Donald Trump’s government has issued a ruling that allows employers to opt out of providing free birth control to millions of Americans.
The rule allows employers and insurers to decline to provide birth control if doing so violates their “religious beliefs” or “moral convictions”.
Fifty-five million women benefited from the Obama-era rule, which made companies provide free birth control.
Before taking office, Mr Trump had pledged to eliminate that requirement.
What happened?
The mandate requiring birth control coverage had been a key feature of so-called Obamacare – President Obama’s efforts to overhaul the US healthcare system.
But the requirement included a provision that permitted religious institutions to forgo birth control coverage for their employees.
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said on Friday it was important to expand which organisations can opt out and deny free contraceptive coverage.
“We should have space for organisations to live out their religious ideas and not face discrimination because of their religious ideas,” said one HHS official, who did not wish to be named.
Why was the decision made?
In announcing the rule change, HHS officials cited a study claiming that access to contraception encourages “risky sexual behaviour”.
The department disputes reports that millions of women may lose their birth control coverage if they are unable to pay for it themselves.
PROVIDING FREE BIRTH CONTROL DOES REDUCE ABORTION RATES
Colorado provides a real-life experiment on whether providing safe, effective, long-acting birth control can reduce unwanted pregnancies and abortions. The state’s Department of Public Health and Environment got private funding in 2008 for a program to provide long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs), such as IUDs and hormone implants, to low-income women for little or no cost.
Trends in abortion between 1997 and 2014Guttmacher Institute
“The Colorado Family Planning Initiative helped cut the abortion rate nearly in half for women aged 15-19 and by 18 percent for women aged 20-24,” the department said in a 2017 report. “Between 2009 and 2014, birth and abortion rates both declined by nearly 50 percent among teens aged 15-19 and by 20 percent among young women aged 20-24.”
ABORTION IS VERY COMMON IN THE U.S.
“In the United States, where one half of all pregnancies are unintended, almost one third of women will seek an abortion by age 45,” ACOG says.
A 2016 study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that 45 percent of all pregnancies among U.S. women in 2011 were unintended, and 42 percent of them these unintended pregnancies ended in abortion.
According to the Guttmacher Institute, 19 percent of pregnancies ended in abortion in 2014, a total of 926,200 abortions. That was down 12 percent from 2011. The 2014 abortion rate of 14.6 abortions per 1,000 women was the lowest rate ever measured. In 1973, the rate was 16.3 abortions per 1,000 women, aged 15 to 44.
