doesn’t feel like a utility at all. It feels like a burden.
Besides protecting you from an unwanted pregnancy, birth control impacts a large part of women’s daily life. It calms acne, controls hormones and can reduce how heavy one’s menstrual flow can be. Taking away birth control access doesn’t just take away the right to safe sex — it takes away so much more.