Salon: The absurd attack on contraceptives

“Reproductive rights activists seem wryly amused by the desperate machinations of their opponents — or at least they have been ever since an independent medical panel’s recommendation earlier this week that insurers be required to fully cover all FDA-approved contraceptive methods. Laura MacCleery, government relations director at the Center for Reproductive Rights, could barely suppress her incredulous laughter during a phone interview: ‘The opposition to the scientific case for contraception is just so extreme,’ she said. It’s also profoundly out of step with the rest of the country. A recent Reuters-NPR poll found that 77 percent of Americans want private health insurance to cover birth control, and 74 percent think government-sponsored plans should as well. An even larger share — 99 percent — of American women use contraceptives at some point in their life. It might be that the opposition understands just how far they stand outside of the mainstream — which is why they’re trying to reframe this as a debate about abortion. Jeanne Monahan, director of the Family Research Council’s Center for Human Dignity, said in a statement that requiring insurers to cover FDA-approved birth control ‘essentially would mandate coverage for abortion.’ MacCleery told me, ‘People need to understand that the same people that vocally oppose access to abortion also oppose access to contraception, which most people think is an important way to reduce unintended pregnancies.’ The real issue here is that, as the IOM panel said, birth control should be included in preventive care not because pregnancy is an illness but because unplanned pregnancies are demonstrably bad for women’s and children’s health. The U.S. has one of the most shameful records on that front: Half of all pregnancies in this country are unplanned.”

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