Birth control is not controversial: 99% of sexually active women use it at some point in their lives.1 Women use birth control for all sorts of reasons including to avoid getting pregnant before they are ready. Making birth control accessible and affordable is the quickest way to reduce the number of unintended pregnancies.
At NARAL Pro-Choice America Foundation, we’re fighting to make sure every woman has access to affordable birth control that is right for her—no matter where she lives, where she works, or how much she makes—so she can control her own future.
Laws promoting insurance coverage of contraception are crucial to ensuring comprehensive reproductive-health care. The Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive-coverage policy ensured that the full range of birth control is covered with no copay. Although this policy is in danger at the federal level, some states have also passed laws ensuring this benefit. Other states have passed laws requiring that insurers cover a year’s supply of contraception dispensed at once.
The anti-choice movement has targeted birth control as a means to fur who are opposed to birth control for ideological reasons have worked to restrict access to contraception. Employers who want to deny their employees coverage of contraception won at the Supreme Court in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby. Some states have enacted laws allowing some individuals and companies to refuse to provide or cover contraception.
And at the federal and state level, anti-choice legislators have supported “personhood” measures that would not only make abortion illegal—it would also ban many forms of birth control, as well as in vitro fertilization.
Policies that restrict access to contraception makes birth control less effective and can lead to unplanned pregnancies.
1 Guttmacher Institute, Contraceptive Use in the United States