Contraception Shouldn't be a Luxury: The Fight for Affordable Birth Control

It’s hard to ignore. Listen to the news or go into to a clinic for your monthly birth control pills: An increasing number of laws and regulations have made it harder for Americans (especially low-income Americans) to access birth control. The most recent of these unfortunate regulations, passed through the Federal Deficit Reduction Act in late 2006, prevents universities and nonprofit health care organizations, like Planned Parenthood, from purchasing and providing low-cost contraceptives to patients. Strangely enough, this outcome was a mistake- an unintended consequence of some loop-hole closing on the part of congress. As a result, since January, when the law went into effect, birth control prices have skyrocketed for over 3 million college students and roughly 750,000 low-income women. For nearly twenty years, pharmaceutical companies have been permitted to provide birth control pills at very low cost to particular providers who work with clients especially in need. The error eliminating this possibility has been hard to fix because certain members of the House and Senate are so out of touch with the average American, they’d like to see birth control harder to access. Someone should remind them that 98% of women in this country have used birth control!
And the sad part is, according to the Guttmacher Institute, rates of unintended pregnancy and abortion are on the rise among low-income women. It seems obvious that we need to help women and couples prevent unintended pregnancy by increasing the availability of affordable birth control- the opposite of what’s happened this year. On college campuses, birth control has gone from $5 or $10 dollars to $40 or $50 dollars a month. Some college health centers have stopped providing birth control at all. For many students and low-income women, birth control is now out of reach. To a college student or a low income woman, $50 is two weeks of groceries, or a fifth of a moth’s rent. No one should have to make a decision between these things and their monthly birth control.

This Congress has had over 9 months to fix this mistake, but has yet to do so.
To fix the problem and make birth control affordable again, Congress only needs to make a small change to the law, permitting pharmaceutical companies to once again offer these low-cost drugs to university health centers and safety net providers. This simple fix will not cost Congress or the American people a dime. But failing to do so will be devastating for students and low-income women.
We’re all up in arms about gas hitting $3 a gallon and housing costs rising upwards of 15%. The cost of birth control has skyrocketed- a whopping 900% in some cases! Degradation of women’s health is certainly worthy of public outcry as well. We must let congress know: SAVE BIRTH CONTROL NOW!