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Contraceptives are cheap and easily available

The battle over contraception continues:

The Biden administration is withdrawing a proposed set of regulations that aimed to improve access to contraception by narrowing the ability of employers to opt out of covering birth control for their employees.

....Conservative organizations celebrated the news. In a post on X, the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which represents an order of nuns that has repeatedly challenged the Affordable Care Act’s birth control mandate in court, wrote: “Christmas came a little early this year.”

This whole endless controversy increasingly seems like a relic of the past. Oral contraception has been available without a prescription for a couple of years and it's hardly a wallet buster:

That's $16 per month. Lots of people spend more than that on heartburn meds.

Inserting an IUD still needs to be covered by insurance since a doctor has to do it,¹ but I wonder if it's time to stop fighting over "free" oral contraceptives. They're now so cheap and easily available that maybe we should let insurance off the hook and just have people buy them on their own.²

¹Though the cost is equally low. IUD insertion typically costs $500-$1,000 and lasts five years. That's about $10-16 per month.

²As always, there are exceptions for people who need a specific type or brand of contraceptive that still requires a prescription.

23 thoughts on “Contraceptives are cheap and easily available

  1. JRF

    I don't agree with one part of this post because yes, when you amortize out the cost of an IUD over several years, it's not that much per month. However, a lot of people do not have an extra $500-$1000 lying around right now, when they need it, and as far as I know, nobody is offering "pay-$15/month" financing for IUDs.

    The rise of LARCs (long-acting reversible contraceptives, a lot of which but not all of which are IUDs) has been absolutely remarkable. This study finds that they doubled between 2010 and 2020,
    https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10562738/

    That only happened because insurance covered them for very large numbers of people! Absent insurance coverage, many of those people now using LARCs would using a different and less reliable contraceptive method.

  2. JRF

    Also, on the oral contraceptives, many people find that these are finicky medications in terms of the side effects and sometimes you need to try a few to find the right one. The opill is great but it's definitely not going to be the best one for everybody.

  3. KJK

    These anti abortion absolutist should be OK with any and all types of contraceptives, since the risk of even 1 additional abortion should outweigh all other objections.

    1. Austin

      Assumes the goal of the anti abortionists is to protect fetuses, and not to control when, where, and how women have sex.

      Hope there is a God to confront those nuns when they get to Heaven. “You do realize you were just useful idiots for the asshole men to control women’s bodies, right?” But then again, the Bible clearly shows that God can be an asshole too.

  4. jdubs

    Can't stop fighting for simple, quality of life improvements for other Americans. It's easy to give up small bits of ground when it's someone else's yard, someone else's town. Small incremental losses and degradation in quality of life is not a good plan of action.

    1. Austin

      This. Lots of things can be dismissed as “not very expensive.” No food item in the grocery store is very expensive, so why not get rid of food stamps and cut Social Security? No transit pass and few OTC health items are very expensive, so why not eliminate the ability of workers to buy them pre tax through Wageworks? No individual item a teacher would buy for her classroom is that expensive, so why not eliminate her ability to deduct that cost from her income tax? UPS and FedEx aren’t that expensive so why not eliminate the USPS? Programs offered by the National Park Service aren’t that expensive so why are they subsidized for senior citizens? No fee charged by the TurboTax or HR Block is that expensive, so why provide a free form?

      Once you go down the “not very expensive so get rid of it” route, stuff you (Kevin) like that is currently subsidized by government might also be axed. Fuck that shit. It’s nice to have nice things provided by government, even if the nice things wouldn’t have cost you much to procure all on your own.

      1. SeanT

        And
        For households struggling to afford basic necessities like food and shelter, even small additional expenses can have a significant impact on their ability to meet essential needs.
        The "it is only $15 a month" is just totally tone deaf and suggests no lived experience of economic precarity

          1. dausuul

            Plenty of black people and women have never had to deal with that kind of precarity. Plenty of white men have. This is about class privilege, not race or gender.

            1. SeanT

              One, it is not a competition.

              Two, this "Plenty of black people and women have never had to deal with that kind of precarity." is nonsense refuted by the real world.

              Women are more likely to be clustered in low-paying, precarious, non-union jobs. For example

              And people of color face a wage gap, a wealth gap, a homeownership gap and an employment gap. For example

      2. Salamander

        And this is why Republicans are always harping on "the slippery slope". It's one of their basic tactics. So obviously, don't let even small improvements be made by Democrats, or next year, it'll be SOCIALIZED MEDICINE! FREE FOOD FOR EVERYBODY! INSTANT CITIZENSHIP!!

  5. PeterE

    Don't give an inch, especially when the public is on your side. This is just one hurdle for them until they are on to the next thing.

    Maybe limit availability of some contraceptives for some groups, then ban certain kinds, then stop teens from taking them (hormones! in children! what are the long-term implications?!), etc etc.

    There's always another level they can chip away at (see: abortion).

  6. bizarrojimmyolsen

    Definitely a post written by a man with consulting a woman. One oral contraceptive is affordable so they all must be.

  7. cmayo

    Did you grow a uterus?

    Until you do, I don't want to read a man write about how cheap birth control pills are. FOH with this shit.

  8. bmore

    I agree with a lot of the comments. Suggested one month cost is $19.99 for Opill. Some people may not have that all the time in their budget. As other people pointed out, different pills have different side effects for different people. And one of the reasons that there is no birth control pill for men is that men in the trials couldn't tolerate the side effects. Women just deal with the side effects. BTW, insurance companies would rather cover birth control than pay for pregnancies.

  9. D_Ohrk_E1

    Insofar that a kook (who is perfectly aligned with the wishes of a tyrannical conservative asshole, or otherwise sucks up to that asshole) might head up the FDA and a 100% GOP-controlled government alters laws that allow for the withdrawal of approval of certain classes of drugs from being OTC, I would suggest that nothing is safe.

  10. dausuul

    If it's so cheap, then why should we have any concerns about requiring insurance to cover it?

    There are cases where you have to weigh political expediency against policy goals. I don't see where this is one of those cases. Requirements to have insurance cover birth control are broadly popular. It's true that you can't fight every fight all the time, and this one might have to take a back seat now and then, but that doesn't mean we should abandon it as a policy goal.

  11. jvoe

    When I see comments that presume the moral cause of the anti-abortion crowd is to stop abortion, I think folks have missed a key element of conservative religious movements. The moral cause is to place their sect as God's arbiter of life's most important decisions: Life and Death. When they accomplish this, it reassures them that their power in the world reflects God's will, and so all the things they believe must be true and so the little doubts can be held at bay. They are the Pharisees of our time, they pretend to be the spokespeople for God but ignore the pain and misery around them so that they can feel special, and of course, that they will live forever-and-ever.

    1. SeanT

      Also, the religious reich does not have its origins as an anti abortion movement in response to Roe.
      It was in fact started in response to attempts on the part of the IRS to rescind the tax-exempt status of whites-only segregation academies set up after the Brown ruling.

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