If It Ain’t Broke, Ruin It
Why Birth Control Is Critical for Women and Wildlife
Last week, with his characteristic pomp and ego stroking, Trump kept another one of his campaign promises to curtail rights: On the heels of yet another failed attempt to repeal and replace, he has started to disembowel Obamacare. This time, he issued a rule to tear giant loopholes in the contraception mandate.
It’s like Republicans’ new mantra is, “If it ain’t broke, break pieces off of it until the people we are supposed to represent can’t possibly argue that Obamacare is actually beneficial for them.”
Under the Affordable Care Act, employers and insurers were required to provide at least one free type of birth control in each of the FDA-approved forms, including oral contraception, the IUD and the morning-after pill. Under a mandate from the Obama administration, there were only a few exceptions to this requirement. About 62 million women benefited from the program.
The new rule, effective immediately and dressed up as religious freedom, allows an employer to refuse to cover female contraception by claiming a moral objection. The rule doesn’t require employers to justify their reason, so it opens the door for any employer to deny access to birth control.
Now, there is no such thing as a free lunch, or so they say. But making birth control free allows millions of women to actively control their reproductive futures, especially low-income women who might not be able to afford the high upfront costs of an IUD or the $15 to $50 monthly price tag on the pill.
At a progressive organization that supports universal reproductive rights, I’m pretty safe. But even I’m freaking out. It’s a very real possibility that if enough employers say their moral compass compels them to deny women free contraception, insurance companies will follow suit, rewrite plans that include the equivalent of the ACA’s weakened contraception coverage and essentially price out employers that want to provide free contraception.
These concerns are bad enough for women, their partners and families. But it’s even bigger than that. We’re facing unprecedented human-driven ecological disasters and runaway human population growth.
I’m not trying to politicize the horrendous amount of death and destruction caused by Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria. But we need to face the fact that climate change is real, that it is driven by human activities and it’s leading to more intense storms more frequently. The same goes for the fires burning up and down the entire West Coast and the droughts in the southwest. It all comes back to us.
And as more people crowd the planet, moving into previously untouched wilderness, we are more and more likely to be negatively impacted by these superstorms.
And our population growth isn’t just a human problem. In the last 50 years, human population has doubled while wildlife species populations have been cut in half. Facing climate change, habitat loss and invasive species, wildlife is disappearing so fast that scientists believe we have entered the sixth mass extinction.
This is a problem that every nation needs to address through common sense solutions like expanding access to contraception and reproductive healthcare for all citizens.
The United States should be leading the way in ensuring all people have reproductive freedom. Half of all pregnancies in the United States are unintended. On top of that, Americans account for nearly 15 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, but our population is only representative of about 5 percent of global human population. If it isn’t obvious, that means we’re using way too many resources way too quickly, and at the same time, women don’t have access to the tools that can ensure every pregnancy is planned.
We have the tools to slow down both the unintended pregnancy rate and our greenhouse gas emissions. But Trump is taking us the other way. Instead of making it easier to get birth control, he is making it harder and more expensive. In our current political climate, it’s not difficult to imagine him taking us so far down that road that it might be impossible for women to get birth control without our husband’s permission again. I, for one, am not about that.
It’s a vicious cycle. And in the middle of that loop is a woman’s ability and right to control her own reproductive future.
So who is Trump making America great for, anyway? It isn’t women; this new rule once again makes that clear. It isn’t the communities struck by or threatened by massive storms and the effects of climate change. And it definitely isn’t wildlife, the environment or the planet.
